"The body is held together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and dry and wet, and so on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are combined in just the right proportion."
— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)
Author
Work Title
Date
380-360 B.C.
Metaphor
"The body is held together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and dry and wet, and so on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are combined in just the right proportion."
Metaphor in Context
What I mean is this, said Simmias. You might say the same thing about tuning the strings of a musical instrument, that the attunement is something and incorporeal and splendid and divine, and located in the tuned instrument, while the instument itself and its strings are material and corporeal and composite and earthly and closely related to what is mortal. Now suppose that the instrument is broken, or its strings cut or snapped. According to your theory the attunement must still exist--it cannot have been destroyed, because it would be inconceivable that when the strings are broken the instrument and the strings, which have a mortal nature, should still exist, and the attunement, which shares the nature and characteristics of the divine and immortal, should exist no longer, having predeceased its mortal counterpart. You would say that the attunement must still exist somewhere just as it was, and that the wood and strings will rot away before anything happens to it. I say this, Socrates, because, as I think you yourself are aware, we Pythagoreans have a theory of the soul which is roughly like this. The body is held together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and dry and wet, and so on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are combined in just the right proportion. Well, if the soul is really an adjustment, obviously as soon as the tension of our body is lowered or increased beyond the proper point, the soul must either be destroyed, divine though it is--just like any other adjustment, either in music or in any product of the arts and crafts, although in each case the physical remains last considerably longer until they are burned up or rot away. Find us an answer to this argument, if someone insists that the soul, being a temperament of physical constituents, is the first thing to be destroyed by what we call death.
(85e-86d)
(85e-86d)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Hamilton, E. and Cairns, H., Eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Date of Entry
06/20/2003
Date of Review
03/20/2009
