The Ion

Our class on the Ion took wings from fine student preparation and participation and from these questions:

How many of you have cultivated skill in the arts or are cultivating skill in the arts?

What is involved in that cultivation?

How many have performed?

What is involved in excellent performance?

According to what we find in the Ion, what is involved in an art in the classical Greek sense, a techne (pl. technai)= art, craft, skill?

Knowledge.

In order to interpret poetry, what kind of knowledge to you need?

Knowledge of what the poet is setting forth.

What are the two alternatives that are explicit in this text that explain Ion’s great success? (1) he has techne, including the full knowledge implied; (2) he is inspired from a superhuman source.

Sometimes we talk about an inspired performance.

Has anyone ever had an experience of being ín the zone?

Has anyone ever had such an experience during an aesthetic practice?

This experience has recently been termed “flow (high challenge meets high skill in high performance)” as a result of the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Technē, audience manipulation, and inspiration in Plato’s Ion and

Laurence Olivier’s On Acting

For Plato, the difference between sophistic and philosophic art, between base manipulation and nobility in the arts, hinges on the relation to truth. The sophist is skeptical about the very concept of truth, and sophistic art neglects truth, whereas philosophy lives in the supreme desire for truth and brings forth art out of the quest for truth.

Plato’s Ion introduces us to a conversation partner for Socrates who is a boastful, intellectually inept, but prize-winning reciter of Homer. Ion reveals himself as an emotional manipulator for money, lacking both technē and inspiration. In contrast with the comparatively elementary the analysis of the relations of concepts that Plato gives in the Ion, Laurence Olivier, the leading Shakespearean actor of the middle twentieth century, suggests a more subtle analysis in his book, On Acting. Olivier’s analysis may in some way give a clue to a more advanced and Platonic conception of the relation of technē and inspiration.

Acting and truth

Olivier strongly and repeatedly insists that the core of acting is dedication to truth.

The actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand. (24)

The actor creates his own universe, than peoples it—a giant puppet master. The trick is to make the audience feel that they are observing reality, and this isn’t easy, because to convey the word that has been placed in your mouth to a great number of people you have to exaggerate subtly, ever so slightly highlight. Lead the audience by the nose to the thought. (29)

Truth . . . speak the truth, though the verse will not entirely take care of itself. (84)

I was heroic [as Henry V]—no one could have been more so—but I was truthful, I was not showing off. I played the man like a trumpet as clearly and truthfully as I knew how. (96)

Strindberg is veritas [=truth], perfectly straightforward, no undercurrent, no subtext, no sneaky, subconscious underneath thought that he is either unaware of or hiding from himself. (325)

The following quotation expresses a concept of truth that leans in the direction of relativism that is inconsistent with Plato, for whom truth is not mine or yours; rather my belief may be true or not; my seeming insight may be genuine or not, and it is the truth itself which is the criterion of belief and insight. “In the end, it has been myself I’ve had to turn to, believe in and listen to. When the time comes, it is you, and only you, who knows your truth” (368).

Technē and audience manipulation

It is not clear that Plato would credit Ion with a technē comparable to that of a physician, say, for his ability to manipulate an audience. Ion is found to lack technē , which implies practical knowledge, since he cannot interpret and evaluate other poets who portray the same things that Homer portrays, nor does he have special knowledge of military gear and tack for horses that Homer describes. Since he lacks knowledge, he lacks technē, and Socrates ironically credits him instead with being inspired. Ion embraces and confirms the alternative. “When I tell a sad story, my eyes are full of tears; and when I tell a story that’s frightening or awful, my hair stands on end with fear and my heart jumps.” Then Socrates asks Ion whether being inspired would make one out of one’s mind. This is where Ion agrees with Socrates (against what I think Plato wants the academy reader to see as irony) that to be inspired implies being out of one’s right mind. Ion embraces the ironically offered extension of Socrates’ proposal. To test this hasty agreement, Socrates asks whether Ion is aware that he produces the same effects on his audience, and then the unintended self-revelation occurs. Ion says, “I look down at them every time from up on the rostrum, and they’re crying and looking terrified, and as the stories are told they are filled with amazement. You see I must keep my wits and pay close attention to them: if I start them crying, I will laugh as I take their money, but if they laugh, I shall cry at having lost money.” (535c-d; Paul Woodruff trans. In John M. Cooper, ed., Plato’s Complete Works [Indianapolis, Indiana; Hackett, 1997]).

Here are a few selections from what Olivier has much to say about manipulating an audience.

The actor must keep an audience engaged by constant changes of inflection; he must keep them forward in their seats; he must have an acute sense of when he is boring them, when they are about to yawn or look at their watches, wondering when the interval is coming; he must know the instant he has lost their interest.” (134)

Members of the audience should be respected; they must never be underestimated. It’s very easy to sneer behind your handkerchief and wink at your fellows in the wings, but among that sea of faces beyond the footlights some will know. It is the same wherever you go, in all forms of entertainment: you respect them, they may respect you. They can be manipulated, of course, but that’s something else. This they enjoy, this is why there are here; but they must not be handled clumsily or obviously.

Breathing in the thick, warm air, feeling the expectancy of the house as it waits for your next moment. Timing a pause for perfection. Feeling the lungs bellow in and bellow out as the voice hits the heights of its power. Never giving too much; always making them want more. Making a gesture and holding it, knowing that all eyes have moved with you. Hearing laughter as it moves through the theater like a giant wave, aware that it has been caused by you. Knowing that tears are there for the asking. Controlling every eye in the house, making your thoughts theirs. Taking them on the journey with you, lending their ears to your mind. Frightening them, exciting them, loving them, holding them in the palm of your hand, Lilliputians and Gulliver. Cuddling them, cajoling them, caressing them. Without them you do not exist. Without them you are a man alone in a room with memories and a mirror. Without them you are nothing. An actor without an audience is a painter without a brush. Of courser you can always perform in your head, but where’s the satisfaction?

As I’ve said before, it starts at the very beginning by the family fireside, where the child demands attention: “Look at me . . . look at me. . . .” Once attention has been achieved, it’s the keeping of it that’s important. It is then that the talent to amuse, entertain, provoke shines through: you can soon see who are going to be actors and who stage managers. It is then that you can see the future.

Never underestimate the audience, never patronize them. Because if you do, they will know. They are far more intelligent than you may think. They pay your bills and fill your stomach. Without them you are in an empty room again with a bare cupboard. You must always treat them with respect, be they one or a thousand. If the house is small, never give a small performance. Never cheapen yourself or your profession. It is one of the oldest and best. Remember the court jester: he didn’t dare perform badly; he was always on the high wire. (369-70)

Technē, inspiration and sub-philosophical motivation

Olivier did not write On Acting to justify himself before Platonic standards. “All actors are egotistical and competitive—that’s where we get our energy” (343). Nevertheless, it is reasonable to say that Olivier knows what inspiration is in the theater. He reports one such experience at Elsinore in Denmark, where Hamlet was to be performed outdoors, but where pouring rain forced a quick restaging in the ballroom. The busy director, Tyrone Guthrie, left the task of arranging things to Olivier.

There is nothing better than a group of actors being presented with a problem of this kind and having to improvise. When time is drifting away and the performance is getting closer, somehow the release of adrenaline creates an excitement that runs through everyone, from the leading actor/actress to the maker of the tea. The entire company pulls together with the one object in mind. It is at such times that you can ask for the impossible, and get it. “I’m afraid the only way you can play this scene is by hanging from the chandelier, dear boy.” Without a moment’s hesitation, the reply would come back, “Of course—no problem.”

Great God! there is something amazing about them, the band of players. There is a comradeship that I have experienced only once elsewhere, but not so happily, in the Services.

Somehow every performance seems to be enhanced in times of unexpected difficulties; there is an edge, a fine edge that hoists the players, even the least inspired, onto another level. All the actors’ motors have to be running, but in a low gear for greater acceleration. Nobody dares get a moment wrong. Whereas laziness, even boredom, may have crept in before—and this is very understandable when you think in terms of standing night after night on the end of a spear with somebody else delivering the dialogue that you feel you could do better—that boredom, for a moment, is forgotten and the contribution becomes genuine, energetic, and electric. Everyone becomes a Thoroughbred, muscles alive and alert. The vibrations are high, and this will affect the audience as well. What they witness will be a night that they will always remember. . . .

Whether or not what the audience sees is good we will never know, but the energy that is directed toward them will engulf them in its euphoric state. In Elsinore that night, the actors were heroes, every man Jack of them. I know—I was right in the middle of it. A dignity and excitement was achieved, an atmosphere in which no one falls on his arse unless it is intended. Everyone thrills with a sense of achievement and importance—and quite rightly. The “one for all” society syndrome. Above all, the performance was spontaneous. (86-88)

A synthesis beyond the dichotomy of the Ion

In one passage Olivier suggests a synthesis of Socrates presents, perhaps ironically, in the Ion as a stark alternative.

A good actor is working on at least three levels at all times: lines, thought, and awareness of the audience. (26)

Focus on the lines is part of the actor’s technē, insofar as a basic kind of knowledge of text is required. Focus on the thought expresses the actor’s bond with truth, including the actor’s knowledge of what insights the lines convey. Focus on the audience sustains another awareness that is essential to effective communication and aesthetic success. It is unreasonable to expect persons to be utterly indifferent to secondary goods such as money and self-gratification by means of impressing the audience. Olivier lucidly admits how great is the motivation of vanity, not only in himself. However, so long as vanity does not usurp loyalty to truth, the just order of the soul prevails, and an actor may be judged philosophical by Plato’s own standards. And when a company thrills to the challenge of a performance, then inspiration, technē, and keen awareness of audience may thrive together. Why should Plato not have believed that he saw that very synergy in Socrates and put it into the writing of his dialogues?