Thoughts on Ion

 

Ion is one of the shortest dialogues in all of Plato’s work and, I must say, it was delightful to read. It was a welcome break from the more intellectually heady stuff that hurts your brain, but still dimly sheds some light on Platonic truths that are mirrored in other dialogues. It begins with Socrates meeting the vain and childlike Ion, a rhapsodist who is an expert on Homer. Socrates is being quite ironic when he says he is very envious of rhapsodists, who were the actors of ancient times. They would act out the epic poems which entailed they dress up in fine clothes and have a great ability to memorize huge amounts of lines. More than that though, “You have to understand his thought [the poet’s], and not merely learn his lines” (530c). Whether or not they can really do that remains to be seen. Ion claims to be the world’s foremost expert on Homer, so much so that he would be able to impress the Homeridae (descendants of Homer). Socrates asks what he thinks of other poets like Hesiod and Archilochus and he says he knows almost nothing of them. This stuns Socrates, how can one claim to be an expert on poetry but only know one poet? How does he know Homer is better than Hesiod if he has never read Hesiod’s poetry?

Ion, to his credit, concedes that he probably should care, but he just doesn’t. He asks Socrates to help him figure out why he is such an oddball. Socrates tells him that his passion for only one poet is because he doesn’t have knowledge of poetry, but he has been hit by divine inspiration. This is a doctrine that Plato alludes to in several other places. From what I recall, he mentions it in Symposium, and it is one of the four types of madness discussed in Phaedrus. It seems like Plato has a love/hate relationship with poetry. He seems to recognize its importance and he himself is a superb literary/poetic genius, but he thinks you can’t attain to the summit of truth with poetry. He says that regular people can interpret poetry better than the people who wrote it can. But he also has some very kind words for them, such as the following.

“For the poets tell us, don’t they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as the bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself and reason is no longer in him” (534b)

Not having their reason at the time of composition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, something Socrates defends at length in Phaedrus. They are left without reason, not because they are stupid, but for a very important reason. “Herein lies the reason why the deity has bereft them of their senses… in order that we listeners may know that it is not they who utter these precious revelations while their mind is not within them, but that it is the god himself who speaks” (534c-d).

              Socrates proves that this is true because the worst poet of all time (according to him), Tynnichus of Chalcis, wrote the finest lyrical poem in existence, the aptly titled “Invention of the Muses.” He says that poets are directly inspired interpreters of the gods and rhapsodists are the indirectly inspired interpreters of the interpreters. The way Socrates envisions divine inspiration in art is like a magnet picking up paperclips. The magnet is the thing with attractive power and every paperclip attached to it only has derived power that ultimately comes from the magnet. The magnetic force weakens as we get further from the magnet. The Muse (goddess of inspiration) is the magnet, the poet is the first paperclip, the rhapsodist is the second paperclip, and the spectator of the rhapsody is the third and final paperclip. When Ion acts out the poem, Socrates says his sublimely beautiful performance can be explained as his being possessed by a god. That’s why he can cry a river of tears or feel on fire with the anger of a thousand suns when everything in his life is going right. The god gives him the ability to feel how he does not feel, to channel emotions that are mediated out to the audience.

              Have you ever felt profound emotion watching a movie, reading a book, or listening to a piece of music? Then I think you will know what Socrates is talking about and should agree with what he says. When I’m sitting on the couch watching a movie, what is literally and really happening is that I’m starting at a box that is displaying still pictures that are moving so fast my eyes can’t track them and so they give the illusion that they are moving. Also, more so than that, all the characters are fictional. They are fake, not real. None of the stuff happening is true or real. What is really happening is that I’m on a couch staring at an electronic box. How on earth is it possible that doing such a thing could make me ball like a baby, laugh until I lose a lung, or get so angry I want to hit something? Some may say it is going a bit too far to call this divine intervention, but maybe there is some truth to it, at least on a phenomenological level. What do you think?

              Ion’s vanity really comes out in the next part of the dialogue. Ion doesn’t feel like he is out of his reason when he is speaking about Homer and so he rejects Socrates argument that he is divinely possessed. Socrates then asks him if he speaks well on everything written in Homer’s works to which he replies in the affirmative. Socrates shows him that it is impossible and foolish to think he knows more about medicine than a doctor or about chariots than a charioteer, etc. just because doctors and chariots are in the Homeric poems. Ion somewhat relents but he says the reason he can do this is because the art of rhapsody is identical to the art of the general (541a). I can’t even imagine the arrogance needed to say such a thing. Can you imagine someone like Tom Cruise or Liam Neeson claiming that being an actor is the same thing as being a general? How absurd! Well, I guess Donald Trump did say he knew more about the military than some of the generals and he was basically a reality TV star. But even Ion wasn’t as bestial as that man. Anyways, Socrates asks him the first question any rational person would ask a fool who makes such a statement. “You are at once the ablest general and ablest rhapsodist among the Greeks and yet you go about Greece performing as a rhapsode, but not as a general” (541b)? Ion responds that he is a foreigner and isn’t allowed to be a general or he would. Socrates shows him that this is untrue and gives a list of excellent foreign generals. The only reply Ion has to this is that he takes it back because he realizes that “it is far lovelier to be deemed divine” (542b). Apparently, he makes all his decisions based on what feeds his vanity and ego the most.

              I liked this dialogue. It was a good change of pace and I think there is much truth in it. Most of the people involved in show business do seem to be vain and arrogant. It also shows the danger of veering outside your area of expertise, so it is a good cautionary tale. We should only speak with authority on things we are experts on and know with certainty. It also gives what I consider a realistic account of how genius works. We often see that people who are excellent at something don’t always get there as a result of hard work alone. Sometimes they are able to do extraordinary things in addition to their hard work or even without it. I can guarantee you that I could play piano for 45 years and would never play as well as Bach. I may write a book someday, but I’ll never be like Shakespeare or Tolstoy. These are definitely divine gifts. I even read an article about Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite sci-fi authors, yesterday. In it, a close friend of his said his first decade of writing from 1950 to 1960 was his best and really only good decade. Everything else he wrote later pales in comparison. For various reasons, or maybe just because his muse left him, he couldn’t write well anymore. I would think that you get to be a better writer as time goes on, but now I think Plato is correct. You only are good at an art if you are inspired by divinity, so work hard as you can, but without that inspiration you got nothing. You can take that pessimistically, but I think that would be wrong. God loves giving us free gifts and it is wonderful when you are surprised with a gift you couldn’t possibly think of.