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Download MP3The writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato are cryptic, and often end in riddles. Few Plato scholars claim to know precisely what the philosopher himself really thought. But now a professor at Britain’s University of Manchester claims to have cracked a code hidden in Plato’s writings. Jay Kennedy is an expert on Greek mathematics and music theory. He tells host David Barron how he was poring over his volumes of Plato one day, and he had an epiphany.

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DAVID BARON:  The writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato are cryptic, and often end in riddles. Few Plato scholars’ claims to know precisely what the philosopher himself really thought, but now a professor at Britain’s University of Manchester claims to have cracked a code hidden in Plato’s writings. Jay Kennedy is an expert on Greek mathematics and music theory. He says he was pouring over his volumes of Plato one day when he had an epiphany.

JAY KENNEDY:  Plato’s writings are very mysterious. He was the Einstein of ancient times. They’re beautiful, seductive books, but they end without conclusions. I happened to be teaching one course on Plato and another course on Greek music and mathematics and the eureka moment was when I realized that the musical theory was in fact the key to Plato’s symbolic system.

BARON: So that somehow there’s a musical code hidden within Plato’s writings?

KENNEDY: That’s right. The ancient followers of Pythagoras believe that music was the key to the universe. They had a musical scale with 12 notes regularly spaced and it turns out, I think someone should have noticed this before, that if you go to Plato’s most famous book, “The Republic” and you look at one-twelfth, two-twelfths, three-twelfths that you see a sequence of discussions related to music and that regular pattern is a musical scale. That was the first things I saw, then I burrowed underneath and found hidden layers of meaning throughout the entire works of Plato.

BARON: Of course many, many people have gone over Plato’s writings incredibly carefully for centuries. How come no one noticed this before?

KENNEDY: It is extraordinary. There’s a long and short of that. The short of it is, most humanist don’t know Greek mathematics and music theory. Plato did and that’s what you need to know to find the key to his symbolic system. The long story is quite is interesting. Three-hundred years ago Plato was read symbolically as late as the Renaissance, but there was a revolution in Plato’s studies when the humanist said, nonsense there are no symbols and for two or three centuries now that’s been the standard view of Plato.

BARON: What do you then read into Plato’s writings that you would not have read into then before? Is there some specific new meaning that comes out?

KENNEDY: Plato’s books are very, very beautiful. They’re seductive. They’re rich. It’s been said that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, but his books are plays. They’re debates between philosophers. They give both sides of the question. They’re wonderful books, but at the end you throw them down on the floor and say, but what does Plato believe? What’s final position does he take? And that has lead to the great debate over the centuries. What was Plato’s positive philosophy?

BARON: So the hidden code then let’s you know what Plato really thought about these issues? What his position was?

KENENDY: That’s right. The symbols which encode doctrines are quite surprising. I’ll explain that a little bit. In ancient times the followers of Pythagoras were a persecuted sect. Plato’s own teacher, Socrates, was executed for religious heresy, so Plato had dangerous ideas. And his solution then was to write beautiful books that’s in a way created Western intellectual culture and science, but his dangerous ideas were hidden underneath.

BARON: So in your ability then to read his positive philosophy, that’s because the things that he wrote at certain points in one of his writings that those what he believed.

KENNEDY: Well I can give you an example today, if you like.

BARON: A quick one, sure.

KENNEDY:  That the Pythagoreans were a persecuted cult. They had ideas that you should reject the traditional religion and ethics. And one idea that later became famous was that we should in our lives pursue a golden mean, a bounce between pleasure and pain. We should have moderation in everything. Plato’s students advocated this idea, but no one knew that Plato did. And when you decode those symbols in Plato, one of the many things you discover, perhaps the most easily explained is this idea of the golden mean.

BARON:  Well Jay Kennedy, historian and philosopher of science at the University of Manchester, thank you for opening eyes to the hidden messages in Plato.

KENNEDY:  Thank you. It’s a pleasure to me. I’ve been sitting in dusty library for year and it’s wonderful to have everyone interested in this.

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