Plato's Cratylus by Ewegen S. Montgomery

Author:Ewegen, S. Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

if I remembered Hesiod's genealogy, with some still higher ancestors than these that he mentions, I would not stop going over how rightly their names apply to them until I had tried out this wisdom that has just now so suddenly come over me, I know not from what source, to see what it will produce, and whether, after all, it fails to make it through or not. (396c–d; Sachs)

If Socrates further remembered Hesiod's Theogony, he would recall that Uranus was killed by his son Cronus. In accordance with his mother Gaia's wishes, Cronus one day took a sickle and castrated his father, throwing his member onto the earth and into the sea; it was out of the froth of this severed member that lovely Aphrodite was born (Theogony, 154–210, 453–506).34 Thus, yet again, the name to which Socrates refers is one that emerges against a backdrop of the murdering of the father, the disrupting of inheritance. This example is particularly disruptive of inheritance as it involves the removal of the very organ of patriarchal inheritance, the penis. Cronus removed the source of his own genesis, severing his very origin.

It should here be remembered that such patriarchal inheritance is the core principle of the Homeric conception of names as Socrates conceives it. Earlier, Socrates considered the clue to the Homeric notion of the correctness of names to consist in the idea that a son, provided that his birth is such as to naturally give him the οὐσία of his father, ought to be called by a name which makes that common Being manifest. While the purpose of the inquiry into the names that followed the elucidation of this clue was ostensibly to establish the principle in greater detail, the result has instead been the development of a tragic scene in which the murderous disruption of inheritance is emphasized again and again.

Further, this murderous scene, tracing back the lineage of Atreus, has extended beyond the human realm and into the divine. What Socrates’ examples have shown is that under the Homeric (i.e., the tragic) view of language, even the gods are understood tragically (i.e., as being trapped in the lower parts). The gods are understood not as they are, but rather as they seem from the tragic human posture: thus gods, like humans, are capable of both lies and murder. Such a conception of the gods already calls into question the supposition that the gods, unlike humans, call things by the correct names (391e): for the gods, it seems, are entirely as rough and vicious as human beings. Under such a tragic view the very possibility of a true λόγος dissolves along with the virtuousness of the gods, who cannot even agree with one another.

This passage discloses an important truth regarding the technological/tragic conception of naming. In nearly each case, the name Socrates considers refers (albeit subtly) to a case of familial murder, either of the father or of the son. In other words, each name has been seen to describe a person who operates independently and against its source or offspring.

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