The Ultimate 'Esoteric' Reading of Plato: Jay Kennedy Replies to Critics

Dr. Kennedy (Manchester) has kindly prepared replies to those who commented on the thread about his research earlier in the summer:

I thank the Leiter Report for making room here to respond to the many rich comments about my Apeiron paper on symbolic structures in Plato's dialogues. The stakes in this debate are high. Unravelling these symbolic systems promises to revolutionise our understanding of Plato and Platonism. 

There has been a great deal of progress made since the Apeiron paper was written. For those in the UK, I will be speaking to classicists about these developments at Manchester (23 Sept.), The Institute for Classical Studies in London (4 Oct.), and Leeds (27 Oct.). My forthcoming book, The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues (Acumen, Spring 2011), substantially expands the evidence in the paper. 

1) NEW DOCTRINES? Aaron Boyden, Mohan Matthen, and marcus say that my arguments expose musical structure but not new doctrines. MSPD has a chapter entitled 'Extracting Doctrine from Structure.' My strategy, however, was to publish the evidence for the musical structure first. 

The passages marking the notes repeat at regular intervals and therefore can be studied objectively and rigorously. A future book will show that there are other types of symbols which carry Pythagorean doctrine. 

Phillip Horky wonders if the symbolic structures really have a Pythagorean provenance. I agree that they may partially reflect Plato's innovations and that it may be difficult to parse the relation to the work of Archytas or Philolaus. There are strong indications, however, that the structures fit into the Pythagorean tradition. Most obviously, the hidden musico-mathematical structures bear a family resemblance to the hidden 'music of the spheres.' 

2) WHICH SCALE?  Dennis Des Chene objects that the scale I detect cannot be a conventional Greek scale. He is right. The 'scale' should more properly be called a 'division of the canon.' Ancient references to such a 12-note division are listed in my paper; see also David Creese's new book on the monochord (Cambridge, 2010). 

3) MOTIVATION? Tim O'Keefe questions whether a Pythagorean philosophy would need to be reserved and hidden. Richard Janko's article 'Socrates the Freethinker' makes a strong, general case that such fringe philosophies were persecuted, leading their proponents to hide them with symbolisms of various kinds (in Kamtekar and Ahbel-Rappe's Companion to Socrates). 

4) METHODOLOGY? Philippe Lemoine and James Harold worry that I could find structures in any text or that there might be 'confirmation bias.' This is a serious worry. The Apeiron paper deals with it first by providing many different kinds of evidence, some of which are immune to this kind of problem. Moreover, it directly argues that my methods are falsifiable, i.e., there are some texts similar to Plato's which do not have this musical structure.  Finally, however, MSPD (see, e.g., ch. 3 online) will show that there is a depth and specificity to the interpretations which, I think, rules out problems with confirmation bias. 

5) GOLDEN MEAN? Tad Brennan and Mohan Mattan object to the Divided Line Argument near the end of the Apeiron paper. I did long hesitate to include this argument because so much mumbo-jumbo has been written about the Golden Mean. 

Tad Brennan and Mohan Mattan might be caricatured as complaining that the claimed allusions to the Golden Mean are not explicit. This misses the boat entirely. Allusions are by definition not explicit. 

My argument is not just 'there is a reference to the middle at such and such a location, and so it is a reference to the Golden Mean'  -- which would be lame. Rather my inductive argument rests upon an accumulation of evidence: 

a) By measuring the lengths of speeches and dialogues and by finding parallel concepts at similar relative locations we have evidence that Plato was counting lines, which we know from historical evidence was routine in that context.

b) This is corroborated by independent evidence in the dialogues that they are divided into twelve parts, which would necessitate line-counting.

c) This is corroborated in turn by the musical evidence: by the known importance of the 12-fold-scale, by the correlation between the contents of the passages and the relative harmony of the notes, etc.

d) All this is corroborated by the connections to ancient Pythagoreanism: by their use of 'symbols,' by their doctrines about underlying musical structures, by the assertions that Plato was a Pythagorean, by the neo-Pythagoreans'  emphasis upon the 12-fold scale, etc.

At  this point we have a strong, general case (much amplified in MSPD) that the dialogues have a stichometric and musical structure. Now we bring that to bear on the specific question of the passages about the Golden Mean:

e) Other scholars have identified the Divided Line as an allusion to the Golden Mean, and have given various, strong arguments of their own.

f)  We know from a variety of sources that the Golden Mean was known about the time Plato was writing, that Proclus may have asserted that Plato derived theorems about it, and that it was important to Pythagorean mathematics (Herz-Fishler).

g) Surprisingly, the Divided Line passage is at a location that corresponds to the value of the Golden Mean.

h) Surprisingly, the Parmenides also has a passage near 61.8 percent with specific similarities to the language of Euclid's definition of the Golden Mean.

i) Less obviously, other dialogues discuss means and middles near that point.

 The conclusion from all this is that it is now more probable that the other scholars were correct, and that Plato's tantilizing Divided Line is a deliberate and deliberately vague allusion to the Golden Mean.

Tad Brennan does wonder, quite reasonably, whether all of Plato's references to a middle or the Great and the Small might then count as vague allusions to the Golden Mean. It's true that they demand an explanation. During the last few years I have felt like I was learning a foreign language without a dictionary. I have found  that the dialogues are as dense with symbols as the writings of Dante, Spenser, Mann, or Woolf. As Tad Brennan says, we will have to investigate every passage which bears a similarity to the one marking the Golden Mean.

MPSD is a thorough close-reading of the musical symbols throughout the texts of two dialogues, and aims to be a model for such a comprehensive investigation.

A philosopher might say that whenever a single piece of evidence is pushed I fall back on the accumulation of evidence. But this is true, I think, of all inductive arguments and of all symbolic interpretation.

It is difficult to mount an inductive argument because a large body of mutually reinforcing evidence must be adduced. It is correspondingly difficult to criticise an inductive argument because some wholesale or pervasive problem with the evidence must be detected. No such problem has been identified in the body of evidence presented in the Apeiron paper.

6) I thank everyone who made a comment and look forward to continuing this debate.

Comments

[Mark Eli Kalderon]

Perhaps this reflects naivety on my part, but I am puzzled by one methodological claim. Addressing the worry about confirmation bias, it is claimed that different kinds of evidence was considered and that some of these were immune to confirmation bias. Could there be a kind of evidence that was immune to confirmation bias? I can't see how there could be.

[James Harold]

I share Mark Kalderon's confusion, and add another. I'm not sure how an interpretation's "depth and specificity" could rule out confirmation bias. Many well documented examples of hypothesis that suffer from confirmation bias are astoundingly detailed and specific, particularly in the sciences. In fact, confirmation bias can lead theorists to needlessly complicate theories in ways that obscure other evidence, or other interpretations of that evidence.

[Jonathan Mayhew]

I don't know...As a mode of philosophical communication the secret encoding of information doesn't seem viable. Any interpretation that requires a clever dude 2,500 years later to figure out is implausible unless Kennedy also has evidence that this was a common way of DECODING back in Plato's day. in other words, would readers have known to look for that kind of recurrence? There is no statement to the effect that this was a common way of encoding information, hence no convention for even looking for such a code.

Of course, after the fact you set your parameters however you want by selecting an apparent pattern and then defining the criteria afterwards to fit. For example, the number 12, or the Homeric line. Or what counts as a reference to the golden proportion.

[Jay Kennedy]

JONATHAN MAYHEW asks if such 'encoding' was common in ancient times:

1. The Derveni papyrus, a guide to decoding philosophical
symbols, is taken by Janko, Struck and others as showing
that interest in and use of philosophical allegory was widespread in the classical period.
2. My Apeiron paper gave evidence that Plato's followers
knew of the musical structure; they specifically recommended that readers of Plato know the 12-note scale that I detect.
3. Generally, withholding or 'reserving' knowledge was normal (Burkert), and the dialogues often mention such reverve. It was particularly associated with the Pythagoreans.
4. It was probably the dominant view from the 1st c. BCE until the Renaissance that Plato was a symbolic writer. My work restores the status quo ante.

MARK ELI KALDERON AND JAMES HAROLD ask about confirmation bias.

The original objection was, I think, about c.b. in literary interpretation: finding allusions where none was meant, etc. Measuring the lengths of speeches, for example, provides strong
evidence that Plato was counting his lines and is immune to
that kind of c.b.

For more detail, please see my uni web site. Regards, Jay Kennedy

[Embarrasingly ill-informed grad student]

I'm way out of my depth here, but I'll ask anyway.

Is there anything in Aristotle's work that makes reference, either explicitly or implicitly, to the ideas that Plato coded? The answer to this question seems relevant to Professor Kennedy's thesis for the following reasons:

1. Aristotle understood Plato well. If anyone understood Plato's coded messages, Aristotle did.

2. Large portions of Aristotle's work are reactions to Plato's ideas.

3. Presumably, then, if Plato coded some of his claims, and those claims are important parts of Plato's work, then some of Aristotle's work should contain reactions to -but not necessarily explicit mentions of- Plato's coded claims.

4. If Aristotle's work contains no references explicit or implicit to Plato's hidden doctrine, then either Aristotle also coded his thoughts about Plato's coded thoughts (is this possible?), or Aristotle was able to explain a rich set of ideas deeply influenced by Plato without referring, even implicitly, to Plato's hidden doctrines. And if that is the case, i.e. if Aristotle doesn't react to it at all, then it is hard to see how Plato's hidden doctrine is important to his work.

[Jonathan Mayhew]

Allegorical works tend to present themselves as allegorical. The Derveni papyrus is a commentary on an Orphic poem that begins with an idea of speaking in code to the initiated. Plato's dialogues are ostensibly about the ability to reason things out by open discussion. Of course allegorical reading is common in antiquity, but there's a basic problem here. The idea that the real meaning of Plato is one hidden beneath the surface just doesn't ring true. I'm still not convinced that a contemporary reader would have been able to decipher the code, and, in that case, what's the point?

Also, the claims are inflated (a new Gospel of Jesus Christ!) in relation to the ostensible findings: certain formal recurrences at given points in a text. Even if these recurrences are there, the claims are out of proportion to the results.

[Jay Kennedy]

WELL-INFORMED GRAD STUDENT asks about Aristotle:

1. The fragments collected by Ross and passages in the Metaphysics show that Aristotle was a sceptical outsider to Pythagoreanism, a sect reputed to withhold their doctrines from outsiders. But the symbols I detect in the dialogues have a strong affinity with early Pythagoreanism and suggest that Plato was an initiate or sympathiser.
2. Aristotle's Politics in particular shows him reading Plato's dialogues in a crudely literal way.
3. Thus my work does make us reconsider those ancient reports of a distant or troubled relationship between Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was some forty years younger, a foreigner, did not succeed to the headship of the Academy, and even started his own competing school in Athens.
4. My work is consonant, however, with claims made by many later Platonists that Plato was a symbolic writer.

JONATHAN MAYHEW asks about allegory:

1. Many or most allegorical works in the Western tradition conceal their underlying structures. I gave the example of Spenser's shorter poems. Although intensively studied, scholars did not discover their mathematical structures until the Seventies. The Derveni papyrus is a guide to allegorical interpretation and shows the importance of allegory in the classical period but, yes, is not itself allegorical.
2. Yes, the surface narratives of Plato's dialogues are about openly reasoning and arguing, but what reason is supposed to do is find the forms beneath appearances. That's the core of Platonism and justification enough for adopting a symbolic mode of writing (as it was for Spenser, Dante, and other Platonists).
3. Yes, the press release came from the Media Relations Department and used many popular or simplified expressions. The evidence and arguments are online in my scholarly paper, and I hope scholars will read that.
4. The Apeiron paper was limited to the musical structure of the dialogues. The forthcoming book and work in progress are about the symbols between the musical passages and the doctrines they contain.

[Mohan Matthen]

My memory of this thread is somewhat dimmed, but I thought that Tad Brennan pointed out that the "Golden mean occurs at 61.8%" claim was a little hard to assess, since at times he is saying things like "it's the middle of the day" (in the Phaedrus). The Parmenides quote is a LITTLE closer to an allusion to the Golden Section, but the Philebus ('nothing too much') and Symposium (Eros in the middle) quotes are almost as far off the mark as the Phaedrus one. I find it hard to take these as allusions to the Golden Section. I confess that my friends say I am very literal minded, but even so, I am not sure that Brennan or I simply "missed the boat", by complaining that allusions must be explicit. Of course, what counts as an allusion to one person may not to another. It's possible that disciples of Plato knew that some word meaning 'middle' or 'mean' would occur at roughly 61.8%, and they may have looked for it and taken each new one as a renewed commitment to Pythagoreanism.

I also said, by the way, that I'd be interested in comparing "the probability of some word connoting "middle" occurring at 61.8% with the probability of its occurring elsewhere.

Finally, I was on the whole very complementary in my remarks -- and my name is spelled "Matthen".

[Tim O'Keefe]

On point (3) above: it's plausible to suppose that some people would find it prudent to hide a Pythagorean philosophy. But it seems that Plato wasn't one of those people, as he openly advocated for such a philosophy in many of his dialogs--or at least had such a philosophy discussed by some of the characters in his dialogs in such a way that many readers come away with the impression that the author was deeply sympathetic which such ideas.

[Mohan Matthen]

And 'complimentary' is spelled that way. (Ugh!)

[Jay Kennedy]

TIM O'KEEFE questions whether Plato hid his Pythagoreanism:

G. C. Field once said 'Plato himself hardly ever speaks of the Pythagoreans by name, which is a curious fact on any theory.' (Plato and His Contemporaries, 178)

1. Yes, we can infer from the Timaeus, Philebus, and Republic
that Plato had interest in Pythagorean themes. Experts in early
Pythagoreanism like Burkert and Huffman actually tend to distinguish the innovative doctrines that appear in these dialogues from mainstream Pythagoreanism (i.e., Archytas and Philolaus).
2. Ken Sayre's important book, Plato's Late Ontology, argued that
there are enough allusions in the dialogues to confirm ancient
reports that Plato had an 'unwritten' Pythagorean ontology. Dillon, Kahn, and others have accepted that Plato probably did have such views. But this only makes more pointed the question of why Plato did not openly describe his Pythagorean ontology in the dialogues.
3. The Tubingen school of interpretation (Kramer, Gaiser, cf. Findlay) which is influential in Europe is similarly based on the idea that Plato had a Pythagorean philosophy which was withheld from the dialogues and later orally transmitted among his followers. Like many, I am sceptical about the picture of oral transmission, but they too affirm that Plato hid his Pythagoreanism.
4. So modern scholars do think that Plato withheld some of his Pythagorean doctrine. Until now, however, they did not suspect that his ancient followers were correct: using symbols, the doctrines were hidden within the dialogues.

I thank MOHAN MATTHEN for the encouraging comments. May I appeal to the principle of charity and ask that we move away from the elaborate argument about the Golden Mean. Test my claims by examining the strongest evidence: the objective measurements of lengths of speeches, the stunning correlation between content and the relative theory of harmony, the corroboration by ancient reports of Plato's use of symbols, the close readings in the online sample chapters, etc. Regards, Jay

[Tim O'Keefe]

OK, to make sure we're on the same page, the dispute here is over whether (1) Plato had a hidden Pythagorean doctrine, and (2) if he did have such a hidden doctrine, he hid it for prudential reasons, fearing persecution if it was revealed.

On (1): I think--and I think it's not terribly controversial to think--that Plato espoused OPEN 'vague' Pythagorean doctrines. By 'vague Pythagorean doctrines' I have the following sorts of thing in mind: (a) Souls inhabit the bodies of different species of organisms through a succession of lives, with the sort of organism (and life) determined by whether the soul keeps itself pure or allows itself to become polluted in past lives. (b) All things (e.g., the cosmos, and the microcosm of the soul) are structured according to mathematical proportions, and we must understand this mathematical structure to understand things.

By saying Plato 'espoused' such doctrines, I mean something fairly weak: that in many of his dialogs (like the ones you list above, to which I'd definitely add the Phaedo) Plato presented these doctrines sympathetically, through characters advancing extended arguments in their favor, rebutting objections to them, and telling vivid myths embodying them.

If Plato had hidden Pythagorean doctrines that go beyond the 'open vague Pythagoreanism' sketched above, it would have to be either because (i) the content of the doctrines is more specific and/or 'mainstream Pythagorean' than what I've described above, or (ii) his commitment to them is more full-throated than is revealed in just having them advanced sympathetically in many of his dialogs.

For the sake of argument, let's grant that Plato does structure his dialogs in accordance with a "Greek musical scale of 12 notes popular among followers of the earlier philosopher Pythagoras." That would be really interesting! But I don't see offhand why it would make us think that Plato has "hidden Pythagorean doctrines," or a degree of commitment to them, beyond the fairly generic point (b) above. And if he did have such hidden doctrines, more specific than the 'vague Pythagoreanism' above, I don't see why Plato would feel safe openly expressing the vague Pythagoreanism but think he needed to hide the specific doctrines for prudential reasons.

[David Barkin]

The Pythagoreans were never persecuted as a religion. There is simply no evidence for this. They were often opposed for political reasons...

Far more important if Plato was afraid of telling his beliefs, then why does he use Socrates as his mouthpiece for all his views? The assumption that Socrates was murdered for his atheism is to be polite, nonsense. Neither Plato or Xenophon ever claimed this. He was murdered for political reasons, for being an annoying gadfly to certain demogogues.

To sum up, if Plato hid some of his beliefs, they were not hidden for fear of religious persecution. It is difficult to believe in the entire concept of persecuted Pythagoreans, which would have certainly been mentioned by some of the contemporary historians.

Dave