CRATYLUS
By Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Contents
| INTRODUCTION |
| CRATYLUS |
INTRODUCTION
The Cratylus has always been a source of perplexity to the student of Plato.While in fancy and humour, and perfection of style and metaphysicaloriginality, this dialogue may be ranked with the best of the Platonicwritings, there has been an uncertainty about the motive of the piece, whichinterpreters have hitherto not succeeded in dispelling. We need not supposethat Plato used words in order to conceal his thoughts, or that he would havebeen unintelligible to an educated contemporary. In the Phaedrus and Euthydemuswe also find a difficulty in determining the precise aim of the author. Platowrote satires in the form of dialogues, and his meaning, like that of othersatirical writers, has often slept in the ear of posterity. Two causes may beassigned for this obscurity: 1st, the subtlety and allusiveness of this speciesof composition; 2nd, the difficulty of reproducing a state of life andliterature which has passed away. A satire is unmeaning unless we can placeourselves back among the persons and thoughts of the age in which it waswritten. Had the treatise of Antisthenes upon words, or the speculations ofCratylus, or some other Heracleitean of the fourth century B.C., on the natureof language been preserved to us; or if we had lived at the time, and been“rich enough to attend the fifty-drachma course of Prodicus,” weshould have understood Plato better, and many points which are now attributedto the extravagance of Socrates’ humour would have been found, like theallusions of Aristophanes in the Clouds, to have gone home to the sophists andgrammarians of the day.
For the age was very busy with philological speculation; and many questionswere beginning to be asked about language which were parallel to otherquestions about justice, virtue, knowledge, and were illustrated in a similarmanner by the analogy of the arts. Was there a correctness in words, and werethey given by nature or convention? In the presocratic philosophy mankind hadbeen striving to attain an expression of their ideas, and now they werebeginning to ask themselves whether the expression might not be distinguishedfrom the idea? They were also seeking to distinguish the parts of speech and toenquire into the relation of subject and predicate. Grammar and logic weremoving about somewhere in the depths of the human soul, but they were not yetawakened into consciousness and had not found names for themselves, or terms bywhich they might be expressed. Of these beginnings of the study of language weknow little, and there necessarily arises an obscurity when the surroundings ofsuch a work as the Cratylus are taken away. Moreover, in this, as in most ofthe dialogues of Plato, allowance has to be made for the character of Socrates.For the theory of language can only be propounded by him in a manner which isconsistent with his own profession of ignorance. Hence his ridicule of the newschool of etymology is interspersed with many declarations “that he knowsnothing,” “that he has learned from Euthyphro,” and the like.Even the truest things which he says are depreciated by himself. He professesto be guessing, but the guesses of Plato are better than all the other theoriesof the ancients respecting language put together.
The dialogue hardly derives any light from Plato’s other writings, andstill less from Scholiasts and Neoplatonist writers. Socrates must beinterpreted from himself, and on first r