Thursday, February 9, 2017
Harmony
On Wednesday we brought up a question that was in my opinion one of the most interesting questions we had discussed during Phaedo. Can an idea be created from nothing? I've been thinking about Matt's example of Harmony and whether or not beings with no hearing can still create harmony. After thinking about this question I do believe that those beings could create harmony..but they would not conceptualize it in the same way. Their sense of harmony might be discovered like Matt said, through vibrations but it wouldn't be the same. This begs another question for me: Is harmony universal or do we all think of it differently? I feel as though those beings who cannot hear might think of harmony that is different from us. Overall, yes they found harmony without hearing which would make it possible to create something without having prior knowledge of it but is it different from our harmony? If it is different, how can we say that they discovered harmony? To me it is a circular pattern. To ask someone "what is harmony?" ends up being the same circular argument as our discussion on how to define piety. I guess I am still struggling about how to not end up in a circle...but maybe that is the point
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Matt's example involved deaf beings discovering harmony by depicting it visually or through other means. But there are two problems here:
ReplyDelete1) Although the angles that form a triangle have never and probably can never change, the tones and frequencies that we understand to be harmonic have shifted over the past several hundred years. This means that either the concept itself contains more than just the sound (probably closer to κατα ολον') in which case we probably need to revise the whole example, or that the concept predicates itself on social forces rather than eternal ones. I'm not certain which is more desirable in this instance.
2) Assuming that these deaf beings produce the same tones/frequencies that we understand to be harmonic, the conceptual understanding these beings develop and call "harmony" is still not the same concept that we have, which relies on a whole set of preconditions (biological, social, scientific, mathematical) that are not present. The thing they end up with would sound the same to us, but the concept they have is different. By chance they produced the same sound, but they are not engaging it as the same idea or participating in an unchanging feature of reality in the same way.
It's all about perspective to me! One claim could be that we need to understand the concept, or have some knowledge, of what harmony is in order to create it or identify it. It could also be that we must first experience harmony before we can identify it. What came first, the chicken or the egg? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Perhaps the most important part of these complex questions is that they make you think...even if it is in circles!
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