Music builds a bridge from the spiritual to the physical

“Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything,” said Plato, at least according to zillions of people on the internet.

Like any fake meme gone viral, the misattributed quotation has taken on a life of its own.

But if Plato never actually said such a thing, how did the misquotation gain traction?

Plato’s views on the cosmic role of music are indeed a part of the tradition of Western philosophy.

One of the few Platonic dialogues available to medieval Christendom was the Timaeus. It was well known in Latin translation.

Yet that famous work has no passage in it, either in the Greek original or the Latin translation, corresponding to the fake quotation gone viral today.

The fake quotation also comes in a longer form: “Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”

Does that sound like a vaguely Platonic view? The ancient Greek philosophers did in fact talk about the relation of music to morality.

Plato, in his Republic, speaks of the connection between music and education, including moral education.

Aristotle, Plato’s student, in his Politics, carries on the tradition, further studying the connection of musical education to political order.

Socrates is depicted, in Plato’s Phaedo, at the end of his life talking about music. Right before his execution, Socrates tells the story of a recurring dream:

“The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: ‘Make and cultivate music,’ said the dream.”

It may not be as exciting a quotation as the fake one, but at least this can be attributed to Plato: “Make and cultivate music.”

Still, those words can only be indirectly attributed to him, since it is the dream speaking, not Socrates, who is only indirectly reporting it.

And note Plato is indirectly reporting Socrates: which makes the dream quotation a copy of a copy, which means it is a highly problematic form of imitation (as Plato discusses in his Republic).

But Socrates offers an interpretation of the dream, in which he takes his practice of philosophy to be a kind of music.

The dream, he believes, was meant to encourage him in “the study of philosophy, which has always been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music.”

However, I doubt philosophy majors at a university would be comfortable enshrining that quotation on a coffee mug or a T-shirt: “The study of philosophy is the noblest and best of music.”

That’s because it is more of a puzzle than a straightforward proposition. In what way is philosophy at all like music?

For Plato and Aristotle, at least, music offers an education that forms the soul. So, it seems that the practice of philosophy, as their teacher Socrates conceives of it, is a similar kind of education.

Plato gives us a clue when he writes in his Laws: “Let us sum up the whole matter by saying that the postures and tunes which attach to goodness of soul or body, or to some image thereof, are universally good, while those which attach to badness are exactly the reverse.”

In other words, music is capable of embodying an expression of universal moral qualities. In that way, music becomes a bridge between the spiritual and the physical.

In Stoic philosophy, the human soul has a rational nature, but Stoic philosophy goes one step further than Plato and Aristotle in explaining why music can have an effect on our souls.

For the Stoics, it seems music has a rational structure, in which it encodes and communicates tensional ratios that express the rational structure of things in the world and in our minds.

Music is therefore not an irrational force that can corrupt the soul, which is a problem that Plato and Aristotle consider with emotional education.

Rather, music is able to bypass the indirect representations of verbal language. Instead, music communicates directly to us the deep structure of things – which is to say, their beauty.

The best quotation from Plato, which resonates with this Stoic idea, and which is not fake but true, is found in these words from the Timaeus:

“Harmony is a gift of the Muses, if our dealings with them are guided by understanding,” says Plato. “But with most of us our condition is such that we have lost all sense of measure, and are lacking in grace.”