Simmias’ harmony argument likens the soul and the body to the attunement of a lyre and its strings. …show more content…
This directly contradicts one of Socrates earlier wise statements when he was trying to console his colleagues about the fear that there was no truth. He asserted that it would be a grave mistake to assume that one person would be on either extreme of the moral field. Extreme assumptions would cause extreme dissapointments and foster misanthropy in the hearts of mankind. It would in fact be wiser to acknowledge that majority of people fall in the middle. Perhaps then the attunement isn’t tied to moral standing but simply balance within the soul. If that’s the case then it is very possible that every soul can be attuned as Simmias suggests. But Simmias has contradicted his self in his own argument with the assertion that souls can be good or bad and Socrates capitalizes on that.
Socrates also argued that the soul is the master of the body. Within the harmony metaphor, the strings of the lyre control the harmony and if the assumption is that souls do not take direction from the body as does the attunement from the strings, this could obviously serve as an intellectual discrepancy and there are a few points to consider when examining this particular