Philosophy of Bhoor-rung: Plato and the Spinning Top

Arjun Poudel

Most of us have seen neighborhood kids playing with spinning tops. Some of us might ourselves have played one in our childhood days. I had my first spinning top at the age of eight or ten. My mom had bought that one for me at the Makar Sankranti Mela (fair) in Devghat. It came in a set of two components. The top itself was made of wood and one-half of it was cone-shaped and slightly corrugated, while the other half had the shape of a dome. Then, there was about a meter-long piece of cotton thread, one end of which had a loop into which one inserted the middle finger. The rest of the thread was used to carefully wrap the cone-shaped lower part of the bhoor-rung, as the spinning top is called in our part of Nepal. 

After you have inserted the middle finger into the loop and wrapped the conical half of the bhoor-rung with the thread, you throw the top forward above a hard surface and then immediately pull the thread behind with a forceful jerk. As the bhoor-rung lands on the hard surface, it spins for what seems to be an eternity and one keeps gazing at it awe-struck.

A nail had been driven into the cone-shaped end of my first bhoor-rung. Only after a lot of tantrums had I been successful to persuade my mom to spend her five precious sukees (quarter of a rupee) on it. For the next several days, she kept chiding me for having wasted her money, because I could not make her purchase spin. Each time I threw it in her presence, it would land on its side and wobble away. It was only after a week of endless attempts that I had become consistently successful in spinning the bhoor-rung.

The awe-struck gaze that one fixes on a spinning bhoor-rung is the paradigm of philosophical contemplation (theoria) itself. Philosophers over the last two and a half millennia and as diverse as Plato and Michel Serres have used this plaything of children in an inquiry aimed at reaching an understanding of different types of motion – motion of parts vs. motion of the whole, rotational and spatial motion, orderly motion as opposed to turbulent motion etc. In the fourth book of Plato’s Republic, a founding text of Western philosophy, Socrates and his interlocutors seek to resolve the contradiction between motion and stillness involved in a fast-spinning bhoor-rung whose tip is nonetheless fixed on a particular point, with the whole object appearing perfectly still to an observer:

…tops as wholes stand still and move at the same time when the peg is fixed in the same place and they spin, or that anything else going around in a circle on the same spot does this too, we wouldn’t accept it because it’s not with respect to the same part of themselves that such things are at the same time both at rest and in motion. But we’d say that they have in them both a straight and a circumference; and with respect to the straight they stand still since they don’t lean in any direction – while with respect to the circumference they move in a circle; and when the straight inclines to the right, the left, forward, or backward at the same time that it’s spinning, then in no way does it stand still. (Book IV, 436)

I first received a taste of Plato’s masterpiece as an MA English student at Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur, where the Book X of The Republic was, and probably still is, assigned to students so that we could learn on what grounds Plato banished artists like poets and painters from his utopia. Why did he consider poetry and painting to be inferior to carpentry, which in our day is viewed as a mere trade like plumbing and upholstery while the former two are highly respected professions? The reason is too profound to be dismissed out of hand; it is that poetry and painting are imitative (or mimetic) rather than productive arts. As we read in the final chapter (Book X), a carpenter designs, and produces items like tables and couches, while a painter makes nothing more than a copy of such items. In other words, while a carpenter deals in actual tables and couches, artists like poets and painters deal in a mere semblance or appearance of such items. (Book IV, 436)

Earlier in the seventh book, Plato presents his famous myth (or allegory) of the cave, in which we find people who have remained bound in chains all their life. They are chained in such a way that they face the wall of the cave and cannot turn back to look toward its mouth, where a big fire is burning. Between the fire and the prisoners lies a road with people whose shadows fall on the wall in front of the prisoners. Clearly, then, what the prisoners have seen and heard in life are not actual people and their voices but only shadows and echoes. In a word, what the prisoners view as reality is just an appearance. 

Unlike the narrative of the cave, what we find in the above-cited passage from The Republic is neither a myth nor an allegory. In fact, it presents every inch as scientific a discussion as one ordinarily comes across in a physics textbook for today’s high school or college students. What is more, Plato’s argument concerning the alleged superiority of carpentry over arts like poetry and painting would be better served by the example of bhoor-rung, for at least three reasons. The obvious first is that a bhoor-rung, though it resembles tables and couches in being made by a carpenter, is like painting and literature in that it is an object of pleasure and leisurely contemplation rather than a useful item like the former two. 

Second and more importantly, a bhoor-rung may at first sight be just a toy commonly used by children, but it is also paradigmatic or exemplary of many apparatuses like a dynamo, turbine, thread-spinning wheel, to name just a few. Most importantly, the bhoor-rung illustrates all the three orders of reality that constitute Plato’s philosophical worldview – orders that the myth of the cave is designed to illustrate. Let us see how it is so in more detail.

First of all, to an ordinary observer, the fast-spinning bhoor-rung with its tip (or peg) fixed on a particular spot looks perfectly still. This, however, is an illusion like the procession of shadows on the wall that the prisoners in the cave face. Secondly, and in actuality, the bhoor-rung is spinning in either the clockwise or the anti-clockwise direction at a certain speed. This is the second order of reality involving the bhoor-rung, the third being the geometric (in fact, stereometric, because the spinning bhoor-rung is an object in three-dimensional space) form that it shares with the dynamo, the turbine, the thread-spinning wheel etc. Plato is fully mindful at this point of the third order of reality because he adds to the very first mention of the spinning top (bhoor-rung) the clause “anything else going around in a circle on the same spot does this too.” 

It is not Plato alone who made a bhoor-rung an object of philosophical and scientific contemplation. The Stoic philosophers derived from the same state of affairs involving a bhoor-rung an important inference about human responsibility. In this view of the Stoics, the bhoor-rung

will not move unless the child strikes it: but once struck it will continue to spin ‘of its own force and nature’ (Cicero, Fat. 43). The crack of the whip is an antecedent cause, but the top’s internal force is the principal cause. Likewise, the roller, once pushed, will continue to roll of its own accord. This illustration was used in an attempt to reconcile the Stoic theory of causality with the possibility of human responsibility. (Kenny 194)

Some two thousand years later, the American philosopher William James used the same toy to drive home the fragility and slipperiness of  the stream of consciousness, a notion for which he is more well-known today than for anything else. Analyzing our stream of consciousness retrospectively, James wrote in his pioneering book on psychology, “is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion…” ((161). In our own millennium, we find how the recently-expired French philosopher Michel Serres contemplated both orderly motion as well as turbulent one –  in Latin, turbo and turba – by means of bhoor-rung (‘turbo’ is also the Latin name for a spinning top).

We may conclude by noting that archaeologists have found evidence of bhoor-rungs being in use as early as several millennia before the Common Era (CE). As mentioned by John Hopkins Archaeological Museum in its website introducing its collection of toys and other antiques, bhoor-rungs remained a common toy of children in ancient Greece, of which Plato remains for us the most well-known representative. However, the most memorable mention perhaps is the one in a Homeric simile in The Iliad:  

As Hector was retreating, great Ajax picked up one of the great chermadions used as props of fast ships, which had rolled among the fighters’ feet. He whirled it as a spinning top, which wheezed and hit Hector on the chest just above the rim of his shield, below the neck. (italics mine, Iliad 14. 409-13)

References:

James, William. Psychology. NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1892. Print.

Kenny, Anthony. Ancient Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Vol. 1. Oxford (UK): Clarendon P, 2006. Print.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Alan Bloom. 2nd ed. Chicago (IL): U of Chicago P, 1991. Print.

Serres, Michel. The Birth of Physics. Trans. David Webb and William Ross. NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Print.

[Previously a lecturer at TU and Apex College, Arjun Poudel currently lives and works in Boston, USA.]