Thoughts on Cratylus

 

I started reading through Plato’s dialogues at the beginning of the year for about a month. I just started back up again and I’d like to share my thoughts on them. The one I just finished reading was Cratylus. Previously I’d read Alcibiades I, Gorgias, and Phaedo. This one was very different from the others in certain respects. While it does have a central focus on some ideas, this is the only one I’ve read so far that sort of dragged on without engagement in mind-numbing ideas to the uninitiated. This is because the middle section is a very prolonged search for the etymologies of various “names” of things starting with gods, going onto celestial bodies, heroes, and then down to random everyday objects. Especially if one does not know Greek, this is an especially boring part, but it makes for a quick read and there are some interesting things I learned here – that Orestes means mountain man, for instance.

I read up on this one in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and found that there is much scholarly debate about whether or not Plato was being serious or ironic here. I suppose a case can be made for either view, but in my extremely unprofessional opinion, I lean towards the latter. A few reasons are extremely biased, so I’ll be upfront about them. I think Plato had a brilliant mind and I’d put it beneath a thinker of his stature to believe such nonsense, although modern scholars have pointed out that our own knowledge of the history of Greek philology is much deeper and subtler than people had at that time. I also think it fits better with a worldview I believe to be true and exceedingly worthy of commentary – that we spend too much time listening to the mental chatter of our own discursive mind.

Now that I’ve got my biased reasons out of the way, I will say I think it also fits better with the evidence of this dialogue and from what I’ve read so far. An explicit theme in this work is apophatic in nature – in it, Socrates says that our words are never adequate to describe beauty and truth. So then why would Plato spend 20 or so pages going over ridiculous and wildly speculative etymologies? In 415a, Socrates also cautions Hermogenes of the dangers of trying to be more precise than reason warrants. He also says the gods love jokes at 406c. All of this also jives with the ideas being promoted by more recent philosophers like Peter Kingsley, Pierre Hadot, and Stephen R.L. Clark that philosophy, for the ancients, was a way of life and not just abstract intellectual theorizing—a view which absolutely convinces me.

Besides that, the main topic of this dialogue seems to be dealing with Plato’s familiar middle way between the Heraclitan and Parmenidean extremes represented by Hermogenes and Cratylus, respectively. Hermogenes believes names are meaningless and therefore it does not matter if you call a man a horse or a horse a man. Cratylus believes that if even one letter or one syllable of a name is wrong then you can’t even say the name is wrong; a name is either a name or it is absolute gibberish like akljfla;jfl;asjf;lakj. Socrates holds that names do have real objective meaning and as images they must correspond to their archetype, but since they are images, they can’t be identical with their archetype otherwise they would just be a copy or clone. Plato is subtly advancing his idea of participation in the Forms here; it is very underwhelmingly and implicitly stated though. Plato has been convincing me that this is the only possible way to answer the one and the many problem – the one that is at the heart of all philosophy. In this same view he apprises us of the idea of hierarchical series which rely on the first member or fundamental element (i.e. The Good) for us to have any knowledge at all.

The real standout element of Platonic dialogues is their excellent and intriguing literary quality, they are never as dry as you would expect metaphysical texts about ultimate reality would be. There are little kernels of wisdom strewn throughout, like Socrates reminding us that we must go to those wiser than us to gain knowledge. In a casual side reference, Socrates shows that there is nothing new under the sun when he notes that “the present generation cares more for euphony than the truth” (404d). He also cheers Hermogenes up, telling him that he may not learn everything as fast as he wants to, but little by little is still worthwhile, which is outstanding since he is his opponent! How many of us can see we act like this in debates? Of historical interest, we learn that Anaxagoras (who seems to have greatly influenced Plato) had, at that time, recently discovered that the moon reflected light from the sun. Plato also quotes the important literature of the day like the Iliad and Hesiod’s Works and Days. That may seem strange to say since, it doesn’t seem odd to us to quote literary classics.

Even though that would be like quoting Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, most professional philosophers of our time don’t seem to appreciate or use literature much to formulate their philosophy. They are missing out. In fact, I just purchased a copy of the Iliad and hopefully after reading it, it will deepen my enjoyment of future dialogues and if I ever come to revisit this one; not to mention I’m sure reading the Iliad will itself be a treasure. Even though this is probably the least interesting dialogue I’ve read so far, I still highly recommend it and will say I found it a joy to read.