Plato's Laughter by Sonja Madeleine Tanner

Author:Sonja Madeleine Tanner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Logos and the Satirical

Comedy in the Cratylus reveals not only humanity’s inextricable bond to logos, as Sallis contends, but, as I argue here, it also exposes hubristic pretensions to exceed such limits. Hermogenes and Cratylus both present hubristic philosophical positions that render them incapable of dialogue with each other, and hence, they require Socrates’s mediation. It is by depicting a distinct lack of measure, as is evident in Hermogenes and Cratylus, that comedy enables us to know ourselves as beings who are necessarily limited to logos, to inaccuracy, and to error. The self-knowledge that comedy makes possible, in other words, prompts us to recognize our own ignorance and shortcomings, and scale our claims back accordingly. The humility resulting from this stems from the recognition that, to some extent, we always remain the papered-over incongruity, the lack of self-identical presence, because names and, more broadly, logos, however arbitrary and inaccurate, are all that we have. We are, in other words, laughable.

We are thus limited to logos, but logos itself, or at least our use of it, is subject to its own limits, its own metron. At issue in the Cratylus and the Euthydemus are these limits, the semantic preconditions for using logoi sensibly. As we have seen in the Euthydemus, these preconditions include notions of truth, falsity, difference, error, contradiction, without which we fail to use logos sensibly, and instead fall into the sorts of performative contradictions of which Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are guilty. As I will suggest, such prerequisites are at issue in the Cratylus and, as has been shown in the Euthydemus, it is comic logos that exposes the limitations in question. In both dialogues, Socrates enacts a comic logos so as to expose limitations in logos and its usage. The dialogues’ audiences are invited to laugh because, in so doing, we recognize the insensible use of logoi as such, and so participate in the philosophical debate in question.

A brief look at another approach to the Cratylus may help differentiate just what is so unique about a comic reading of it. According to David Sedley, the enigmatic character of the Cratylus is due to the lengthy series of far-fetched etymologies that comprises a considerable portion of the dialogue.47 The main response to these today is to treat them as some form of satire on someone or something.48 Sedley thus wants to challenge the “fundamental but unargued assumption” underlying this reading of the Cratylus: “that Plato must think the etymologies as ridiculous as we do.”49 He assumes the etymologies to be sound because “the dialogue as a whole never calls that soundness into question, thus leaving us no exploitable gap on the matter between speaker and author.”50 Citing Proclus’s reading of the Cratylus, Sedley claims that there is no hint of reading this dialogue as satire by the ancients: “If Plato was joking, the joke flopped.”51 Indeed, Proclus’s reading does not suggest a great appreciation of Platonic humor, but the assumption as to the correctness of the historical reading of Plato as humorless is precisely what is in question.

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