Plato's Cratylus: The Comedy of Language

1. First Words

17 1 First Words “Shall we let Socrates here join in our discussion?”1 “Suppose that we make Socrates a party to the argument?”2 “Do you want us to make our speech a common endeavor with Socrates here?”3 “Here is Socrates; shall we take him as a partner in our discussion?”4 These four translations of the opening line of Plato’s Cratylus have been placed beside one another in order to make something manifest. Although the wordings of the four translations differ—though they employ different letters and syllables— they all more or less say the same. To use the language of modern linguistics, we could say that although the signifiers differ, the signified remains more or less the same in each case, and that despite the material differences of each translation the same formal meaning comes across. To put it colloquially, all four phrasings have more or less the same gist. We could even let the opening line of the Cratylus be presented in another language, such as German: “Sollen wir auch dem Sokrates da die Sache mitteilen?”5 Anyone with a German dictionary would see that this more or less says the same as its English counterparts, though of course with different semantic nuances, not to mention drastically different graphic and syllabic arrangements . The French translation, too, more or less says the same: “Voilà Socrate; veux-tu que nous lui fassions part du sujet de notre entretien?”6 Yet,despitethissupposedequivalenceacrosstongues,phrasings,andborders— thesuppositionthatthesesentencesallmoreorlesssaythesame—noneoftheabove translations adequately presents what is most at issue in the opening line of the Cratylus. This inability to capture what is at work in the opening line of the Cratylus is not due to any deficiency on the part of the particular translations themselves, each of which has its own merits. Rather, it is an inability that belongs to the very act of attempting to translate the Cratylus at all. As will become clear though this inquiry , the Cratylus presents a certain conflict between language as it is used by human beings (such as translators) and language itself insofar as it unfolds from out of itself.7 More specifically, the Cratylus raises the possibility of a human mode of understanding that attends to what language itself wishes to say about itself, rather than simply to what certain human beings wish to say about language.8 18 | Plato’s Cratylus As will be seen, the opening line of the Cratylus, understood in light of the dialogue as a whole, subtly draws attention to this possibility. Insofar as the opening line wishes to raise this possibility, any attempt to translate it is limited: for in translating the text a translator submits it to his or her own opinions and purposes —or, one might say, to his or her own wishes. Through the very act of translation , whatever it is that language itself wishes to say is filtered through what the translator, in accordance with her understanding of the text and her mastery of the particular languages, wishes to say. In making an interpretive decision, as all interpreters must continually do, the interpreter uses language to point the text in a particular direction or toward a particular end (i.e., using “partner” rather than “party,” or “argument” rather than “discussion”). Such decisions, by their very nature, begin to close off the richness and polysemy that language itself holds in reserve. If it were the case that a text, such as the Cratylus, sought as its very philosophical purpose to emphasize the richness and polysemy of language, such interpretive decisions would damage or at least dampen the text’s ability to say what it wished to say. The Cratylus, as this inquiry will show, indeed wishes to emphasize the richness and polysemy of language. Of course, one could attempt to avoid these issues of translation by simply returning to the “original” Greek, thereby leaving the text in its “native” tongue: Βούλει οὖν καὶ Σωκράτει τῷδε ἀνακοινωσώμεθα τὸν λόγον; (383a).9 However, there are two problems with attempting such a return. To begin with, there is a major (and, to a great extent, insurmountable) hermeneutical problem that accompanies the reception of any ancient text. The Platonic texts as they come to us are not hypostatized ideas set eternally unchanged in the clouds: rather, they are living documents that change over time, copies of copies (or images of images) which, as dynamic, are subject to the entropic rules of alteration and decay that beset all existent things. How the text was “meant” to appear is...