| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
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First some comments on the translation:
• You will see many Latin words or phrases in this text. If you don’t know Latin, you can safely ignore them since they are all translated; they are simply the translator’s effort to indicate what the original Latin is in cases where the translation might leave this in doubt.
• The term translated as “rhythm” is the same as the one the editors speak of as “number” at the end of their introduction (H 172).
• Augustine (or the master who speaks for him—the original is in dialogue form) employs a classification of “rhythm” that was worked out before your selection begins. It goes as follows (in order of lower to higher types):
• “Sonant” (“sounding’) or “Corporeal” rhythm is rhythm in sound or in bodily movement.
• “Recordable” rhythm is rhythm in memory.
• “Occursive” rhythm (the Latin term refers to meeting or running up against) is a rhythm in our perception which enables us to grasp sonant rhythm.
• “Progressive” rhythm is rhythm by which we control action.
• “Perceptive” rhythm enables us to delight in and thus judge the quality of rhythm.
• “Weighing” rhythm is sometimes used by Augustine to include perceptive rhythm and sometimes distinguished as the intellectual basis for such judgments.
Here are some passages in your assignment to pay special attention to (indicated by the chapter-section numbers shown in the margin in the HK anthology):
• x.29-xi.30 (H 185f). What is the point of the metaphor of syllables that are not able to take pleasure in the poem they are part of?
• xiii.38 (H 190f). Note and think critically about the connections between beauty, rhythm, and equality.
• xiv.44-6 (H 194-6). Think about two metaphors: terrestrial structures erected from the debris of the citadel of true equality (in xiv.44) and the plank we cling to and hope eventually to dispense with (in xiv.46). Also think about the intervening discussion of the relation between equality and order.
• xiv.47 from “Again at the ends and beginnings ...” (H 196f). There is more here on equality and order.
• xvii.56-58 (H 200-2). Think through a couple of these examples of the pervasiveness of numerical structure and the relation of temporal and spatial structure.
In general, notice Augustine’s emphasis on something like symmetry and his many comparisons with mathematical ideas. If such views are, in the end, not inconsistent with Plotinus, there is a definite difference of emphasis between these two neo-platonists. Which of the two are you more sympathetic to in this regard? And, more generally, how close a connection do you take there to be between beauty and mathematical structure?