Plato Two Comic Dialogues Ion and Hippias Major

¶ … Socrates' conclusion that the poets and rhapsodes lack knowledge fair? What sort of knowledge does Socrates seem to have in mind? Could there be other kinds? Is Socrates confusing the knowledge necessary to make a work of art with knowledge of what's represented in the artwork?

Plato's "Republic" presents a Socratic dialogue in which the main speaker argues that poets and rhapsodes lack knowledge. To a certain degree, this might be owed to the artificial ideas that one can find in many poems or rhapsodies, as some are seemingly meant to entertain the masses instead of being meant to put across complex topics. Individuals in Ancient Greece actually believed that philosophy and poetry are two very different domains. It is likely that Plato wanted to emphasize Socrates' belief that poetry is essentially something that people can create with the least amount of efforts and that it would thus not be required for a poet to have a great deal of knowledge in order to excel in his field of interest.

Socrates promoted the idea that poetry can be much more complex than it might seem and, from his point-of-view, one would have to truly understand a poem in order for the respective person to have knowledge. Simply reciting or writing a poem without having solid ideas in mind would be pointless and would thus have nothing to do with the concept of knowledge.

Socrates was apparently infuriated with the idea that a rhapsode would be capable to have a complex understanding of the concepts that he or she discusses. From his perspective, rhapsodes simply take information from one place to another, as other people are responsible for creating the respective information. One would find it perfectly normal to agree with Socrates, taking into consideration that his rationale is valid and many rhapsodes tend to perfect poetry and texts without actually being able to have a complex understanding of the topics they are addressing. It is practically as if Socrates believed that rhapsodes simply interfered in the process of creation by adding their personal touch. Making something better did not necessarily mean that the person in charge of the process had a good understanding of that something's background or of the ideas that went into play when that something was first created.

Even with the fact that Socrates puts across solid evidence to back his assumptions, the fact that he seems to look at knowledge from a single perspective instead of seeing the general picture makes it difficult for him to actually understand the relationship between a rhapsode and the idea of knowledge. One can go as far as to say that Socrates is biased in his thinking, as he is apparently concerned in emphasizing how rhapsodes are frauds on account of how they promote a particular type of thinking without being able to understand it.