Cratylus

This will be my final Plato for the foreseeable future: I wanted familiarity with his major works, and I have that now. Cratylus is weird to modern readers because it considers a problem people haven't thought about in a long time and it honestly appears absurd to us today: the nature of naming, if people are named according to their nature or simply by convention? Most of us would pick the latter, and rightly so. The obvious problem with taking the former perspective is that naming a child by its nature requires some omniscience on the part of the namer. We can't figure out the nature of newborns.

Half of this dialogue is an exercise in deriving the meaning of the names of Greek gods, seasons, et cetera. While this was mostly boring, I found this gem -

So, if [Hades] is to bind them [people in the underworld] with the strongest of shackles, rather than holding them by force, he must, it seems, bind them with some sort of desire.

Later, when considering the problem of naming as imitation, Socrates seems to derive the logic behind one of my favourite paintings, René Magritte's The Treachery of Images:

Suppose some god didn’t just represent your color and shape the way painters do, but made all the inner parts like yours, with the same warmth and softness, and put motion, soul, and wisdom like yours into them—in a word, suppose he made a duplicate of everything you have and put it beside you. Would there then be two Cratyluses or Cratylus and an image of Cratylus?

Ceci n'est pas un Cratylus? Pardon my French.

“Cratylus” challenges the reader to consider thoughtful questions about the relationship between words and objects while stimulating deeper reflection on how language functions in everyday life. If you are interested in philosophy or linguistics this dialogue has some valuable insights that make this work a worthwhile addition to your reading list.

Por dónde empezar.
No le doy una estrella porque soy considerada y entiendo la falta de conocimiento sobre el tema que había en esa época, pero joder, pocas verdades hay escritas en ese libro, pocas etimologías de las que Platón propone resolver son correctas. Solo se ha basado en el criterio de similitud lo cual no siempre funciona en lingüística (existe la homonimia y tal). Por otra parte, el lenguaje es arbitrario y convencional, el signo no está motivado por el significante, cero relación. Una cosa que me ha cabreado bastante es que para los fenómenos para los cuales no tenía explicación, simplemente los despachaba como "bárbaros", es decir, ajenos a la lengua griega. Denotando una ignorancia inmensa ya que esas lenguas "bárbaras" son variantes dialectales del griego, lenguas que descienden de la misma familia griego-armenia o indoeuropea o simplemente lenguas de otras familias que se han influido mutuamente por la convivencia.
Una sensación que he tenido con este diálogo es que Platón, inseguro por un conocimiento que no tiene, pero sabedor de que se le conoce como una evidencia y, además, un ególatra, se esconde detrás de la figura de Sócrates para exponer su conocimiento (o falta de este), su opinión sobre el tema, y que se le exima de cualquier responsabilidad ya que, al final, él solo se ha ocupado de transmitir las palabras o ideas de Sócrates.
En fin, se le da mucha importancia a señores que por "pensar" en algo se creen que tienen conocimiento sobre ello.

aula de linguística :)

The topic of Cratylus is the correctness of names – and hence the criteria that should determine the correct choice of name. On one side, Cratylus argues that there is a “correctness of name for each thing, one that belongs to it by nature”; on the other, Hermogenes stance is that the correctness of names is determined only by convention and agreement.
I do not believe that the same names could have been attached to quite different object and the same objects given quite different names (extreme conventionalism) because names are given accordingly to the characteristics that we perceive the object to have. Etymology, linguistics, and philology all show us that words are not created in a void.
The bulk of Cratylus is long (and more or less fallacious) etymological explanations of important Greek words. It’s a longwinded quasi-monologue t that can simply skimmed over: on the whole the argument doesn’t bring us much value (Astyanax’s contemporary equivalent would be Remus Lupin, and I think that can sum my entire thesis: Plato forgets about human agency), and on the whole the argument doesn’t bring us much value (that is, value relevant to the current discussion), except as a reminder that names have a history behind them.
Indeed, then, as Socrates-Plato explains, words are not attached in a merely arbitrary way to their objects. Speaking is a human action. A name indeed is a sort of tool, not to “divide things according to their natures” but rather to transmit knowledge. Yet, names are not chosen arbitrarily; there is a history behind each name.
Except, names are not given based on the essence of a thing, but rather on our perception of it. The namegiver did not have to know the thing he was naming, but rather he gave a name based on what he believed the thing to be. Knowledge of its essence is not a requirement for naming. It might be that names cannot aspire to being perfect encapsulation of their objects’ essences, but they don’t have to try to do so in the first place. Rather, the naming is a process entirely human, in that it is done for humans by humans based on human’s perceptions.
Names are given by people – things don’t need names to exist.
I do agree that “no name belongs to a particular thing by nature” (extreme naturalism) – while it is a very romantic notion (a true name to be called upon, that knowing the true name of things gives you power over them) which might find some ground in psychology (e.g. the benefit that comes with getting a diagnosis, or recognizing that abuse is indeed abuse), it is not true for nature: Nature does not care.
[a draft of my arguments goes like this: (1) Mary Oliver’s poem that has a fox (or is it a turtle?) in it; (2) the research on bilingualism shows that people think in concepts; (3) untranslatable words: the same feeling is present whether or not you have a word for it; (4) scientific phenomena: they exist even before they get discovered and names and they will go on existing even if we don’t understand them]
This dialogue belongs to the early middle phase of Plato, the phase in which he develops his theory of the Forms – you might see reminiscences of that in my argument as well and would not be wrong. Things might be “by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature”, but Names are nor Things nor the essence of the Things.
Anthropomorphic gods might “call themselves by true [names]”, but that’s only because we are defining them as if they were human. If the Thing, and hence the God, is not human – will it call himself with a name? [The fox says no].

Naturally, and somewhat ironically considering the content of the dialogue, this would be a much more mind-blowing read if one spoke Greek. However, considering how much of the English language comes from the Greek routes, it is 100% worth it to wade through Socrates' etymological flexing. Anyway, all of that is less important than the spectacular discussion concerning the meaning of language, the difference between the sign and the signified, the possibility of truly knowing a thing, and the question of whether there are static realities behind the world of motion or not. Socrates, or Plato rather, uses the particulars of an argument about language to navigate bigger questions about the universals and the foundational assumptions of epistemology. In some ways, Plato actually foreshadows Kant's view that one is unable to see outside of their own sensory perception into the actual being of something else. Plato is making the point that, like Kant's Noumena, the thing in itself that is being named might not be reachable or containable through our powers of language; yet, those powers of language are all we have to attempt reaching it. Like all the best Socratic dialogues, we are left without a definite answer. We are fortunate to get numerous satirical and roasting comments from Socrates about Pythagoras and the school of etymologists. Remember: exploring language with Socrates is only the 2nd best way to learn - not as good as taking the special class.

The Cratylus is not one of Plato’s most read dialogues. It’s kind of a shame, because it addresses two fundamental questions:

What is the relationship between language and reality?
Is reality constant and unchanging or is it in constant flux (the position attributed to Heraclitus, and represented in the dialogue by Cratylus)?

The original date of the dialogue is in some dispute, and also the order in which it fits in Plato’s “middle dialogues”. The maturity of Plato’s thoughts seem to definitely place it well before The Republic, also one of the middle dialogues.

The dialogue opens with opposing positions taken by Socrates’ two companions here, Cratylus and Hermogenes. Hermogenes states Cratylus’ position, “Cratylus says, Socrates, that there is a correctness of name for each thing, one that belongs to it by nature.” Hermogenes’ own position is a contrary one, “I believe that any name you give a thing is its correct name.” “No name,” he says, “belongs to a particular thing by nature, but only because of the rules and usage of those who establish the usage and call it by that name.”

That gives us the crux of the argument to come. Call it conventionalism vs. essentialism.

Socrates’ first move in the dialogue is to establish that things do have natures. It’s a quick argument, a rebuttal to Protagoras’ relativism, which Hermogenes defends. The argument turns on whether there can be facts of the matter, e.g., that there are wise men and foolish men, as opposed to everything being left to the judgement of each individual. You could object that the argument is too quick, that that formulation of Protagoras’ relativism is extreme and that other positions are possible.

There will be other arguments in favor of essentialism as the dialogue goes on. I don’t think that everything depends on this rejection of Protagoras’ relativism.

Socrates goes on to argue that speaking, like other things, has a nature, and that it is possible to distinguish speaking correctly, i.e., according to its nature, from speaking incorrectly. Speaking correctly is speaking truly.

I’ll skip a bit ahead, since I imagine you can see the direction of the argument. Speaking correctly will imply speaking truly of the natures of things, in particular naming them in accordance with their natures. Socrates says, “We cannot name things as we choose; rather, we must name them in the natural way for them to be named and with the natural tool for naming them.”

The “tools” Socrates invokes here are rules for naming things. “Name-givers” as Socrates will call those who name things, are in a sense legislators, “rule-setters” for how things will be spoken of.

Socrates draws an analogy between name-givers and craftsmen in general, saying that name-givers are a rare sort of craftsman, but like other craftsmen, they are skilled at their trade. In particular they “know how to embody in sounds and syllables the name naturally suited to each thing.”

Also, just as a blacksmith may fashion drills that differ in their details, so long as the drills they make are made correctly, i.e., in accord with the nature of drills, so might different name-givers, working in different languages, fashion different names for the same things, so long as they accord with the natures of the things they name. This accounts for differences in names from language to language.

The next question Socrates takes up is what it means for a name to accord with the nature of the thing it names. He does this through a long series of etymological arguments, tracing back from the names of gods, human virtues and vices, truth, and knowledge (the translator, C.D.C. Reeve gives a nice summary of the categories of names Socrates covers in his introduction to the book).

But before going on to that, note that what Plato (via Socrates) treats as a “name” is a broader category than what we would call a name. “Names’ include proper nouns, like names of people or places or gods, but also common nouns, names for objects, actions, and attributes. It may also include adjectives, like “good.”

A couple of examples helps. The word for gods, “theos”, derives from “thein”, meaning to run, because the gods (originally likely the planets, sky, and earth) were in constant motion. “Daimons”, the name for the first humans, derives from “daimon”, denoting wisdom.

Often Socrates notes that the original names for such things have changed over time, having been “covered over” with embellishments or “to make them sound good in the mouth.” Those changes amount to corruptions of the original names, and a loss of the wisdom contained in those original names. Etymologies like the ones he demonstrates here can uncover those original names.

The names themselves are not just neutral tags for the things they name, they contain descriptive content, e.g., that the gods are constantly in motion. As another example, Socrates says of the name for the good, “[The good] always does away with (luei) any attempt to let motion end, making it unceasing and immortal. In my view, it is for this reason that the good is said to be ‘lusiteloun’, because it does away with (luon) an end (telos) to motion.”

When we unpack the “meanings” of names etymologically we understand better what the things, e.g., the good, are. So the etymologies aren’t just historical reconstructions, they are uncoverings of wisdom contained in the “original names” of things.

This is at least somewhat borne out by what Socrates says about the name for names themselves. He says, “Well , onoma (‘name’) seems to be a compressed statement which says: ‘this is a being for which there is a search.’” He then goes on to connect this notion of a search to the etymologies of truth (Aletheia), falsehood (Pseudos), and being (on or ousia).

But there is a tension here. If these names are well chosen by the name-givers, they will contain wisdom about the nature of the things they are names for. If they are well-chosen. And although Socrates speaks reverently of the name-givers, he doesn’t grant them infallibility.

That tension will come to a head toward the end of the dialogue. So far, the etymologies have traced names to other names, the name for gods to the name for running, etc. But etymology has to come to an end someplace, with some names that are elemental or primary.

Plato finds the relationship between these primary names and what they name in “imitation.” “It seems to follow that a name is a vocal imitation of what it imitates, and that someone who imitates something with his voice names what he imitates.”

But it’s not just any kind of imitating — it is imitation of the “essence” of the thing (e.g., not an imitation of the sound it makes or its shape). Naming seems to consist in imitating the being or essence of things via letters and syllables.

Now the job becomes one of describing in turn what the imitation consists in, how letters and syllables can imitate the essences of things (and whether or not they do so well or correctly). Since these primary names are the basis for all other derivative ones, the correctness of those primary names is the basis for the correctness (and embedded wisdom) of all names.

As an example, Socrates presents the letter “r” as a name-giver’s tool for copying (or imitating) motion, as in “rhoe" (“flow”) and in other examples of words naming motion.

It seems to be both the sound of the letter and the way it is produced by the tongue that are the basis for the imitating. “He [the name-giver] saw, I suppose, that the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in pronouncing this letter, and that’s probably why he used it in these names.” He repeats the same point about the motion of the tongue to describe how other letters (“i”, “d”, . . . ) are apt tools to imitate other qualities, like smallness or smoothness or a blowing outwards of something.

This brings us back to the tension I mentioned above. If the correctness of these primary names provides the basis for the correctness of all other (driver or compound) names, and if that correctness consists in their properly imitating the nature of the things they name, are those primary names in fact correct?

Socrates rightly points out that the name-givers must have had knowledge of the things they named independently of their names. They had to know the things in order to create names for them in the first place. So they knew them directly, foreshadowing the direct knowledge of Forms he develops in The Republic.

Did the name-givers create correct primary names?

I think the dialogue actually ends with that question still open. Cratylus never gives up his defense of Heraclitus, finding evidence in the prevalence of primary names that connote (or really, “imitate”) motion or change. Socrates offers one final argument against Heraclitus. He argues, among other points, that knowledge in an Heraclitean world would be impossible, because as soon as we gained knowledge of something, it would have changed, and our knowledge would no longer be of the thing. What’s more the thing would no longer be itself. It gets downright Parmenidean at this point, although it does foreshadow again arguments that Plato will make about knowledge and Forms in later dialogues.

The dialogue closes with the promise of future conversations. Socrates gets no final “Certainly so, Socrates” from Cratylus.

To go back to the two fundamental questions:

What is the relationship between language and reality?

Plato’s answer here is really a theory of “names”, where that category is a broad one. But he doesn’t explicitly provide what we would call, in contemporary philosophy, a theory of meaning or even a theory of reference per se. His theory is more one of the history and origin of names. And there his interesting claim is that names “imitate” the things they name, more specifically they imitate the “nature” of those things. Plato doesn’t fully explain what he means by their “nature” here — that’s going to wait for a more fully developed treatment of his theory of Forms, e.g., in The Republic.

The imitation that binds names to things, if they are correctly named, is a likeness between that nature of a thing and the qualities of letters and syllables, the sounds of letters but also even the feel of the letters and syllables in the mouth and on the tongue.

Given this “likeness” between names and the things they name, we can come to know things by knowing their names. However, to do so is to both count on the things being correctly named (i.e., truly imitating the nature of things) and to know things indirectly, rather than directly knowing the natures of things (again something to be developed in Plato’s theory of knowledge and the Forms).

Is reality constant and unchanging or is it in constant flux (the position attributed to Heraclitus, and represented in the dialogue by Cratylus)?

Here I don’t think we get a full answer. As I said, Cratylus leaves the conversation still holding to a Heraclitean position. Socrates has presented several arguments, but he hasn’t proven his case against Cratylus and Heraclitus. The “primary names” give mixed results, some conveying a Heraclitean emphasis on motion and change and others a stop to change (associated with a "d" rather than "r" sound and feel). Both, though, as I said above, are fallible, as the name-givers may have or may not have named the primary things correctly.

Aristotle reports in his Metaphysics that Plato learned about Heraclitus’ thoughts from the real-life Cratylus. So the relationship portrayed in the dialogue has some validity, as may the open question at the end of the dialogue.

Plato’s later development of his theory of Forms and his theory of knowledge (especially in the Theatetus and The Republic) combines Heraclitean insights with his own essentialism, so the open-endedness of the discussion here isn’t all that surprising. It’s like a rehearsal of arguments and positions to come.

Un libro muy importante, precursor de muchas preocupaciones lingüísticas actuales y/o de los últimos tiempos.

(3,5/5)