Plato: Ion (Bryn Mawr Greek Commentaries)

Rating:
Summary: Inspiration, Self-Creation, or Both?
Review: .
In ION, Socrates says ION, a reciter of Homer, is not an artist but argues that his skill is that which is inspired by a larger source. That he is not an artist, but rather conveying the source as a magnet strings along a series of conductors, a chain of rings, so to speak, from the divine to the inspired ION to the audience that is moved by his recitals of Homer. And that ION's recital of Homer is just a carrier of such divine inspiration, transmitter of force, that he can not know more about driving than a true charioteer, or fishing than a true fisherman and medicine than a true doctor, the characters he depicts in his recitals.

My first argument was that Socrates appears to miss in his inquiry, is the idea that ION is an artist, or as Nietzsche and Max Weber have illustrated, a value-producer and self-creator. He may not have the art of the fisherman, the doctor and the charioteer, which he so vividly depicts, but he does have his own perception and imagination coupled with his own ability to both self-create and act. Inspired yes, yet the creation of his realty. All humans filter realty and project their own image, either from a collective consciousness or that of their own individual autonomous self, however such value producing autonomy remains to those with such amazing and profound ability, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha and so forth. ION therefore is not depicting a true doctor, fisherman, nor the literal and actual essence of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, but he is creating from himself something new. He is a producer, a creator in using his imagination, his acting skills.

Yet for Socrates, he is only a magnetic conductor of divinely inspired source information. And he may be right. Rather than being a mere artist as I argue above, the idea that music excites the right hemispere of the brain which in turn spreads to areas of both hallucinatory audio and visual occurences is something that Julian Jaynes brings out in his thesis of the bicameral mind, which existed prior to the self-conscious mind as we know it, which can be subsequently tapped into in what is known as possesions, speaking in tongues and other hallucinatory occurences, the right hemisphere of the brain can be triggered with poetry accompanied by music. This can be seen in priestesses of the Oracles of Delphi as they went through various inductions, music and rituals into trances as if possessed, speaking and singing from what can be interpreted as coming from the right hemisphere of the brain, overtaking the normal languistic motor skills of the left. I recommend reading Julian Jaynes book entitled, The Origin of Consciousness in the Break Down of The Bicameral Mind.

" . . . all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed . . . there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him." - Plato, Ion,

Comparing the Muses inspiration (the internal hallucinatory-auditory songs of the divine female voices of the muses) in the Iliad and in Hesiod's Theogony, Jaynes states: "The evidence, therefore, suggests that up to the eighth and probably the seventh century, B.C., the poet was not out of his mind as he was later in Plato's day. Rather, his creativity was perhaps much closer to what we have come to call bicameral. The fact that such poets were "wretched things of shame, mere bellies," as the Muses scornfully mocked their human adoring mediums, unskilled roughs who came from the more primitive and lonely levels of the social structure, such as shepherds, is in accord with such a suggestion. Mere bellies out in the fields had less opportunity to be changed by the new mentality. And loneliness can lead to hallucination." p. 373

It was the dramatic change from the calm poets of the bicameral mind, who regularly, without effort heard the Muses inside his head to the later poet of Plato's day who had to go into a frenzy, esctasy, or even possession, to bring on the internal hallucinatory voices inside the mind.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiration, Self-Creation, or Both?
Review: .
In ION, Socrates says ION, a reciter of Homer, is not an artist but argues that his skill is that which is inspired by a larger source. That he is not an artist, but rather conveying the source as a magnet strings along a series of conductors, a chain of rings, so to speak, from the divine to the inspired ION to the audience that is moved by his recitals of Homer. And that ION's recital of Homer is just a carrier of such divine inspiration, transmitter of force, that he can not know more about driving than a true charioteer, or fishing than a true fisherman and medicine than a true doctor, the characters he depicts in his recitals.

What Socrates appears to miss in his inquiry, is the idea that ION is an artist, or as Nietzsche and Max Weber have illustrated, a value-producer and self-creator. He may not have the art of the fisherman, the doctor and the charioteer, which he so vividly depicts, but he does have his own perception and imagination coupled with his own ability to both self-create and act. Inspired yes, yet the creation of his realty. All humans filter realty and project their own image, either from a collective consciousness or that of their own individual autonomous self, however such value producing autonomy remains to those with such amazing and profound ability, as Christ, Krishna, Buddha and so forth. ION therefore is not depicting a true doctor, fisherman, nor the literal and actual essence of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, but he is creating from himself something new. He is a producer, a creator in using his imagination, his acting skills.

Yet for Socrates, he is only a magnetic conductor of divinely inspired source information. This is perhaps what Socrates fails to ascertain.