At g mail dot com I am emersonj.
Related pieces: The Heap, Simples, Parmenides and Chuang Tzu in Chungking
WHAT WAS CRATYLUS TRYING TO SAY?"The other principle,
of linguistic density within a given text, is essentially Kahn, Charles, "On Reading Heraclitus", Kahn, 1979, p. 91.
In the dialogue named after him, Cratylus appears as a bright, amiable fellow who is not terribly aware of the significance of the ideas he espouses, and who as a result does not advocate them very effectively. This is, of course, more the rule than the exception in the Dialogues, and can lead one to suspect that Plato has been stacking the cards. More generously, however, we might just say that Plato embeds his dialogues in fictional sketches set in a city where some moderate degree of philosophical acumen was considered necessary for the gentleman. The source for Parmenides' poem in Plato's dialogue named after him, for example, is one Antiphon: "'Before he was grown up, Antiphon worked hard at getting that conversation by heart, though nowadays he takes after his grandfather of the same name and devotes most of his time to horses'" (p. 65). Among the Sophists, the argumentative talents necessary for advocacy in legal cases or public debates (which were weakly distinguished in Athens) were widely dispersed, and continually threatened to develop into real philosophy (though if we are to believe Plato this only really happened when Socrates came along.) So the first answer to the question is probably that Cratylus didn't mean very much by what he said. When philosophy was demanded in social occasions, Cratylus had a Heraclitean schtick worked up which primarily relied on etymological comparisons -- some ludicrous, some interesting. This sort of thing is familiar in many cultures -- e.g., I Ching studies in China, Vedanta studies in India, and Kabbalism in medieval Europe -- and seems especially associated with the esoteric interpretation of sacred texts. Cratylus is identified as a Heraclitean and it is thus reasonable to reinterpret his statements in terms of what we know of Heraclitus' thought. That way we can reconstruct what Cratylus might have said, and give the doctrine that Plato is arguing against a better advocate than Plato did. Some of Heraclitus' fragments do use the etymological method expounded by Cratylus, and Heraclitus' priestly background may have included exegetical training. Since much of it makes little sense to someone who doesn't read Greek, the Cratylus dialogue hasn't played a very big role in the history of philosophy. It is usually rather perfunctorily read to be an argument about whether names are natural or conventional, and Cratylus is normally taken to be arguing the easily-refuted case that names are natural. Without going into the examples in the dialogue itself, this view can be exemplified in a claim that the words "cat" and "bat" for the respective creature are correct because there's something about "c" appropriate to cats and something about "b" appropriate to bats. This method, while ludicrous and unworkable as a general theory of language, is commonly used by religious scholars as an exegetical tool. Charles Kahn's study of the Cratylus concludes that the actual goal of the dialogue was not to decide whether language is conventional or natural, but to show that "the study of words is not and cannot be of any use at all in discovering the nature of things". And in particular to show that while "the study of names suggests that all things are in motion or in flux... in fact there must be fixed and immutable objects (namely, the Forms) if knowledge and discourse are to be possible at all" (p. 153). Like all founders, Plato looks both to the past and to the future. He is a philosopher of order, but he lived in an unruly, murderous world, and his writings are such a chaotic mess of arguments from varying points of view that there often is no scholarly consensus about exactly what it is that he was trying to say. He pointed the way toward an articulate, systematic philosophy, but in his own writings you can't always tell whether he's talking about logic, metaphysics, proto-science, political theory, mystical theology, or all five at the same time. The Theory of Forms points the way to a precise, clear, decontextualized, systematic, "thin" discourse, but his own writings are about as "thick" as any philosopher's have ever been. At the root of Plato's philosophy, I am convinced, was an attempt to attain political order by finding and describing political truths as unambiguous and unquestionable as statements of mathematics or physical fact. Instead of the endless sophistical, sometimes-lethal wrangling about immediate political questions characteristic of Athens, Plato wanted to find political truths which would make possible the orderly resolution of political questions by people who understand them. The flux of language that Plato wishes to exclude is specifically political history. Plato's political thought makes use of terms such as "virtue", "justice", etc. which all have histories. Whenever he used one of these terms, it was always possible for an interlocuter to cite usages of the word in Hesiod, Homer, or other earlier authors which did not agree with Plato's concept. By declaring that names are arbitrary (along with explaining that the poets are mostly wrong about things), Plato is able to disengage his own concept of justice from the history of the word "justice". When he talks about justice, he is using an existing word to indicate a Form knowable by reason, and earlier uses of the word are irrelevant. He can do this by declaring that the Forms are real and (in some sense) things, and that they are knowable by definition. While one might want to say that the old definitions of justice were imperfect or incomplete actualizations of the Form justice, the way that particular dogs or beds are imperfect or incomplete actualizations of the dog Form or the bed Form which set the standards for dogs and beds, that doesn't seem to work. Because by Platonic standards the justice and virtue spoken of by Homer are not just imperfect or incomplete actualizations of justice or virtue. They aren't justice or virtue at all, but rather injustice and baseness. The relationship between the Forms of dogs and beds and actual kickable dogs and beds seems different, and much less problematic, than the relation between the Form of justice and the supposed actualizations of "justice": it seems that during much of history the Form of justice has not been not perceptibly actualized at all. Actual "justice" is at least partly unjust, whereas actual dogs are imperfect representations of dogginess, but still all dog and nothing but dog. Something similar may be at work in Plato's dealing with comparatives. In one place it is said that Simmias "participates in tallness in comparison to A, but participates in shortness in comparison to B." It would seem more economical and more useful to have a tall-short continuum, on which everyone simultaneously participates in tallness and shortness, and on which some people are more-short and less-tall, and others less-short and more-tall. (This is, in fact, the Chinese Taoist solution). But applied to moral questions this would bring up the problem that everyone is by definition either more-good and less-bad, or more-bad and less-good, which runs the risk of leading to some of the same relativizing and historicizing dilemmas that Plato was specifically trying to avoid. (This is discussed further in "The Heap"). Thus, while names are arbitrary and conventional in Plato, the things named have definite natures and are not arbitrary or conventional, but are given and the same for everyone. Granted that the Ideas are a major step in the way toward understanding of natural kinds such as chemical elements or biological species, and granted Plato's goal of finding objective realities to constrain the unruly impulsiveness of Greek political life, and granted the appeal of the definite answers like those given by the methods of geometry to anyone wanting to find a basis for political order, it still seems quite doubtful that there actually is an objective Idea of justice the way there might be an objective Idea of a dog or a bed. And as a result, the history of the word "justice" tells you something about Justice in a way that the history of the word "dog" does not tell you anything about dogs. In point of fact, actual governments are not rationally based, but historically or traditionally based -- the the case of the U.S., on the Constitution, the common law, and statute law. In the real world, rational argument about questions of justice is indeed possible, but only if it defers to tradition in the courtroom and in Congress. And while rational justifications can be constructed within our traditional political and legal systems, none of them does more than to slightly reinforce the intrinsic persuasiveness of the system as it exists as a brute fact. Our system of government isn't based on the reasons underlying our system, but on the widespread reflexive acceptance of the unexplained system itself. Contrary to Plato's wish, the fateful absoluteness of social actions and decisions is not grounded on reasons as absolute as the decisions, but on historical customs and conventions. As a result, we cannot know the answers to social ("normative") questions the way we know questions of ahistorical scientific fact. And Cratylus can be seen as an ancestor, not only of culture critics such as Nietzsche (who had his own history of the word "virtue") or for a more recent example Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (writing about the history of word "representation" in all its contexts), but also of the legal scholars who rule our lives an the basis of conventional precedents tracing back to the Norman Conquest.
Heraclitus (Kahn, 1979) "In the Eleatic conception of language, names typically express a false or mistaken view of reality. Heraclitus is closer the the standard archaic view reflected in Aeschylus, that names are "truly" given..... and hence that there are truths expressed in them for whoever knows how to read the meaning. This view gives rise to the allegorical interpretation of divine names that is developed in the Cratylus and even more systematically in the Stoics" (Kahn, 1979, p. 201). Heraclitus' complete surviving work consists of 125 fragments (many only 4 or 5 words long and the longest about 75 words) totaling about ten pages of Greek text. Reading these fragments requires the same kind of deep reading that he advocated for all study. Heraclitus looks for hidden truths: e.g."Nature loves to hide" (x), "The hidden attunement is better than the obvious one" (lxxx). "The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither declares not conceals, but gives a sign" (xxxiii). The Delphic oracles (like Norse and Mongol oracles) spoke in riddles requiring a deep or close reading, and in the few fragments we have Heraclitus often "goes behind" the overt meaning of words, via puns or a historical reading: "The name of the bow is life (ß???); its work is death" (lxxix: based on an archaic word for "bow"); The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus [name of life, ????? o??µa] (based on an archaic genitive form of "Zeus": cxviii, pp. 267-71). This fragment comes very close to the kind of hermeneutic reading of the past that we see in Nietzsche et al: "If it were not for these things, they would not have known the name of Justice" (????? o??µa: lxix, p. ). "They" means people generally; "these things" means legal cases, the crimes or offenses leading to them, and the punishments which they impose. In ancient Greek as in English, "justice" means both "righteousness, correctness", etc., and "the investigation, judgement, and punishment of crime". Heraclitus uses the fact that the Greek word has these two meanings to point to the fact that the Greeks' noble ideals of perfect Justice can historically be traced back to the courts where criminal offenses and violations of order were dealt with: in other words, that only from injustice can we know Justice, or even that our idea of Justice is an artifact and creation of the punishment of injustice. Cratylus (Jowett tr.): (An etymologically-sophisticated translation of Cratylus is devoutly to be desired.) Socrates: "[T]he primeval givers of names were undoubtedly like too many of our modern philosophers, who, in their search after the nature of things, are always getting dizzy from constantly going round and round, and then they imagine that the world is going round and round and moving in all directions; and this appearance, which arises out of their own internal condition, they suppose to be a reality of nature; they think that there is nothing stable or permanent, but only flux and motion, and that the world is always full of every sort of motion and change..... (411 b, p. 73) In 412d (pp. 73-2) the Greek words for "wisdom" (phronesis), "judgement" (gnome), "knowledge" (episteme), "wisdom" (sophia), "justice" (dikaiosune), etc., are etymologized (sometimes fancifully, sometimes reasonably), all leading to odd interpretations relating these terms to motion, sexual reproduction, etc. At a later point (437, p. 102) different etymologies are given with contrary, more honorable interpretations. Socrates conclusion is not that the latter etymologies are better, but that this method ultimately is useless, since he also shows that certain words for bad things are etymologically connected to words for good things, which for Socrates is impossible. As always with Plato, our desire or need for a certain kind of knowledge is taken as evidence that that knowledge is attainable, and by extension, that behind the messy world we see is a more real world which is by definition intelligible: "[N]or can we say, Cratylus, that there is any knowing at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding." (440, p. 105). But the dialogue ends inconclusively, with Cratylus unconvinced, and perhaps a Straussian reading of Plato would tell us that Plato intends to leave the question genuinely open.
Bibliography Cornford, F. M., Plato and Parmenides, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Jowett, B. (tr.) Cratylus, in The Dialogues of Plato, Oxford, 1953. Kahn Charles H. Language and ontology in the Cratylus. In Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek philosophy presented to Gregory Vlastos. Edited by Lee, Edward N., Mourelatos, Alexander, and Rorty, Richard. Assen: Van Gorcum 1973. pp. 152-176 Kahn, Charles H., The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Cambridge, 1979. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, The Concept of Representation, California, 1978. Wheelwright, Philip, Heraclitus, Princeton, 1959. Cratylus Wiki (cites this page!) :-) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Cratylus
Plato's
Cratylus, translated and introduced by Jowett
|