Harmony, within the depth-psychology corpus, is never a static equilibrium but a dynamic achievement wrought from the tension of opposites. The tradition reaches back to Heraclitus and the Platonic dialogues, where harmony is precisely the reconciliation of discordant elements — the bow and the lyre held taut by opposing forces. Plato’s Phaedo raises the foundational challenge: if the soul is a harmony of bodily elements, it is secondary to those elements and must perish first; Socrates rejects this, insisting harmony cannot precede the components from which it arises. Aristotle reinforces the critique in De Anima, arguing that harmony belongs more properly to health and bodily function than to soul. Sri Aurobindo relocates the problem to ontology: harmony is the ‘natural rule of the spirit,’ the spontaneous expression of unity-in-multiplicity at the gnostic level, impossible in blank unity and only constructible (hence fragile) in pure diversity. McGilchrist reframes it neurologically and philosophically, insisting that living harmony differs radically from bland equilibrium — it is the ‘dynamic equipoise’ of taut synergy, a Heraclitean tension rather than a Pythagorean formula. The I Ching traditions (Huang, Wang Bi, the Taoist commentaries) treat harmony as an active seeking, a social and cosmological orientation achieved through correct conduct and discernment. Lacan recovers the Pythagorean-medical harmonia from Eryximachos in the Symposium as the unexamined postulate underlying all therapeutic aspiration toward concord. Together these voices make harmony one of the most contested and generative terms in the library.
Harmony is the natural rule of the spirit, it is the inherent law and spontaneous consequence of unity in multiplicity, of unity in diversity, of a various manifestation of oneness.
Aurobindo argues that harmony is not constructed but is the ontological expression of spirit’s unity-in-diversity, distinguished from both blank unity (which admits no harmony) and pure diversity (which yields only discord or artificial arrangement).
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Those people in whom balance is achieved merely by ‘toning down to an unattractive equilibrium’ are very different from those who achieve a living harmony, writes Schleiermacher.
McGilchrist, via Schleiermacher, argues that genuine harmony is a taut, generative synergy of opposing forces — not a dull mediocrity produced by mutual cancellation.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
This is also, by the way, what is intended by the Golden Mean: not a flabby compromise, but a position in which taut synergy produces a dynamic equipoise.
McGilchrist recasts the Golden Mean as a Heraclitean dynamic tension rather than an adynamic midpoint, aligning harmony with the productive opposition of the bow and lyre.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
harmony is not like the soul, as you suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the sounds exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of all, and perishes first.
Socrates in the Phaedo refutes the Pythagorean thesis that the soul is a harmony, arguing that harmony is always posterior to and more perishable than its constituent elements.
, Phaedo, -385thesis
there surely ought to be harmony in a discourse of which harmony is the theme. There ought, replied Simmias. But there is no harmony, he said, in the two propositions that knowledge is recollection, and that the soul is a harmony.
Plato’s Socrates demonstrates an internal contradiction in the Pythagorean soul-as-harmony thesis by showing it is irreconcilable with the doctrine of recollection, thus undermining harmonia as a theory of psychic identity.
, Phaedothesis
harmony is composed of differing notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be no harmony.
Eryximachos in the Symposium defines harmony as the reconciliation of formerly opposed elements through art, offering the Pythagorean-musical model as the template for medicine, cosmology, and love.
, Symposium, -385thesis
It would be more ‘harmonious’ to use the word harmony in connection with health and the successful performance of bodily functions in general than to use it of the soul.
Aristotle argues in De Anima that harmony is properly predicated of bodily health and functional proportion rather than of the soul itself, resisting the Pythagorean identification.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350thesis
It is precisely the one which is here going to be promoted in the discourse of Eryximachos under the name of harmonia. We do not know the harmony that is in question, but the notion is very fundamental to every medical position as such, all that we should seek, is concord.
Lacan identifies harmonia as the unexamined but foundational postulate in the medical and therapeutic tradition, tracing its Pythagorean-musical genealogy through Eryximachos to the structural presupposition that concord is the proper goal of clinical practice.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
His emphasis on the harmonious tension of opposites, however, is ultimately based on Heraclitus. The Greeks were profoundly impressed with the harmonious character of health and fitness; the ideal of harmony, order and measure is propagated in countless positive admonitions.
Snell traces the Greek ideal of harmony to the Heraclitean tension of opposites as mediated through Eryximachos and Empedocles, situating it as the positive but elusive core of Greek ethical and medical aspiration.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
there are only two spontaneous harmonic movements, that of the life, inconscient or largely subconscient, the harmony that we find in the animal creation
Aurobindo distinguishes between the spontaneous infra-rational harmony of animal life and the constructed rational harmony of reflective consciousness, arguing that only the supermind can produce a truly spontaneous higher harmony.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
what constitutes harmony, for example, has changed slowly over the course of time. The dominant seventh was considered a discord until the nineteenth century, and even the major third was once — in organum, therefore until the fourteenth century — considered a discord.
McGilchrist uses the historical evolution of harmonic norms in Western music to argue that the perception of harmony is culturally conditioned yet converges cross-culturally, suggesting a deep psychobiological substrate beneath its conventional expressions.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
a world consisting of a pair of basic opposites, informed by harmony and defined by number.
Seaford, citing Burkert on Philolaus, locates Pythagorean harmony at the intersection of the limit-unlimited opposition and numerical definition, establishing harmony as the cosmological principle binding the fundamental pair of opposites.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
Seeking harmony out of the gate. No fault. Going out of the gate to seek harmony. Who would find fault with this?
The I Ching’s hexagram on ‘Seeking Harmony’ presents harmony as an active, outward-directed pursuit structured by moral and relational stages, from the gate to the clan to the countryside.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998supporting
musica humana, human music or the music of the soul, sensed in the moving patterns of subjective experi
Moore, following the Boethian-Ficinian tripartite schema, locates harmony at three levels — cosmic, human-psychological, and instrumental — arguing that the reduction of music to the latter impoverishes the soul’s participation in cosmic harmonic order.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
for the three parts of the republic to work together in harmony, the leader had to be an example of this harmony.
Place explicates Plato’s Republic to show that political and social harmony requires a philosopher-king who embodies the tripartite harmony of the soul, making inner psychic harmony the model and precondition of outer civic order.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
in action and stillness one can be in harmony wherever one may go.
The Taoist I Ching identifies harmony as the fruit of properly balanced modesty and delight, achievable in both action and stillness when neither impulse cancels the other.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
bent down through the Harmony and having broken through the vault showed to lower Nature the beautiful form of God.
Jonas notes that in the Poimandres the Hermetic figure of Man descends through the celestial Harmony (the sphere of the planets), making harmonia the boundary-zone between divine and material realms in Gnostic cosmology.
, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958aside
‘Brings harmony and keeps well regulated’ translates heji, which often means ‘blend ingredients’ — as in cooking or concocting medicines.
Wang Bi’s commentary unpacks the Chinese term heji to reveal harmony as a practical, regulatory blending — analogous to cookery or medicine — operative at both cosmic and social levels in the Classic of Changes.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994aside