Plato's Cratylus

The Comedy of Language

S. Montgomery Ewegen

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780253010445
• eBook ISBN: 9780253010513
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Plato's dialogue Cratylus focuses on being and human dependence on words, or the essential truths about the human condition. Arguing that comedy is an essential part of Plato's concept of language, S. Montgomery Ewegen asserts that understanding the comedic is key to an understanding of Plato's deeper philosophical intentions. Ewegen shows how Plato's view of language is bound to comedy through words and how, for Plato, philosophy has much in common with playfulness and the ridiculous. By tying words, language, and our often uneasy relationship with them to comedy, Ewegen frames a new reading of this notable Platonic dialogue.

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, despite this supposed equivalence across tongues, phrasings, and borders—the supposition that these sentences all more or less say the same—none of the above 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

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 ο

ν καὶ Σωκράτει τ

δε 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 an ideal utterly lost to the contingencies of history, though philologists may do their best to speculate upon probable arrangements.¹⁰ In a certain radical sense, then, there is no original to which one could return. Even if we could somehow assure ourselves that we had returned to the original Greek text laid out as Plato had wished it, such a return would in no way relieve us of the labor of translating the text into our own tongues, of interpreting—indeed, one is tempted to say metaphorizing—the Greek words into the words of our “own” language. We are all of us—English, Germans, and French alike—barbarians to the Greeks.¹¹

The second problem is more specific to the Cratylus, and infinitely more abysmal. So many of the words of which the Cratylus is comprised are the very words whose meanings are interrogated within Socrates’ long series of playful etymologies offered within the Cratylus itself. Even if one were somehow to access, across a history of facsimile and linguistic difference, the “original” text of the Cratylus in such a way as to have its unadulterated words immediately at hand, one would still have to analyze the Cratylus in terms of its own rethinking of those words, tracing every instance of them while striving to understand their use in light of the internal etymologies of those terms. One can imagine a scene wherein some scrupulous scholar would set out to accurately trace and record the infinitely complex semantic drift of each of these self-reflexive words, tirelessly striving to present a coherent genealogy of each such word. Yet, such an undertaking would be limitless in scope and Herculean in deed: for without a doubt the very words used to explain one etymology would themselves be words interrogated in another etymology, and so on, and so on.¹² Such an “original” text would thus undermine itself—one is tempted to say “deconstruct” itself—and drag the poor scholar down with it.

Despite all of this, one could argue that even the Greek text more or less says the same as its English, French, and German translations; that, despite all the particular (i.e., material) differences in these phrasings, they all for the most part say the same. Hermogenes rather famously makes this very point within the Cratylus when he, summarizing Cratylus's position, states that “there is a kind of natural correctness [ὀνόματος ὀρθότητα] in names, which is the same for all human beings, both Greeks and Barbarians” (383a; my translation). Whatever the correctness of a name is—and this remains to be seen—it is the same for all of us, according to Hermogenes’ version of Cratylus's position, despite the idioms of our particular languages. Socrates echoes this when he says that the rare and all-important name-giver, like an iron-smith, might embody the look of a name in different materials (i.e., letter and syllables), but that such materials, whether of domestic or foreign origin, will not alter the ιδέα that they embody (390a). With such a picture, the phrasings “shall we let,” “do you want,” “shall we take,” “Sollen wir,” “veux-tu que nous,” and “βούλει” all convey the same idea: they all more or less say the same.

It should be observed that this principle, whether or not it is in the end endorsed by any of the characters of the Cratylus or its author, is the very condition for the possibility of our reading the Cratylus.¹³ Without the supposition, flimsy and groundless as it may be, that the Greek words “say the same” as our English words, any attempt to read or understand the Cratylus (or any other ancient text) would be laughable to the extreme. It is the unspoken principle of translation that the foreign words we translate must more or less say the same as the words into which we translate them, at least to enough of an extent to allow us to enumerate the differences. To refuse this supposition would be to sever oneself from the possibility of community, of a common term in or around which one could commune with an ancient text. In a word, to refuse it would be to refuse a common λόγος, retreating instead into the realm of private and incommensurable λόγοι, if not into absolute silence.

Yet, despite the absolute necessity of supposing a semantic equivalence (without which we would never bother to undertake to read anything at all), none of the above-quoted translations lets the opening of the Cratylus say what it itself wishes to say (though the translation offered by Joe Sachs arguably gets the closest). If it proved to be true that the text itself of the Cratylus wished to say something, then the best translations would be those that let themselves be guided by the text, not so much translating the text as letting themselves be translated by it. The best translations would be those that hold their own wills and wishes in abeyance to the extent possible, thereby letting the words themselves say what they wish to say. However, even such reticent translations would still to a great extent be bound—in manner that is decidedly tragic—to the opinions and wishes of the human beings who constructed them. The best one can do is play at letting oneself be transported by the text to whatever strange place it wishes to take us.

With strict economy Plato has Hermogenes begin the Cratylus:

Βούλει ο

ν καὶ Σωκράτει τ

δε ἀνακοινωσώμεθα τὸν λόγον;

“You wish that we should gather up in common with Socrates here in the λόγος?” (383a; my translation)

The opening question of the Cratylus involves a wish. Hermogenes is asking Cratylus if he wishes (βούλει) for Socrates to join them in the λόγος, in what will prove to be a λόγος about λόγος, an exchange of words concerned with nothing other than words and the possibility of their meaningful exchange. With the immediate mention of βούλομαι (“I wish”) the text is at once oriented toward the operation of human wishing, an operation that will play a decisive role within the philosophical movement of the Cratylus. By questioning Cratylus about whether he wishes to bring Socrates in as a mediator in their discussion, Hermogenes is effectively putting wishing itself into question.

As the first word, βούλομαι should be read carefully in light of the dialogue as a whole. There are many occasions where Plato, for dramatically and philosophically significant reasons, uses the first word of the text to mark or foreshadow what is to come.¹⁴ In the case of the Cratylus, this first instance of βούλομαι, which occurs some seventy-plus times throughout the text, marks at once one of the most significant and most overlooked elements at play in the dialogue. To overlook this i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation
• List of Textual Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 First Words
• 2 Marking the Limits
• 3 A Question of Inheritance
• 4 The Nature of Nature
• 5 Technological Language
• 6 A Homeric Inheritance
• 7 What Words Will
• 8 The Tragedy of Cratylus
• Conclusion: The Comedy of the Cratylus
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index