Abstract
Plato’s Ion is primarily ethical rather than epistemological, investigating the implications of transgressing one’s own epistemic limits. The figures of Socrates and Ion are juxtaposed in the dialogue, Ion being a laughable, comic, ethically inferior character who cannot recognize his own epistemic limits, Socrates being an elevated, serious, ethically superior character who exhibits disciplined epistemic restraint. The point of the dialogue is to contrast Ion’s laughable state with the serious state of Socrates. In this sense, the dialogue’s central argument is performative rather than demonstrative.
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Notes
- 1.
Gerald E. Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry, ed. Peter Burian (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 8.
- 2.
Ibid., 7.
- 3.
Plato, The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1925).
- 4.
Plato, Laws, volume 2, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1926).
- 5.
Richard Patterson, “The Platonic Art of Comedy and Tragedy,” Philosophy and Literature 6 (1982), 79.
- 6.
Ibid., 80.
- 7.
Ibid., 79. Else concurs that the Phaedo is not tragic: 186.
- 8.
Might this be a clue to understanding Socrates’ claim in the Symposium that the accomplished dramatist should be able to compose both comedy and tragedy? This passage may be read as saying not that such a dramatist should compose both, but only that she could. Is the accomplished dramatist one who represents only the serious despite knowing the laughable as well? Or perhaps this dramatist displays the laughable in her work, but only for the sake of contrasting it with, and thereby recommending, the serious life. I argue below that the Ion is of the latter sort. See Symposium 223d.
- 9.
See Else, 62, 63.
- 10.
Ibid., 186.
- 11.
Ibid., 8.
- 12.
Plato, The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1925).
- 13.
Else, 9.
- 14.
Ibid., 7.
- 15.
Suzanne Stern-Gillet, “On (mis)interpreting Plato’s Ion,” Phronesis 49:2 (2004): 169.
- 16.
Ibid., 178.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid., 180.
- 19.
Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1966).
- 20.
William Desmond, Beyond Hegel and Dialectic: Speculation, Cult, and Comedy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 341. The passage continues: “Aristotle? Not much. Descartes? Not at all. Kant? Not at all. Hegel? Now and then. Nietzsche? An astonishing buffoon—I repeat his own word, with some admiration. Husserl? Not at all. Heidegger? I cannot find it. Derrida? At others, yes. At himself? No, not at all.”
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Svoboda, T. (2021). Plato’s Ion as an Ethical Performance. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55049-3_1
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