The Supreme Musician

Plato / Socrates

On the Soul and Music

In this respect, replied Simmias: Might not a person use the same argument about harmony and the lyre -- might he not say that harmony is a thing invisible, incorporeal, fair, divine, abiding in the lyre which is harmonized, but that the lyre and the strings are matter and material, composite, earthy, and akin to mortality? And when someone breaks the lyre, or cuts and rends the strings, then he who takes this view would argue as you do, and on the same analogy, that the harmony survives and has not perished; for you cannot imagine, as he would say, that the lyre without the strings, and the broken strings themselves remain, and yet that the harmony, which is of heavenly and immortal nature and kindred, has perished -- and perished too before the mortal. That harmony, he would say, certainly exists somewhere, and the wood and strings will decay before that decays. For I suspect, Socrates, that the notion of the soul which we are all of us inclined to entertain, would also be yours, and that you too would conceive the body to be strung up, and held together, by the elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, and the like, and that the soul is the harmony or due proportionate admixture of them. And, if this is true, the inference clearly is that when the strings of the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disorder or other injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of music or of the works of art, of course perishes at once, although the material remains of the body may last for a considerable time, until they are either decayed or burnt. Now if anyone maintained that the soul, being the harmony of the elements of the body, first perishes in that which is called death, how shall we answer him?

- Plato

For more on "Phaedo" visit http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1658

From "The Republic"

Extracts from "Phaedo"

From Timaeus