ΚΡΑΤΥΛΟΣ
H.N. Fowler (Loeb, 1926)
Plato · H.N. Fowler (Loeb, 1926)
Scene: no dramatic setting
The Cratylus debates whether the correctness of names is natural — words somehow fitting the things they name — or merely a matter of human convention (the nature-versus-custom question applied to language). Socrates spins out a dizzying series of etymologies, deriving the names of gods and concepts from their supposed meanings.
Behind the wordplay lies a serious point: names are tools that image reality, but they are unreliable guides to it, and knowledge must finally rest not on words but on the Forms themselves.
The Platonic dialogue on the correctness of names sets the view that names belong to things by nature against the view that they hold only by convention. Socrates, examining a long series of etymologies, suggests that names may image the things they name — yet warns that one cannot learn the truth of things from names alone, but must study the things themselves.
For the later Platonists the dialogue was a charter for the philosophical reading of the divine names, and its play of etymologies fed directly into the Neoplatonic theology of the gods.
From the Plato Scroll Encyclopedia · open this entry in the reader
Hermogenes: Here is Socrates; shall we take him as a partner in our discussion?
Cratylus: If you like.
Hermogenes: Cratylus, whom you see here, Socrates, says that everything has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and that a name is not whatever people call a thing by agreement, just a piece of their own voice applied to the thing, but that there is a kind of inherent correctness in names, which is the same for all men, both Greeks and barbarians. So I ask him whether his name is in truth Cratylus, and he agrees that it is. And what is Socrates’ name? I said. Socrates, said he. Then that applies to all men, and the particular name by which we call each person is his name? And he said, Well, your name is not Hermogenes, even if all mankind call you so.
Hermogenes: Now, though I am asking him and am exerting myself to find out what in the world he means, he does not explain himself at all; he meets me with dissimulation, claiming to have some special knowledge of his own about it which would, if he chose to speak it out clearly, make me agree entirely with him. Now if you could interpret Cratylus’s oracular speech, I should like to hear you; or rather, I should like still better to hear, if you please, what you yourself think about the correctness of names.
Socrates: Hermogenes, son of Hipponicus, there is an ancient saying that knowledge of high things is hard to gain; and surely knowledge of names is no small matter. Now if I had attended Prodicus’s fifty-drachma course of lectures, after which, as he himself says, a man has a complete education on this subject, there would be nothing to hinder your learning the truth about the correctness of names at once; but I have heard only the one-drachma course, and so I do not know what the truth is about such matters. However, I am ready to join you and Cratylus in looking for it. But as for his saying that Hermogenes is not truly your name, I suspect he is making fun of you; for perhaps he thinks that you want to make money and fail every time. But, as I said, it is difficult to know such things. We must join forces and try to find out whether you are right, or Cratylus.
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The Athenian who turned Socratic conversation into a written philosophy and founded the Academy.
Plato was born around 428 BCE into a wealthy and politically prominent Athenian family; through his mother Perictione the family traced kinship to the lawgiver Solon, and his relatives Critias and Charmides were among the oligarchs of the Thirty. A late tradition says his given name was Aristocles and that 'Plato' — from the word for 'broad' — was a nickname. He grew up during the long agony of the Peloponnesian War and came of age amid the violence and disillusion that followed Athens' defeat.
Plato · H.N. Fowler (Loeb, 1926). Each edition has its page, the reader and a plain-text file:
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