Harmony

Use in the book

The arithmetic excerpt relates friendship and enmity to harmony and its absence, deriving harmony from numerical ratios. The report under Pythagoras’ name makes numbers and their proportions principles. The Philebus excerpt describes pain through the dissolution of bodily harmony and pleasure through its restoration. In the Phaedo, however, the claim that soul itself is a harmony is challenged as incompatible with recollection and prior existence.

Places to read

1. Arith.2aSocial concord is interpreted through numerical harmony.
2. I.10.12.10Harmonies belong to the account of principles.
3. I.47.13.1Bodily harmony explains pleasure and pain.
4. I.49.13.5The harmony theory of soul is rejected within the argument.

Translation in this edition

The common translation does not make these accounts identical. In particular, a harmonious body does not establish that soul is a harmony.

Use in the book

Thoughts should link through their relations as musical sounds do, instead of being externally chained or strung like pearls. The difference is in the kind of connection. In style, harmony addresses the soul while number addresses the ear, with number a means that may sometimes be dispensable. Another note separates harmony within the soul from music within it: the former makes the soul just and wise, the latter poetic. Harmony’s figurative use thus does not make moral and poetic excellence interchangeable. Even in prose, too much harmony can be a seductive fault whose first pleasure becomes exhausting.

Places to read

1. I, p. 320, entry 6, ¶1Thoughts link by relation rather than external chaining.
2. II, p. 510, entry 9, ¶1Harmony is an end distinct from rhetorical number.
3. II, p. 746, entry 14, ¶1Harmony and music designate different qualities of soul.
4. II, p. 815, entry 12, ¶1Excess harmony can become a fault in prose.

Translation in this edition

The English translation keeps harmony and music separate and preserves the soul/ear distinction. The moral analogy is Joubert’s formulation, not a claim that acoustic harmony causes ethical virtue.

Use in the book

In the meditation on the soul’s communicative beams, the harmony and joys of heaven appear in love. The surrounding catalogue includes music, stars, trees, feasts, wine, virtue, and spiritual life. Love gathers their diverse excellencies rather than reducing them to a single undifferentiated pleasure. Harmony names the fitting coexistence of these delights within the end for which they were made.

Places to read

1. IV.82Heavenly harmony appears in love amid a catalogue of natural, artistic, bodily, and spiritual excellencies.

In this edition

This occurrence does not set out a mathematical theory of musical intervals or cosmic ratios. Its work is integrative: many forms of excellence are enjoyed together through love.

Use in the book

The opening spring scene makes harmonizing contrasts a primary artistic act. At Coëtquen a dark stream's apparently disagreeable color becomes pleasing when seen with black trunks, ivy, and white birches. Harmony is discovered through relation; an isolated detail can be misunderstood before the scene is apprehended as a whole.

The religious meditation of March 21 enlarges this principle. Isolation is overcome by finding one's place in universal harmony and opening the soul to its impressions. The self does not generate the order it enters, but its manner of relation determines whether that order can be enjoyed. The preceding reading passage also makes the soul active: it spiritualizes and harmonizes physical beauties, then combines them with ideal ones.

The coastal entries give harmony a strongly acoustic and sometimes violent character. Ocean, wind, cloud, and birds converge in wild resonant harmonies; the night storm is a furious harmony that overturns peace. Harmony cannot therefore be equated with placidity. The 1834 wish for inner accord, however, does seek equilibrium among unequal faculties, and finds it elusive.

Finally, perceived cosmic order does not automatically answer the questions it arouses. In September 1834 the world rolls melodiously while the human spirit circulates anxiously within it. Harmony may be heard and still not understood. That distinction preserves the notebook's movement between felt participation and troubled knowledge.

Places to read

1. 19 March 1833 · ¶1The dark water becomes aesthetically intelligible through relation and contrast.
2. 21 March 1833 · ¶2Universal harmony offers a remedy for false relations and apparent isolation.
3. 8 December 1833 · ¶3Wild, resonant harmonies can include storm and physical instability.
4. 26 June 1834 · ¶1Inner harmony is imagined as the faculties' accord but is not secured by favorable surroundings.
5. 19 September 1834 · ¶1The world's melodic order coexists with a human inability to understand it.

Translation in this edition

The uncommon active “les harmonie” in March 21 becomes “harmonizes them.” The English thus preserves a necessary distinction between receiving harmony and helping form a relation among received beauties.

Use in the book

The different settings specify the same joining language at distinct scales. B232 says that painters mix their pigments in harmony, more of one and less of another, to make images resembling many things. Here the word characterizes a proportioned operation. B96 names Harmony as the agent whose gluings fit together white bones. The resulting tissue is a material construction with measured constituents, so divine agency and artisanal process are expressed together rather than assigned to rival explanations.

At the scale of the whole, B27 places the Sphere in Harmony's close covert. Solar, terrestrial, and marine differentiations are no longer discernible there. The image emphasizes secure enclosure and unity. In B122/123 Harmony becomes a grave-eyed figure beside bloody Quarrel, translating the opposition of joining and conflict into a pair of presences. Plutarch's account attached to B18 explicitly associates the name with Empedocles' beneficent principle, but that statement is the quoting author's report, not an additional complete Empedoclean line.

The recurrence gives good grounds for reading Harmonia among Love's expressions. It does not mean that every lowercase occurrence of fitting is a full invocation of a separate goddess, or that musical ratios supply the hidden key to the system. The local work of the word is more concrete: fitting pigments, fitting bone, and securing the divine whole.

Places to read

1. B 23.1–5The painters mix their pigments in harmony, in unequal proportions.
2. B 96.1–4Harmony’s gluings fit the components into white bone.
3. B 27.1–4The Sphere rests within Harmony’s close covert.
4. B 122/123.2Grave-eyed Harmony is paired with bloody Quarrel.
5. B 18 (editorial discussion)Plutarch’s accompanying report associates grave-eyed Harmony with the beneficent principle.

Translation in this edition

The introduction announces a preference for the language of fitting rather than musical “harmony,” yet the English verses retain “Harmony” in several named occurrences and “harmony” in B232. The variation should be reported as it stands, not regularized into a translation the edition does not print.