Abstract

The paper attempts a critical reinterpretation of the Platonic Ion and especially of the concept of enthusiasm. More particularly, it attempts to decode the Socratic irony and place itself between two contradicting interpretations of the work; the one that reads Ion as a work on Aesthetics and, in its more advanced version, as a quasi proto-romantic manifesto, and the other which fully negates to it any aesthetic status and value. Its thesis is that Ion forms an early formulation of that critique of poetry that would come back more systematically in the Republic, but that the concept of enthusiasm, which is indeed used to discredit poetry, ends up being richer from what its supernatural garment may suggest.