Plato's Cratylus: The Comedy of Language

Conclusion: The Comedy of the Cratylus

182 Conclusion: The Comedy of the Cratylus “[I]t is not we who play with words; rather, the essence of language plays with us, not only in this case, not only now, but long since and always. For language plays with our speech—it likes to let our speech drift away into the more obvious meanings of words. It is as though man had to make an effort to live properly with language.” —Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking “Die Sprache spricht.” —Martin Heidegger, “Die Sprache” (in Unterweg zur Sprache) In the Cratylus, language speaks. The Cratylus unfolds as a dialogical event whereby language is given the space to say something about itself and its relationship to Being, as well as its relationship to the human being. Through the course of the Cratylus, and the etymologies in particular, what is shown is the extraordinary manner in which the human being dwells within λόγος in such a way as to thereby relate toward beings as beings and the Being in relation to which beings are beings. It is only because of λόγος—only by virtue of being ἄνθρωπος, the being who gathers up (ἀναλογίζεται) into λόγος what it has seen (399c)—that the human being can hold-after (μετέχω) Being. The Cratylus as a whole shows λόγος to be the way by which the human relates to Being. Of course, the Cratylus also shows, in vivid comic detail, that it is equally because of λόγος that the human being can relate inappropriately, or incorrectly, toward Being. In particular, the long and exceedingly playful etymological section demonstrates the extent to which λόγος, rather than simply opening an unobstructed pathway to the stability of Being, can close that pathway off, hermetically isolating the human being. Due to the natural and irrepressible playfulness of words—that is, due to the manner in which the meanings of words fluctuate, blend together, and play with our understandings of our world and ourselves— the human being is seduced into following words not into a dream of stable Conclusion | 183 Being, but rather into a nightmare of unrestrained flux where “everything drips like a piece of pottery, and things are in the same condition as people suffering from runny noses, with all things afflicted by flux and running sores” (440c–d; Sachs). It is because of this latter capacity of λόγος that Socrates says that no person of sense would place his trust in words enough to claim to know anything at all about beings (440c). Or so Socrates says. Λόγος thus serves as the opening wherein a correct or incorrect comportment toward Being can take place. Given that λόγος has the dual capacity to lead one toward stability or toward radical flux—that is, given the fact that it is dualnatured —it is of the utmost importance that one come to comport oneself correctly toward λόγος, lest one get carried away by the viscous and unrestrained flow. The Cratylus in general serves as an analysis, and a comic performance, of the possibility of a correct comportment toward λόγος. And yet, how would one ever come to comport oneself correctly? Through his contrived etymologizing Socrates has shown that words can be willed to mean either stability or flux (or both) and that, more generally, words can be made, through the human will and its techniques of manipulation, to mean anything at all. Words have the capacity to be used like tools by those who would wish to force them into accord with how reality seems to them, or with how they wish for reality to be. Given this capacity for deception, how could one ever come to trust that words were genuinely leading one upward toward the stability of Being? One could not, so long as one remained related toward λόγος as if it were a mere instrument by which one conveys one’s own private vision of reality. For the Cratylus as a whole has attested to the limitations of any such instrumentalist view, and the extent to which that view remains trapped within the world of mere appearances —that tragic, lower world of myth and falsity. So long as one relates to λόγος as the smith relates to the bore or the weaver to the shuttle, one relegates λόγος to the wills and wishes of those who use it, to those who make λόγος speak for them. What is needed, then, is a comportment toward λόγος that does not seek to reduce it to the status of a tool or mere mechanism. It is the Cratylus as a whole, and the etymological comedy in particular...