Plato's Cratylus: The Comedy of Language

7. What Words Will

121 7 What Words Will Although Socrates has been playing with words since his entrance into the discussion with Hermogenes Hipponicus, it is only after his elaboration of the Homeric clue concerning the correctness of names, and the corresponding demonstration of that clue through the tragic scene of the house of Atreus, that Socrates transitions into an earnest display of the etymological prowess he claims to have contracted from Euthyphro earlier that morning (396d). Considered most generally , the long series of etymologies that follows generates a dramatic scenario reminiscent of the scene of radical becoming that arose out of the Protagorean doctrine that “the human being is the measure of all things.” As seen in chapter 4, such a doctrine represents an understanding of nature (φύσις) based entirely upon the way it appears to the human being: namely, as a vacillatory play of unstable appearances. Under the sway of such an understanding, the stability thought proper to Being is undermined and supplanted by ceaseless becoming, and both λόγος and knowledge prove to be impossible.1 With certain important exceptions (to which we shall return), the extended etymological section shows how those who supposedly conferred the original names upon beings were people who, like Protagoras, opined all things to be in flux and named beings in accordance with that opinion. To the extent that this attachment to apparent flux and opinion is demonstrated throughout the etymologies, and eventually explicitly noted by Socrates (411b), the long series of etymologies foremost exhibits the failings of the technological /tragic/Homeric view of language out of which the names arose. Such a view, as Socrates has been at pains to show, is unreflectively bound by the limits of human opinion and is utterly trapped within the rough lower part of λόγος, that goat-like part pervaded by myth and falsity. The etymologies present, in vivid detail, the severance from Being characteristic of the tragic view of language. Yet, as is apparent from even the most cursory reading of the Cratylus, the etymologies are preeminently playful, as Socrates himself explicitly notes on two occasions.2 Consisting of comic mischief and excessive wordplay, the etymologies represent some of the most comedic moments in the Platonic corpus, despite 122 | Plato’s Cratylus the attempts of some scholars to take them with utter seriousness. How, then, is one to reconcile the tragic view that Socrates presents with the manifestly comic manner in which he presents it? As was noted in the Introduction, comedy often operates in Plato’s texts as a means of marking limits. It is through the comedy of the etymologies in particular that the limits of the investigation underway within the Cratylus are most clearly demarcated. Broadly stated, the etymological comedy discloses the manner—the tragic manner—in which human beings are bound to human λόγος.3 Although Socrates and Hermogenes undertake to discover the correct names of things, and although these correct names are supposed by the interlocutors to coincide with the divine (and therefore true) names of things,4 the etymological play eventually reveals the brute fact that human beings are wholly immersed in human names, those names made by human beings and informed by their all-too-human opinions (436b, 439c). In other words, Socrates and Hermogenes, being bound to human λόγος, are essentially incapable of accessing the divine names which they seek, though they remain forgetful of this incapacity. It is through a comic etymological display that Socrates reveals this tragic character of human names and the technological view of λόγος from which they arose. However, the situation is only tragic if λόγος is only human in character— that is, if it is so pervaded by falsehood as to be utterly severed from the true λόγος of the gods. And yet, as Socrates will soon say in his etymology of the name “Pan” (discussed in chapter 2), λόγος is not simply human in nature, but is also divine and set up amongst the gods (θεῖον καὶ ἄνω οἰκοῦν ἐν τοῖς θεοῖς): that is, λόγος is dual-natured (διφυῆ/διπλοῦς) (408b–c). When human beings become cognizant of this dual nature of λόγος their ability to access the divine part of λόγος—that part that bears a relation to true Being—is restored, albeit in a limited manner. Through the recognition of the divine part of λόγος a certain (limited) overcoming of the human part takes place and subsequent (limited) access to the divine and the true is obtained. It is through his comic etymological display that Socrates will reveal this other part of λόγος, that part not wholly bound by the tragic and false. To...