Plato’s Cratylus often frustrates. Some have dismissed it as frivolous; surveys and handbooks blithely assert its importance while disdaining serious engagement; and scholars have fallen time and again into controversies over fruitless and ill-framed questions. Most telling is the widespread disagreement over its purport. Does Plato come down, finally, on the side of nature or convention, or both, or neither? Rachel Barney’s book, a revision of her Princeton doctoral thesis (1996), is a focused and sensible study of this difficult dialogue. She claims no single “wonder-working key” (p. 3), but instead explores the Cratylus carefully and from a variety of angles, avoiding commonplace and facile antitheses (such as Scherz oder Ernst?).
B.’s exposition follows the order of Plato’s text, from the initial conventionalist argument, through several versions of naturalism (names as tools, the etymological showpieces, the mimesis theory of names), to the return of convention and the dialogue’s conclusion. Two final chapters move beyond the Cratylus : the first deals with the seventh letter and the second with the account of false statement in the Sophist. ( Sophist 261d1-262e2, which deals with the composition of
The topic of the Cratylus might initially seem remote from the concerns that many readers are likely to associate with Plato—the Republic‘s search for an adequate definition of justice, or the epistemological investigations of the Theaetetus. B. provides some valuable help in situating the Cratylus in the larger context of Plato’s philosophical work. First, the Cratylus occupies a unique place in what she calls the “project of the strict sense”: the attempt, common both to the early “definitional” dialogues and to a number of later works, to establish how some critical term—such as ‘courage’, ‘friendship’, or ‘virtue’—should be used, and in exactly what it is to be held to consist. B. argues that “Plato’s investigation of names in the Cratylus should be understood both as an instance of the project of the strict sense, parallel to works like the Statesman, and as groundwork for the project as a whole” (p. 15). In other words, Plato undertakes a general investigation of what constitutes the right use of names (e.g., ‘courage’), and at the same time he investigates a specific name—the term ‘name’ (
B. points also to connections between the Cratylus and Plato’s political thought. Naming has serious consequences and when done badly can lead to serious confusion and to wrong action—as in the famous Thucydidean account of the perversion of words during the Corcyrean conflict (3.82.4). This is a valuable (and, no doubt, timely) observation, and one which certainly merits further study. We might profitably compare the essay on the “Right Use of Names” ( zheng ming) in the Confucian Xunzi (ca. 310-ca. 210 B.C.E). This is a lucid and intriguing analysis of naming that happens to be embedded in an important text of Confucian moral philosophy. We can keenly appreciate the relation between ethics and the study of names when we examine some of the fallacies discussed by Xunzi: “‘To be insulted is not disgraceful’, ‘The sage does not love himself’, ‘Killing robbers is not killing people’, these (claims) confound names by confusion in the use of names. If one tests them by the purpose of having names and observes which alternative applies generally, one can prevent these confusions” (22.29).1
Perhaps the most innovative feature of B.’s monograph is her interpretation of Socrates’ etymologizing as an “agonistic display” (pp. 60 ff.). About half the Cratylus is devoted to these etymologies, which have typically elicited scorn or amusement from modern critics.2 Clearly an interpreter of Plato is obliged to account in some way for the etymologies rather than merely writing them off. B.’s insight is that the etymological section is in fact a competitive performance, an
Socrates moves beyond etymology when he arrives at what B. calls “the third stage of naturalism”—that is, the mimetic account of how names function. The etymologist explains one name in terms of others; but those names in turn become explananda, and the question of where to stop becomes urgent. At a certain point the etymologist feels the need to posit prime names—
Ultimately Socrates retreats from naturalism; he declares, somewhat cryptically, “we must also bring to bear this vulgar thing, convention, on the correctness of names” (435c5-6; B.’s translation). As
B.’s penetrating and sustained study of the Cratylus will be useful to any serious student of Plato or of ancient Greek language science. She concentrates on philosophical argument, yet she does not overlook the literary aspects of Plato’s dialogue (see, e.g., her discussion of the significance of the words
This volume is generally well-edited and produced. I note only a few gremlins, harmless enough (“Deveni” for “Derveni,” p. 53 n. 11; “Middlestrass” [!] for “Mittelstrass” in the index). The index also suffers from some annoying omissions (no entries for “Diodorus Cronus” or “Wittgenstein”).
Notes
1. Many interesting parallels and contrasts could be drawn between the Cratylus and Xunzi. A. C. Yu, ” Cratylus and Xunzi on Names” (in S. Shankman and S. W. Durrant, eds., Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons, SUNY Press, 2002), is a start, but leaves many important points untouched. For more general background concerning Xunzi’s essay on names, see the discussions of C. Harbsmeier (J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7.1, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998, pp. 321-6) and P. R. Goldin ( Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi, Openr Court, 1999, ch. 4).
2. Thus, for instance, W. Sidney Allen: “each word is derived from two or more component words, no distinction being drawn between stem and inflectional endings: the only rule is that the first part of the first component, the last part of the last, and at least one letter of the middle components must be represented in the word under analysis” (“Ancient Ideas on the Origin and Development of Language,” Transactions of the Philological Society 81:35-60 (1948), 54). One must bear in mind that Socrates engages in etymology elsewhere in Plato: see e.g. the derivation of
3. The theory of such names — otherwise called
4. B. quotes an amusing passage from Orwell, but she overlooks a number of other contemporaries (more or less) in whom these ideas turn up. First and foremost there is R. Paget’s Human Speech: Some Observations, Experiments, and Conclusions as to the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Possible Improvement of Human Speech (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930). Paget explicitly mentions Plato, in connection with his theory of oral gestures. Today this material is enjoying a lively resurgence: see e.g., D.F. Armstrong, W.C. Stokoe, and S.E. Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). Nor is phonosemantics dead and buried: see the labor amoris of Margaret Magnus, Bibliography of Phonosemantics.
5. For a quick survey of some disparate positions, see J.E. Joseph, Limiting the Arbitrary: Linguistic Naturalism and its Opposites in Plato’s Cratylus and Modern Theories of Language, John Benjamins, 2000, pp. 8-9.
6. One might compare the more developed linguistic pessimism found in Augustine’s De magistro. If names accurately reproduced reality, they would reveal their own meaning. But clearly this is not the case: “cum enim mihi signum datur, si nescientem me invenerit, cuius rei signum sit, docere me nihil potest, si vero scientem, quid disco per signum?” (33).
7. B. briefly notes (p. 101) that Hippias must have been among these experts (see esp. Hipp. Maj. 285c7-d2). I think more might be said about the the content of their teachings.