Plato the Pythagorean

It seems that the Pythagorean play of numbers, and hence music, is concealed within Plato’s Dialogues.

Necessity willingly or unwillingly obeys God, who harmonises everything in the universe according to precise proportions

This, succinctly stated, is Plato’s formulation of the Pythagorean doctrine. With Pythagoras, for the first time in the Western World, a belief in a world run by the whims or fancies of gods as the ancient Greeks affirmed, had given way to a god of harmony. And this idea of a mathematical world has underlain much of the West’s scientific understanding since. But a recent essay by JB Kennedy in the journal Apeiron makes a much stronger claim, that Pythagoras’ number mysticism explains the very structure of Plato’s Dialogues. Consider the evidence obtained after recreating the texts of Plato based on the original form of each line made up of 35 characters: the Apology is 1,200 lines, or 100 per twelfth. The Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus, and the Symposium are each 2,400 lines, or 200 per twelfth. The Gorgias is 3,600 lines, or 300 per twelfth. The Republic is 12,000 lines, or 1,000 per twelfth. The Laws is 14,400 lines, or 1,200 lines per twelfth.

Kennedy believes that the pattern corresponds to the 12-note musical scale used by Pythagoreans, and when he divided the texts into equal 12ths he found that ‘significant concepts and narrative turns’ in the Dialogues occur regularly at such junctures. This symbolism of Pythagoras was concealed because Socrates, Plato’s teacher “was executed for religious heresy… (Plato and his followers) wanted to replace the Olympic Gods with science and mathematics. These were dangerous views. So Plato wrote his stories with a fascinatingly rich surface story then, underneath, hid the messages he really wanted to convey to future generations”. The findings, he says, “not only changes our understanding of the past but it changes … where we’re heading in the future. Plato was a key founder of Western culture. So the birth of Western thought and science looks different’’.

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Hartosh Singh Bal