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PlatoIon
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Limits of Reason
In “Ion,” Plato distinguishes reason and creativity. He believes that the two are mutually exclusive. A human being’s capacity to reason is responsible for their abilities to speak, calculate, plan, etc. It can even account for a person’s ability to write a poem or create art when those tasks are accomplished according to a method. But reason does not account for a person’s ability to create something so beautiful that it is beyond the capacity thought to plan or predict. In other words, inspiration can cause humans to accomplish superhuman things—things that would not have been possible through logic and reason. Socrates notes, “As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy” (942).
When divine madness inspires someone “to make poetry or sing prophecy,” it is the gods communicating directly with humans. Socrates notes:
That’s why the god takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us (942).
Reason allows us to make sense of our experience. But for Plato, truth does not exist in the world of experience, so reason can only get us so far. While experiencing divine madness may not be the same as grasping the absolute truth of the Forms, it is a way to get beyond the limits of human reason and thereby expand what humans can perceive and know.
Thus, Plato offers an ambiguous theory of the arts. Art is inferior to reason because it deals with imitations of imitations. Poets write about horses and generals but are unable to train horses or lead armies. In this sense, the arts lead one away from understanding and reality. Yet, reason is limited too. Ordinary thinking and problem-solving do not bring a person to the highest objects of knowledge—the Forms. Thus, poetic inspiration and philosophical insight seem more similar than different. Both are gifts of the gods that take one beyond normal human insight.
Recitation Versus Interpretation
Plato also distinguishes between recitation and interpretation. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates remarks,
I mean, no one would ever get to be a good rhapsode if he didn’t understand what is meant by the poet. A rhapsode must come to present the poet’s thought to his audience; and he can’t do that beautifully unless he knows what the poet means (938).
The first step toward being a good rhapsode is to memorize the lines that a poet wrote, and the second step is to interpret those lines and then recite them to convey their message. Socrates claims that it is necessary to memorize in order to interpret, but that at the same time, memorizing is not sufficient for interpretation.
Socrates asks Ion to recite passages that deal with chariot driving, medicine, fishing, and divining (944-47). Ion can recall the passages easily, but he concedes that he is not the best judge of whether the passages portray their subjects accurately. He is not an expert on those subjects because such expertise is unnecessary for a rhapsode. This concession creates a paradox. Ion won the prize for the best interpretation of Homer, but he doesn’t know if Homer’s descriptions are correct. What is his interpretation based on if not knowledge of the subject matter? Socrates thinks it is a gift from the gods—and a dangerous one. Ion can make Homer’s poetry seem real and convincing independent of its truth or accuracy. Socrates suggests this power can make falsehoods appear true and truths appear false.
Interpreting Homer mattered for the ancient Greeks because they used his epics as cultural instruction. This is akin to how modern religions regard scriptures. Interpreting religious texts can provide moral and spiritual guidance, but simply memorizing lines or verses would not have the same effect and could even negatively influence a person’s behavior.
The Nature of Poetry
It is difficult to pin down Plato’s opinion of poetry and art in general because he sometimes extols its virtues and other times warns of its dangers. In “Ion,” Plato mostly speaks of poetry and art in “divine” terms, which seem to indicate that he values it. However, Plato believes that poetry and art can be dangerous tools in the wrong hands. He even bans them from the perfect city he attempts to describe in his work called Republic.
This tension between art’s value and harmfulness is reflected in the way Socrates juxtaposes inspiration and mastery in his discussion of poetry and art:
For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. Therefore because it’s not by mastery that they make poems or say many lovely things about their subjects (as you [Ion] do about Homer)—but because it’s by a divine gift—each poet is able to compose beautifully only that for which the Muse has aroused him: one can do dithyrambs, another encomia, one can do dance songs, another, epics, and yet another, iambics; and each of them is worthless for the other types of poetry (942).
Poetry is special and rare because of its relation to the Muses that inspire it, but it does not require skill, intellect, or mastery, which limits its applications. For Plato, any value that art has comes from its function, which in this case is its effect on the audience. As a rhapsode, Ion is both audience and artist; he is audience to the divinely inspired Homer, and he is artist for the audiences to whom he passes on Homer’s divine inspiration. On the significance of this, one critic writes:
Any theory of art which does not take account of both the source and the destination, the artist and the audience, must be incomplete […] The meaning of the act of creation for the artist is sometimes ignored in theories of art. But the importance of the audience should not be overlooked either […] what the work means to the audience may take precedence over what it meant to the artist (Dorter, Kenneth. “The Ion: Plato’s Characterization of Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Arts Criticism, vol. 32, no. 1, 1973, p. 66).
Even though poetry may be a direct message from the gods, the picture of poetry in “Ion” would not be complete without understanding that its origins are irrelevant if its effect on its audience is not considered. This effect comes through the rhapsode’s interpretation, which is why it matters whether Ion uses his poetic prowess to inspire his audience in the same way Homer inspired him, or whether he wields poetry as a weapon to distort his audience’s perceptions of reality.
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