85e3—86a3. Harmonia has been translated 'attunement' rather than 'harmony', except in the joking allusion to Harmonia, wife of Cadmus, who personifies Simmias' argument at 95a4. In a musical context 'attunement' is less misleading than 'harmony', whose modern musical sense the word never bears. 'Attunement' is also conveniently related to 'tune', which is needed for the verb at 93a—94a. The noun is formed on this verb, whose primary meaning is 'fit together' or 'join'. It has a basic sense of 'fitting together', 'adjustment', or 'arrangement', in which Simmias applies it to 'all the products of craftsmen' (86c6—7). It can thus mean the 'adjustment' of the parts of an instrument, and specifically the tuning of its strings. Hence it comes to mean a musical scale or mode, or, more broadly, music. See L.S.J. s.v. apfiovia. For various Platonic uses, cf. Symposium 187a—188a, Republic 398e—400a, 430e3—4, 431e8, 443d5-e2, 531a-b, The interpretation to be placed updn it in connection with Simmias' theory of the soul is far from clear. See on 86b5—d4.
86a3—b5. Simmias here parodies the argument of 80c2—dlO. The properties ascribed earlier to the soul—'unseen', 'incorporeal', 'divine'—belong also to an attunement. But just as an attunement does not outlast lyre and strings, so the soul's possession of these properties need not entail that it outlasts the body. This is a powerful objection, and, as Bluck notes (22, 86), the force of the attunement analogy as a criticism of the Affinity Argument is never denied. However, the parallel between attunement and soul, as the latter was represented in the Affinity Argument, is not exact: (i) The case for the soul's indestructibility rested upon its supposed incompositeness. But an 'attunement', however interpreted (see next note), is evidently not incomposite. Socrates later calls it 'a composite thing' (92a8, cf.93al). (ii) The soul was said to resemble the divine by virtue of its ruling the body (80a). But, as will be argued later (94b4—e7), an attunement is incapable of ruling its constituent elements. So 'divine' must apply differently to soul and attunement (cf.94e5—6). (iii) An attunement, although 'unseen' (85e5), is-on at least one interpretation—capable of being heard, whereas the soul is not accessible to the senses at all.
86b5—d4. The attunement analogy is now developed further.
Simmias says that something of this sort is 'what we actually take the soul to be' (b6—7): the soul is a blending or attunement of the bodily elements. Here he goes beyond criticism of the Affinity Argument. The attunement theory of the soul is not merely consistent with its destruction at death, but actually entails it. Two problems arise here: (1) Who are 'we' who are said to hold the theory? (2) What exactly does it maintain?
Does Simmias mean, as might seem natural for a disciple of Philolaus (see on 61d3—e9), 'we Pythagoreans'? It is true that the theory has some appeal for the Pythagorean Echecrates (88d3—6). But it is flatly inconsistent with the Pythagorean orthodoxy that seems implicit in Philolaus' teaching on suicide, if this is correctly represented by 61e-62b (cf. DK 44 A 23, B 14). Simmias must be associating himself either, as Burnet suggests (note on 86b6), with a heterodox Pythagorean group, or with 'people in general'. The latter seems preferable for the reasons given by Hackforth (102—3). Cf.92dl—2 and see note 49. The attunement theory is acutely criticized, from very different perspectives, by Aristotle (De Anima 407b27—408a30) and Lucretius (De Rerum Natura iii. 94-135), but neither refers to the Phaedo or identifies the theory with any particular school. Aristotle simply calls it 'persuasive to many' (407b27— 8), and ascribes a wholly different theory of the soul to the Pythagoreans (404a 16-20). For the view that the attunement theory is of Pythagorean origin, see F. M. Cornford, C.Q. 1922, 145-50. For a full discussion of the relation between the present passage and later versions of the attunement theory, see H. B. Gottschalk, Phronesis 1971, 179-98.
Is Simmias identifying the soul with (a) a ratio according to which bodily elements are combined; or (b) the condition of the body when they are thus combined; or (c) some complex product, analogous to the 'music' of a lyre, yielded by the bodily parts?
A. E. Taylor (P.M. W. 194) takes the theory in sense (c): '"mind" is the tune given out by the body, the music made by the body.' He compares it with the epiphenomenalism of T. H. Huxley. Harmonia could, perhaps, bear this meaning (see on 85e3—86a3), and occasional phrases give the interpretation some support: 'very lovely and divine' (85e5—86al) seems well suited to music; at 86c6-7 Simmias refers to attunements 'in musical notes', which might be regarded as elements in a musical scale or melody (cf. 'notes' at 92cl); and at 94c5 an attunement is assumed to depend not only upon the tension of the strings, but upon their being struck (cf.93a9).
Nevertheless, this interpretation, which is unmentioned by Aristotle, is probably mistaken: (i) The soul is expressly said (86b9, d2—3) to be a 'blending and attunement' of the bodily elements, the hot and cold, wet and dry, which are more closely analogous to the physical components of a lyre than to musical notes, (ii) Simmias refers to attunements 'in all the products of craftsmen' (86c7). These presumably include such things as painting, weaving, building, and furniture (cf. Republic 400dll—401a8), which exhibit 'structure', but produce nothing analogous to the music of an instrument, (iii) 'Attunement' will be contrasted several times with 'non-attune- ment' (93c5, 93e4, 93e8, 94a3), which means 'being out of tune' rather than 'lack of music'. Above all, (iv) Simmias is comparing the soul with something that is destroyed as soon as the tension of the strings is altered: 'when our body is unduly relaxed or tautened by illnesses and other troubles, then the soul must perish at once' (86c3—5). Clearly, it is the tuned state of the strings that 'perishes' in this way rather than the music. For music could hardly be said to 'perish', even though it can no longer be produced, as a result of relaxing or tightening the strings. It is true that the tuned state, once lost, may be restored by restringing, and retuning the instrument, whereas the soul cannot be restored to a dead body. But equally, a musical scale or melody can be replayed many times on the same instrument. The analogy breaks down at this point on any interpretation.
There remain the alternatives (a) and (b), that are distinguished and separately refuted by Aristotle. The distinction between these is rather a fine one, and may not even have been recognized by Plato himself. But if a choice has to be made, (b) is perhaps preferable. The notion of the soul as a mathematical ratio is rather abstruse, and would be less likely to have appealed to 'most people' (92d2). It is true that if 'attunement' means the tuned state of an instrument, it will be hard to understand the suggestion at 93al 1—12 that an attunement itself could be tuned. But this is a difficulty on any view.
However interpreted, the attunement theory is a notable ancestor of the many accounts of the soul, from that of Aristotle onwards, which have denied its independent existence either as causally impossible or as logically absurd. It makes the essential point, central to all such accounts, that the soul is not an entity separate or separable from the body. The theory thus challenges a basic assumption of Socrates' arguments, that we are 'part body and part soul' (79b 1—2). In confronting him with it, Plato recognizes it as a plausible and popular rival to his own view (cf.92d).
86e6—87a7. Cebes here accepts the conclusion of the Recollection Argument that our souls existed before birth (al—4). His own account of the soul will be consistent with that view, whereas that of