ABSTRACT
Plotinus is celebrated for the manner in which he frequently employs powerful images in order to express central notions in his philosophy, and at least one major study — by R. Ferwerda 1 — has been written on this question. Particularly striking is his use of images based on light and vision to describe such things as the emanative process of the hypostases (e.g. in Enneads, V. 3, chapter 11), the omnipresence of true Being (e.g. in Enneads, VI. 4, chapter 7), and so forth. Although Plotinus makes considerably less use of images based on sound and hearing, it is to the latter that we shall turn in this essay. The result will be a sidelight on his thought which, however, is not without interest for historians of ideas. It is likely that Plotinus derived his technique of using musical or harmonic similes and analogies to explain philosophical concepts from the Pythagorean school of late antiquity. Given their belief in the numerical structure of all reality, it is hardly surprising that arithmetical, geometrical, harmonic, and astronomical conceptions should play an important role in the Pythagoreans’ philosophical method as a whole. Moreover, since that belief itself was widely reported to have arisen from Pythagoras’ own discoveries about the association between string-length and musical pitch, it is understandable that musical conceptions should retain a privileged place within the sphere of the mathematical. Of course, Pythagoreanism was not the only ancient school in which musical theorization took place. One should overlook neither the survival of an Aristotelian tradition which placed more emphasis on the sensory evaluation of sound, nor the impact of approaches like that of Ptolemy which endeavoured to find common ground between the Pythagorean and Aristotelian tendencies. Nevertheless, it is 196undoubtedly to Pythagorean thought that Plotinus is primarily indebted for his musical similes or analogies.
