Cratylus
Bust of Socrates at the Louvre by Eric Gaba.
Just got done reading Plato’s Cratylus, which is a dialog between Socrates and Hermogenes and Cratylus. It’s about names, and whether or not names represent a thing because they convey or represent some truth about, or the essence of, that thing, or if they are just a bunch of name tags we’ve all agreed to use so we don’t confuse each other. There’s a lot of talk about the nature of things and lots of tracing Greek words back to their original meanings — sometimes their constituent letters. For a bit there is was kind of like reading Genesis: and the oo sound, which is the essence of the expression of awe, begat goo-goo ga-ga, which begat good, which begat goodness, which begat the Goo-Goo Dolls.
This dialog is under the Great Idea of language, hence the 30 or so pages about the naming of things. Oddly enough, this is something I wrote about back when I was writing commentaries. It’s not at all surprising to find out somebody else has done a much better job of thinking about it, and that I wrote a confident commentary without any knowledge of the existence of classic texts on the subject, much less what those texts said.
My main point before, which came up when we were deciding on a name for our daughter, agreed with the position that there was something inherently appropriate about a good name. That the name, or the sound of the name, was somehow right for that person or thing. I was very conscious, for example, that the fact that my two favorite first names for our daughter, Alexandra and Regina, said something. Nothing “my little princess” about those. Of course another thing I said in my old commentary was that people with the wrong name — a name that didn’t suit them — usually ended up being called something else. I have a brother-in-law and an old friend called Butch. I also know a guy who outgrew “Butch” and went back to his given name. So I don’t think there’s any one perfect name for a person — at least no one a parent can pick out while the child is in the womb — but I do think you can saddle a child with something so far from his personality that he’ll end up being called Butch or Rusty.
Knowing that to be the case, I argued for our daughter’s middle name to be very different from her first name, hence Alexandra Skye. At the time it was more about wanting a nice flow and after the long Alexandra the simple Skye seemed to fit. But also, I knew she might end up not wanting to carry around a big name like that, or might be some kind of retro-hippie-vegan, and then Skye would come in handy.
Well, the upshot of all that Socratic dialoging was that to know the name of a thing is not the same as knowing the thing — at least it’s not sufficient. That was kind of the start of the discussion, and kind of the end, too. Here’s how Socrates put it:
How real existence is to be studied or discovered is, I suspect, beyond you and me. But we may admit so much, that the knowledge of things is not to be derived from names. No; they must be studied and investigated in themselves.
It struck me as I typed that quote that it’s a pretty good argument against book learning, which is kind of ironic.