Questions on Plato's Ion

Directions: Answer these questions on a separate piece of paper. Please number your answers. Only typed answers will be accepted.

1. In discussing with Ion who might be the better judge of certain passages in Homer, does Socrates seem to admit the applicability of only one kind of judgment? Is there another kind of judgment about poetry which Socrates does not consider?

2. Might Ion have been better able to reply to Socrates if he had made a distinction between form and content? Explain.

3. Socrates' notion that the true source of poetry is divine inspiration suggests, at the very least, that man's reason is hardly enough for the production of a good work of art. Can you think of other theories about the source of art which stress its a-rational, even irrational, origins? Do these theories justify a distrust of art? Do they, on the contrary, make art seem more valuable?

4. Socrates never seems to tire of imagining ways in which literature can morally corrupt people, especially the young. Does Socrates ever strike you as naïve in his conception of the relationship between the literary work and its audience? How is Socrates' ethical suspicion of literature derived from his psychological assumptions? Are those psychological assumptions very different from many of today's psychological assumptions?

5. Has Socrates mentioned all the ways in which literature, or the imaginative arts in general, might be regarded as morally corrupting? Does this question offend you?

6. Suppose that Socrates abandoned the idea of literature as imitation and instead embraced the modern notion of poetry as the expression of powerful feeling. Would Socrates therefore change any of his ideas about the place of poetry in his ideal state?

*The reading selections are from Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory Since Plato. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt, 1992.