Among the Platonic Dialogues that are actually ascribed to
Plato, the Cratylus is one that is
often met with skepticism, or is written off as too whimsical to be placed on
the level of “philosophy.” To be sure, it is a bit of an anomaly. In addition,
because of the heavy emphasis on the Greek etymologies (both folk and
“legitimate), it somewhat defies translation and further understanding without
a rather decent grasp of Ancient Greek.
As such, it is often pushed aside for the more “serious”
dialogues and sometimes pops up in Literary Criticism courses, but for the most
part, remains largely untouched by those without a deeper interest in Plato and
his usage of language.
The argument begins with a certain Hermogenes lamenting to
Socrates that his friend, Cratylus, (claiming to have a sort of divine insight
into words), has just told him that “Hermogenes” is not actually his “true”
name, despite the fact that everyone calls him that.
This initiates the argument about whether there is “truth”
in names, or, are they arbitrary and mutable?
At the bottom of this argument is Heraclitus’ teaching that
all things are in flux and that there is no permanence, leading to the
conclusion with words, that they too are merely temporal markers for things in
the ever-changing world. Well, this is hardly insignificant if you consider
then that if that is true, words are meaningless
at their core, and by extension, communication cannot ever really take place.
In the late 1960’s literary critics and theorists began
arguing over the impossibility of one person truly understanding another,
gesticulating wildly in articles by the dozen, as if it were something new.
Hardly. The oft-orphaned Cratylus had
anticipated this argument well over two millennia before.
I was reminded of the Cratylus
the other day when my young daughter, who is learning Dutch and English simultaneously, asked me why things are called the names that they are. She
asked, “Why is a squirrel called a squirrel in English? Could it not be called
something else and still be a “squirrel?” This is more or less the exact
opening of the Cratylus in that
Socrates posits the question of if we switch words in public versus private,
such as “anthropon (man)” and “hippo (horse),” then does the thing change, or
does it stay the same, despite changing the name?
Furthermore, as my daughter also asked, “Who decides what is
called what?”
In the tradition of Zen and the Tao, for to name something
is to not understand it, because as soon as we place a name on it, we limit it.
Krishnamurti asks if we can appreciate a tree as just what it is without
wondering what kind of tree it is, or what name we have given it.
Names, then, and words in general, seem to then be an
inadequate necessity to achieve some level of communication, but begs the
question of “are we missing something?”
As languages are something that I have invested a large
portion of my life to, this could be quite a miasma to be stuck in. I am
intrigued how different some words can be in cognate languages while other
words can nearly be identical.
One of my daughter’s favorite cartoons is “Phineas and
Ferb,” in which the boys have a pet named, “Perry (the Platypus),” who is in
reality a Secret Agent, unbeknownst to them. As she watches it in Dutch here, he
is “Perry de vogelbekdier.” Vogelbekdier
literally means “bird-beaked animal.” Platypus,
however, comes from the Greek meaning “flat-footed.” However, in Italian, a
“Platypus” is known as an ornitorinico,
coming from the taxonomical name of the Australian “duck-mole,” the Ornithorhynchus, which means, from the
Greek again, “Bird-billed.”
Umberto Eco’s book Kant
e L’Ornitorinico (Kant and the
Platypus) discusses the problem of categorically defining the Platypus in
that it defies all possible categories that we might bring to it to understand
what the hell this creature is? Is it God’s joke? A mammal that lays eggs with
the beak of a duck, the webbed feet and tail of a rodent beaver, and is native
to an isolated continent and nowhere else?
In other words, logic and reason, and ultimately names, break down with
the case of our strange creature.
As the Cratylus
progresses, and such topics are taken up, Socrates goes into a whirlwind of
possible etymologies (some which are apparently to be taken quite
tongue-in-cheek) and that there are entities known as a nomothetes, or “placer
of the law” who give “proper” names to things. At this point, many will raise a
hue and cry about Socrates and/or Plato being an elitist by assigning a greater
significance to certain people over others.
However, the take home message of reading Socrates via
Plato, is that for the most part, what appears to be the logos, or argument, is
ultimately reveled to be a mythos, and serves as a surrogate for a truth that
eludes us within our mortal realm. Much as Kant will say 2,000 years later, we
have limits to our Reason, and the best we can do as humans is to approximate
our sensus communis, or “common/communal
sense/consensus.” And this is often done via language…and thus words.
Socrates ultimately wraps up the Cratylus with the caveat:
“…no person having any sense/mind at all entrusts himself or
his soul to names/words, having believed in them and their makers to affirm
that he knows something…”
Hey, where’s Perry?
