Cratylus

Summary

The Cratylus is Plato's dialogue on the correctness of names, and the earliest surviving Western treatment of whether words belong to things by nature or by human agreement. Hermogenes, a poor brother of the rich Callias, has been arguing with Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus. Cratylus holds that every thing has a naturally correct name, the same for Greeks and barbarians, and teases Hermogenes that 'Hermogenes' (son of Hermes, god of luck and gain) is not really his name. Hermogenes holds that a name is whatever people agree to call something, as masters rename slaves. Socrates, who jokes that he heard only the one-drachma lecture of the sophist Prodicus, takes up both sides in turn. Against Hermogenes, he argues that if statements can be true or false, so can names, and that if things have stable natures (as against Protagoras' 'man is the measure'), then naming is an action with a right way to perform it. A name is a tool for teaching and for dividing things according to their natures, as a shuttle divides the threads of a web. Tools are made by craftsmen; names are made by a skilled 'legislator' or name-giver, who looks to the ideal form of the name and should work under the direction of the dialectician, the person who knows how to ask and answer. Socrates then launches into a long, increasingly fantastic run of etymologies, which he attributes to a fit of inspiration caught from the soothsayer Euthyphro: names of heroes (Agamemnon, Orestes), gods (Zeus, Hestia, Poseidon, Apollo, Athena, Hermes), the heavens, and moral terms (wisdom, justice, courage). Many of them, he observes, suggest that the original name-givers thought all things in motion, as Heraclitus did, perhaps because the name-givers were dizzy themselves. When the analysis reaches primary names that cannot be broken down, Socrates proposes that letters imitate the essence of things by sound: rho for motion, iota for subtlety, lambda for smoothness. Turning to Cratylus, who welcomes all this, Socrates presses the other way. Names are images, and images can be more or less like what they represent; Cratylus' view that a misapplied name is not a name at all cannot explain false speech. Words like the Greek for 'hard' work despite containing a 'smooth' letter, which shows that custom and convention play a part after all. Finally, if names were given by people who believed in universal flux, we cannot learn the truth of things from names; things must be studied in themselves. And if everything flows, there could be no knowledge, no stable beauty or good. Socrates asks Cratylus not to trust names or the givers of names so far, and Cratylus, unpersuaded, leaves for the country still inclining to Heraclitus.

Plot or Argument

• Nature or convention? Hermogenes states the dispute

  Hermogenes reports Cratylus' claim that names are correct by nature and his own view that all naming is convention and habit. Socrates, recalling Prodicus' fifty-drachma course he could not afford, agrees to examine both (Stephanus 383a-384e).

• True and false names; against Protagoras

  If a statement can be false, so can its smallest part, the name. If what appears to each man were true for him, no one could be wiser than another; since wisdom and folly differ, things have natures of their own, and actions, including speaking and naming, have a natural right way (385a-387d).

• The name as a tool; the name-giver and the dialectician

  As a weaver uses a shuttle made by a carpenter who looks to the form of shuttle, a teacher uses names made by a legislator who looks to the form of name, expressing it in whatever syllables, Greek or foreign. The user of a tool judges it best, so the dialectician should direct the name-maker (387d-391b).

• Etymologies of heroes and gods

  Starting from Homer, Socrates derives Astyanax, Hector, Agamemnon, Tantalus and Zeus, then the gods: Hestia, Cronus, Rhea, Poseidon, Pluto, Apollo (named for music, prophecy, medicine and archery), Athena, Hephaestus and Hermes, all under the 'inspiration of Euthyphro'. Along the way he gives the Orphic reading of soma (body) as sema (tomb) of the soul (391b-408d).

• Names of nature and of virtue: the Heraclitean pattern

  Sun, moon, stars, seasons and then wisdom, understanding, justice, courage, good and evil all yield etymologies of motion and flux. Socrates suggests the name-givers projected their own giddiness onto the world (408d-421c).

• Primary names: letters as imitation

  Compound names resolve into simpler ones, and the simplest must signify by imitating their objects through sound, as gesture imitates. Rho expresses motion, iota fineness, lambda slipperiness, omicron roundness. Socrates calls this account ridiculous yet the best available (421c-427d).

• Cratylus examined: images, falsity and custom

  Cratylus approves everything Socrates has said. Socrates shows that names, as images, admit degrees of likeness; that a perfect copy would be a second Cratylus; that false statements are possible; and that words such as skleros (hard) are understood through custom despite ill-fitting letters (427d-435d).

• Learning from things, not names; against universal flux

  If the first name-givers erred about flux, names cannot be trusted as a path to truth; one must learn from the things themselves. Stable beauty and goodness, and knowledge itself, require something abiding. Cratylus leaves for the country still inclining to Heraclitus (435d-440e).

Characters

• Socrates, questioner

  Mocks his own cheap education, spins etymologies he admits may be inspired nonsense, and turns from attacking pure convention to attacking pure nature.

• Hermogenes, defender of convention

  Son of Hipponicus and brother of the wealthy Callias, but poor himself; candid, willing to learn, and the main respondent for most of the dialogue. He is named among those present at Socrates' death in the Phaedo.

• Cratylus, Heraclitean defender of natural names

  Ironical and oracular at first, then content to agree when Socrates seems to support him; leaves still inclined to Heraclitus. Aristotle reports that Plato knew him in youth.

• Euthyphro (mentioned), soothsayer

  The religious expert of the Euthyphro, from whom Socrates jokingly claims to have caught his etymological 'inspiration'.

• Prodicus and Protagoras (mentioned), sophists

  Prodicus for his paid course on correct names; Protagoras for the doctrine that man is the measure, which Socrates rejects early on.

Lessons

• A name is a tool for dividing the world rightly

  Socrates' central analogy is that a name is an instrument of teaching and distinguishing natures, as a shuttle separates threads. Like any tool, it can be well or badly made, and its best judge is the one who uses it: the dialectician who asks and answers. For students learning grammar and logic, the point is that words are neither arbitrary noises nor magic keys; they serve thought and can be judged by how well they help us see distinctions that are really there.

  • What does the shuttle analogy explain well about language, and where does it break down?
  • Why does Socrates make the dialectician, not the name-giver, the final judge of names?
  • Name a word that helps you see a real distinction, and one that blurs one.

• Etymology: insight, play and the danger of the clever derivation

  The long middle section mixes genuine observations with deliberately extravagant derivations, which Socrates credits to borrowed inspiration and promises to purify himself of the next day. Readers have long disagreed over how serious he is. The lesson for students is to enjoy wordplay while asking what it proves: an attractive derivation may show what the name-givers believed, not what is true.

  • Which of Socrates' etymologies seems most plausible to you, and which most fanciful? Why?
  • Why does Socrates attribute the etymologies to Euthyphro's inspiration rather than to his own reasoning?
  • What is the difference between learning what people believed from a word and learning what is true from it?

• Dizzy philosophers and a world in flux

  Socrates notices that many names seem to encode motion and suggests that their makers, like some contemporary philosophers, were dizzy from going round and round and mistook their own condition for the nature of things. The closing argument draws the consequence: if all things flow, nothing could be known or be beautiful in a stable way. Students meet here the basic Platonic claim that knowledge requires something that abides.

  • How can a person's inner state be mistaken for a fact about the world? Give an example.
  • Why does Socrates think universal flux would make knowledge impossible?
  • Does the Christian claim that God does not change bear on Socrates' argument? Where would you be careful not to read it into Plato?

• Learn from the things themselves

  The dialogue's conclusion is modest but firm: the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names but from the things studied in themselves, and no sensible person will put the education of his mind in the power of names. Socrates sends Cratylus off with the advice to reflect like a man and not accept a doctrine too easily, since he is young and of an age to learn. The ending models how to leave a question open without giving up on truth.

  • In what fields today might people try to settle questions by redefining words rather than examining things?
  • Why does Socrates ask Cratylus to come back and tell him the truth when he finds it, rather than declaring it himself?
  • Hermogenes and Cratylus each held part of the truth. State what each got right.

Context

Greek thinkers of the fifth century BC debated whether customs, laws and words exist by nature (physis) or by convention (nomos). Sophists such as Prodicus taught the correct use of words for a fee, Protagoras made man the measure of all things, and followers of Heraclitus held that everything flows. The Cratylus brings these strands together around a question that also touched religion, since Greek poets and priests often explained the names of gods by etymology. Plato's Socrates treats names as part of the larger problem of how a mind can know a world that changes.

Composition

The date is uncertain and has been placed anywhere from the early middle period to late in Plato's career; the record's 'c. 380s-360s BC' reflects that range. Its themes of Forms, flux and false statement connect it with the Theaetetus and Sophist. Aristotle (Metaphysics I.6) says Plato knew Cratylus and Heraclitean doctrine in his youth. The library's text is Benjamin Jowett's translation with his long introduction on the origins of language, from The Dialogues of Plato (3rd ed., 1892), reproduced from Project Gutenberg #1616. Stephanus numbers cited here come from standard editions; the attached text does not print them.

Reception

Aristotle's On Interpretation defines the name as significant 'by convention', siding with Hermogenes, and his Metaphysics reports that Cratylus in the end would only move his finger, having concluded one could not step into the same river even once. Stoic etymology, Varro and later Isidore of Seville's Etymologies continued the project of reading truth from word origins. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine and On the Teacher treat words as signs and ask how they teach, in debt to this debate. Modern linguistics since Saussure's principle of the arbitrariness of the sign has generally sided with convention, while philosophers continue to discuss natural kinds and reference with the Cratylus in view. The dialogue was included in the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 6.

Comparisons

• Categories

  Aristotle opens with words used equivocally, univocally and derivatively and then sorts 'expressions which are in no way composite' into ten kinds; he classifies what words signify without the Cratylus' question of whether names are naturally correct.

• Theaetetus

  The Theaetetus works out at length the Heraclitean and Protagorean positions that the Cratylus raises and dismisses briefly, and ends, like the Cratylus, by arguing that a world in total flux would leave nothing to say or know.

• Sophist

  The Cratylus raises the puzzle of how false speech is possible and leaves it unsettled; the Sophist solves it by analysing a statement as a weaving of name and verb, a step beyond the Cratylus' focus on single names.

• On Christian Doctrine

  Augustine distinguishes natural and given signs and treats words as conventional signs serving the understanding of Scripture; he shares Socrates' conclusion that one must know the things signified, not just the signs.

• Euthydemus

  In the Euthydemus, sophists exploit ambiguous words to win arguments, and Socrates again mentions Prodicus on the correct use of names; it shows in comic action the misuse of language the Cratylus analyses.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The Cratylus is not about medicine, but it records several Greek medical and religious assumptions in passing. Socrates compares the etymologist to a physician who recognises the same drug under different colours and smells; he cites physicians' names (Iatrocles, Acesimbrotus) as names sharing a meaning; he explains Apollo's name partly through the purifications, fumigations and washings used by doctors and diviners to make a person pure 'both in body and soul'; and he reports the Orphic view of the body (soma) as the tomb (sema) or prison of the soul. The closing image of a world that 'has a running at the nose' uses catarrh as a figure for universal flux. These are useful for historians of how medicine, purification and religion overlapped in classical Greece, not as statements of Plato's own medical views.

• Stephanus 394a-c

  The physician recognises one drug under different disguises; names for a physician such as Iatrocles and Acesimbrotus share a meaning despite different letters.

  Pharmacology Poisons Physicians Doctors
• Stephanus 400b-c

  Etymologies of psyche (soul) and soma (body), including the Orphic view of the body as tomb or prison where the soul pays a penalty.

  Mind Body
• Stephanus 404e-405c

  Apollo's four powers (music, prophecy, medicine, archery); the purgations, fumigations and lustral washings of doctors and diviners aim at purity of body and soul.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
• Stephanus 440c-d

  Socrates refuses to believe that all things leak like a pot or that the world suffers from a running at the nose.

  Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Each student chooses an English word, traces its real etymology in a dictionary, then invents a Socratic 'inspired' etymology for it. Read both aloud and discuss what makes the false one persuasive.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation when Cratylus returns from the country, as Socrates asked, to report what he has found. Has Heraclitus won him over, or has he begun to doubt?

• Essay

  Socrates says a name is a tool for 'distinguishing natures'. Write an essay on whether that is true of a word that has changed its meaning in your lifetime.

Further Reading

• Theaetetus, Plato

  Plato's fullest examination of Protagoras and Heraclitean flux as theories of knowledge.

• On Interpretation, Aristotle

  Defines names and verbs as significant by convention.

• On the Teacher (De Magistro), Augustine of Hippo

  A dialogue with his son Adeodatus on whether words can teach anything without knowledge of the things they signify.

• Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure

  The modern statement of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.

• Plato's Cratylus, David Sedley

  A scholarly study (Cambridge, 2003) arguing that Plato took many of the etymologies seriously.