Bhagavad-Gita 3.12-16

Trans. Edgerton

Harmony in Greek and Indo-Iranian Cosmology

Harmony, in the non-musical sense, is a concept common to many cultures, because it describes an actual physical (and some would say metaphysical) phenomenon. As formulated by the ancient Greeks, Harmony is the interaction of two or more parts to create a whole which transcends the properties of its elements. Other familiar expressions include the Chinese circle of Yin and Yang, and the English saying 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'. The concept is of great relevance today with the explosion of interest in the phenomena of complexity. Much of our modern scientific vocabulary—'energy', for example—was resurrected, as each concept was rediscovered in modern times, from the ancient Greek tradition of natural philosophy (physiologia). It seems appropriate, therefore, that Harmony (harmonia) now be adopted as a technical term in its own right to describe, in its entirety, both an emergent effect, and the complex conditions which give rise to it.

Harmonia was a central element in pre-Socratic cosmology, especially for Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Philolaus. For the Greek philosophers, Harmony was not the absence of conflict, as the word tends to be used now. It is a 'conflict' which, in neutralizing itself, gives rise to a productive reconciliation, a supervenient or emergent property. The dynamics of a complex system in a state of harmonic equilibrium may be reduced to the dualism of conflict and reconciliation—in Hesiod's family portrait, Harmonia is the daughter of Ares and Aphrodie, Love and War (Theogony 933-937). At the same time, the harmonic equilibrium itself may be regarded as a unity. As Heraclitus expressed it , "from all comes one and from one come all" (fragment 22B10).

Unity, duality, equilibrium, circularity, the articulated continuum, mutual causation and supervenience: these are the essential attributes of Harmony. Its full significance is encrypted by Heraclitus in one of his riddling pronouncements, where bow and lyre are presented as paradigms:

Simple yet ingenious, the bow is a mechanical riddle, worthy of the divining powers of Apollo, Plato's overseer of Harmony (Cratylus 404e-405d). The string once connected, the bent arms attempt to diverge and release the potential energy invested by the bender; they are instead forced to converge. The disparate parts thus joined, the bow emerges as a single and continually self-interacting whole, at once articulated and a continuum, limited and unlimited. In early Greek poetry, archery could stand metaphorically for cognition and intellectual process (e. g. Pindar Isthm. 5.46 ff.; Aeschylus. Suppl. 446).

Greek harmonic philosophy may have had its roots in Indo-European cosmological ideas, as suggested by parallels in Indo-Iranian material, like the causal loop illustrated in the Bhagavad-Gita passage above. See my paper "Harmony in Greek and Indo-Iranian Cosmology", The Journal of Indo-European Studies 30.1/2 (2002), 1-25 (GET PDF). The connection of Harmony with musica speculativa, as seen most clearly in the Pythagorean tradition, is only a secondary development, probably due to the influx of Mesopotamian musico-cosmological ideas, connected with the imported diatonic music system. The original involvement of Harmony with music, however, derives from a metaphor of 'tonal construction', also found in Akkadian sources: see sections 6.5-6.6 in The Babylonian Tuning Cycle.