Plato, er... Socrates' Ion

 So... it's been awhile, Mimesis Tute, but here we are.

Let's catch up. In the months since we quote unquote went live, I've started my reading, and oh boy was I ready to go. I read the Symposium, and had a few ideas about it, none of which I'll actually take up in any meaningful way. It's enough to say, that dialogue doesn't directly connect with our topic, mimesis. Now, that's a good deal of giving up, isn't it? Should a trajectory of discovery be limited by its subtitle (or its title)? Well, no, I thought. And maybe that's true, and maybe we'll come back to the Symposium in a more meaningful and committed way. It is a dialogue "about" love. Love is its content, its what it's about. It engages directly in the tools of mimesis (we'll determine soon enough if the "tools of mimesis" makes any sense to say). It's a dialogue, with characters and a scene (a funny, hungover one at that).  A mimetic discussion is definitely possible. But, it seems to me, having some sense of what mimesis is would make that reading richer.

For that reason, I'm starting with Ion. This one in particular:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0180%3Atext%3DIon%3Asection%3D530a

In it, Socrates and Ion have a kind of epistemological debate. Ion, a rhapsode, claims to know everything there is to know about Homer, the poet whose work he performs. Can he judge between Homer and Hesiod, Socrates wants to know? Only one skilled in an art is capable of making judgements of quality. Only the doctor can judge someone in good or ill health, only someone versed in the art of painting can say one painting is good and another bad. Ion cannot compare Homer and Hesiod because he lacks an understanding of Hesiod's work, and so lacks information. Socrates equates this to his lacking an art, his work as a rhapsode being that of divine possession, rather than an artform.

Socrates uses the metaphor of a magnet to describe the dissemination of this divine possession. The magnet, the prime force, is the Muse, who inspires the epic poet. The poet, having no control over what she writes (hence, not an artist), is magnetize by the Muse, takes her charge, is inspired, and so channels the work. It is a work of the gods played through the medium of the poet. When Ion performs Homer's epics, the same thing occurs. Homer, like the Muse before him, channels through the rhapsode, and, as Socrates makes clear, the same thing carries into the audience as well. The emotions Ion feels performing Homer's work are conveyed to the audience. The possession, or magentization carries into the audience, such that from the one Muse, or God of the work, there is a long chain of magnetized charges.

The poet, the rhapsode, the audience to the epic poem--according to the dialogue--have no access to any particular intelligence or knowledge. In the dialogue, all knowledge is had only by those with direct knowledge. Doctors know about health. Generals know about generalling. There is no knowledge otherwise, and if a doctor knows about horsemaning it is because he is both a doctor and a horseman. Though Epics describe and dramatize horsemaning and doctoring or seering, the epic writer can't know anything about the real-life qualities of those skills and knowledges. Less so the rhapsode, and still less so the audience member.

In this dialogue, all knowledge is only truly knowledge if it is gained as the result of real-life use. Use in the real-world. Use through actual art, and not by any sort of inspiration.

This sets up poetic work as being of another order from the real. It's the gap between these things that makes of the mimetic space. Whether divine inspiration--or self-sublimation of any kind--has to do with this--and, something like it  probably does--is secondary. That there is a distinction between works of what Socrates would call art, and those of what he'd call a divine nature, opens an aesthetic space in which to understand the subject, consciousness, and what we tend to call art today.