The second part of the dialogue, which takes
us up to about the halfway point, revolves
around two key insights, which Socrates introduces
and gets Ion to agree to.
The first of these is that judgment requires
knowledge.
That is, to be able to judge excellence in
a particular subject matter requires knowledge
of that subject matter.
So that the person who is able to accurately
determine who is it, that this guy is an excellent
doctor, this one is a mediocre doctor, and
this one is a very poor doctor, that person
who makes those judgments can only do so on
the basis of some kind of knowledge about
medicine itself.
Only the person with that adequate knowledge
is capable of rendering accurate judgments.
In the context of Plato’s overall thought,
we can see that this would be connected with
his theory of forms, and a kind of intellectual
knowledge that lies as the rational foundation
of practical judgment.
This particular claim of Plato’s is open
to challenge, and we might find ourselves
later on building a case that Plato is in
fact wrong about this.
But that’s the first insight from the second
part of the Ion.
The second is that knowledge of the whole
art is, requires and is in fact identical
to the ability to judge quality in the subject
matter.
So, if someone is said to have perfect knowledge,
or knowledge of the whole art, say, of medicine,
that person then has the ability to judge
excellent from mediocre from poor medical doctors.
In fact, the complete knowledge is nothing
other than the ability to make those judgments
correctly, consistently.
This takes us up about to the halfway point
of the dialogue, and then the third part,
in which Socrates, in a longer passage, articulates
his theory about what’s going on with poets
and their performers.
Poets and performers, he says, are divinely
inspired.
They do not speak from knowledge of what they
talk about; they are somehow communicating
some kind of inspiration that goes beyond
the rational, from the gods, which they communicate
then to their audience through their works.
The fourth part of the dialogue consists in
the examination of several specific arts:
arts of charioteering, of medicine, of fishing,
and other arts.
What’s happening here is that Socrates is
searching for the performer or the poet’s
specific area of expertise.
If we think of the first half of the dialogue
as addressing and refuting Ion’s claim to
have perfect knowledge of all things, that
the poet and the performer is simply an expert
in all human affairs, that plainly is not
the case, the second half seems to be an examination
searching for, well, just what kind of knowledge
is it that poets and their performers, their
rhapsodes, might possess.
‘What are you expert in, Ion?’
Socrates seems to be asking in this fourth
part.
The final part of the dialogue, the fifth
part, is, I think, Ion’s last stand, where
he says: it’s military strategy, it’s
the speech and actions of generals, that’s
the specific area of expertise which I as
a performer, and Homer as a poet, must have.
Socrates dispatches this, and that marks the
ironic conclusion of the dialogue.
One of the major themes I think you should
look for as you read through Ion is the rivalry
between poetry and philosophy as sources of
moral education, as sources of knowledge about
human life and how to live it.
The real live question here is: Who is the
person who is best fitted to instruct us about
how we should live our lives?
Is it the poet, like Homer or, for us, Shakespeare?
Or is it the philosopher?
And on what basis do each of these people
make claims about the quality and the truth
of what they tell us?
So that’s my quick overview of the five
parts of Plato’s Ion dialogue.
In other videos, I will take a look at the
logical structure of some of the arguments
in the dialogue, and also do a walkthrough of the text of the dialogue, with more detailed commentary.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.
