Plato’s Ion: The Stories That Souls Trade

“We are all Ions,” one participant observed, and maybe that’s truly the case if each one of us is a link in a storytelling chain. In Plato’s dialogue the Ion, Socrates reminds the title character, who is a proponent of the poet Homer, that since Homer represented an idea, Ion is representing Homer’s representation. With each successive representation, some of the original idea is altered to suit the memory and external influences acting on the storyteller. Is each one of us acting as a representative of a representative of one, or many, original idea(s)? Plato’s short dialogue was the subject of a great discussion and originality of ideas among members of the Toronto, Calgary, and Chicago Philosophy Meetup groups on June 11, 2023. We concluded that while, like Ion, we all need inspiration, care must be taken to avoid the wrong path because every one of us learns from our failures. In Socrates’ analogy, of the divine power as a magnetic stone that moves surrounding souls as if they were iron rings, where do we stand in relation to each other? What if, as one participant observed, Socrates intended to represent philosophy itself – the original idea – in the magnetic stone, as the timeless presence always in our midst?