Harmony Cannot Come from Discord: Correcting Heraclitus
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Eryximachus — πρότερον τοῦ ὀξέος καὶ βαρέος, ἔπειτα ὕστερον ὁμολογησάντων γέγονεν ὑπὸ τῆς μουσικῆς τέχνης. οὐ γὰρ δήπου ἐκ διαφερομένων γε ἔτι τοῦ ὀξέος καὶ βαρέος ἁρμονία ἂν εἴη· ἡ γὰρ ἁρμονία συμφωνία ἐστίν, συμφωνία δὲ ὁμολογία τις— ὁμολογίαν δὲ ἐκ διαφερομένων, ἕως ἂν διαφέρωνται, ἀδύνατον εἶναι· διαφερόμενον δὲ αὖ καὶ μὴ ὁμολογοῦν ἀδύνατον ἁρμόσαι— ὥσπερ γε καὶ ὁ ῥυθμὸς ἐκ τοῦ ταχέος καὶ
Formerly, the high and the low were at variance; but afterward, once they had agreed, it arose through the art of music. For surely harmony could not come from the high and low while they are still at variance. Harmony is consonance, and consonance is a kind of agreement. And agreement cannot come from things at variance, so long as they are at variance. And what is at variance and not agreeing cannot be brought into harmony — just as rhythm too arises from the quick and
Continuing straight from 187a, where Eryximachus quoted and criticized Heraclitus's saying that 'the one, being at variance with itself, agrees with itself, like the harmony of bow and lyre,' he now proposes what Heraclitus must really have meant: harmony only arises once the formerly opposed high and low notes have been brought into agreement by the art of music. He then argues the point as a strict chain of definitions — harmony is consonance, consonance is a kind of agreement, and agreement cannot exist between things still at variance — before turning, at the unit's close, to make the same case for rhythm.
Eryximachus now spells out what he thinks Heraclitus must have meant by the bow-and-lyre saying quoted at 187a. Harmony does not describe two things while they are still pulling apart; it names what happens after the high note and the low note have stopped fighting and the technē of music has brought them into line. He then runs the argument as a chain of definitions: harmonia is symphōnia, and symphōnia is a species of homologia — agreement. Agreement, by definition, cannot exist between things still at variance, so a harmony made of clashing notes is a contradiction in terms. The same root that gave 186e's homonoia its civic sense of factions settling their dispute now does the same work for two pitches on a string.
The argument is airtight and it also quietly changes the terms of the dispute it is trying to settle. Heraclitus's own word for the bow and the lyre is harmoniē, and in his vocabulary that word names something closer to a joint or a fitting — the carpenter's or bowyer's sense, where the frame holds together precisely because the string still pulls against the wood. On that older sense the tension is the harmoniē; it does not vanish once the parts are joined, it is what joining them means. Eryximachus, a doctor arguing from the tuned scale of working musicians, hears harmonia only as consonance achieved after difference is resolved, and he never entertains the reading in which Heraclitus meant the opposite. He calls the saying badly phrased at 187a; he may simply be translating it into a vocabulary where it no longer says what it said.
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