MIMICS AND GESTURE THEATER.

(The title of this entry jokingly borrows the name of the theater for deaf people in Moscow.)

Once again we need to ask the same question. Nietzsche and Russell are silent about him. He is sometimes identified as a sophist and by no means a pre-Socratic… So, why Cratylus, and why in this particular spot? There is not much known about him, to put it mildly, and from what we do know, a question may arise as to whether there is a good enough reason for knowing anything about him at all. Our primary sources are Plato’s Dialogue The Cratylus and Aristotle’s Metaphysic, but even from these, Cratylus does not seem to amount to a lot. Yet, two interesting subjects are raised in connection with him, and there is even the term Cratylism, referring to a philosophical theory, which originates if not with him personally then at least certainly around his name. In other words, he does deserve our attention, and a separate entry as well.

He is known as a follower of Heraclitus, but he is also said to be a pupil of the famous sophist Protagoras. Plato was a pupil of his before he met Socrates, and apparently treated him with great respect. Some historiographers of philosophy place him among the sophists, due to that association with Protagoras, but this does not make much sense to me, therefore I have placed him after Heraclitus, disassociating him from the Protagoreans.

Cratylus is interesting because of two things. He pushes the Heraclitean theory of the flux to a wild extreme and he also comes up with a theory of language all of his own, which has a remarkable relevance to modern linguistics. His Heraclitean ties are examined by Aristotle. His linguistic theory is examined by Socrates, in the above-mentioned Plato’s Dialogue.

First here is Aristotle on Cratylus:

[Cratylus] “ended up by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and [he] criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.” (Metaphysics 1010a).

Here in a single sentence we find both Cratylus’ logical “improvement” on Heraclitus, and also his linguistic extremism resulting from the former. Indeed, he seems to have believed that nothing truthful can be said of the things that change, because by the time our words are said, the things about which they are said have changed. In order to refrain from making untrue statements, Cratylus’ solution is to say nothing at all. Ergo, the mimics and gesture theater!

In Plato’s Dialogue Cratylus, the latter knows better than to communicate by gesticulation and mimics. His linguistic theory is set out in fairly comprehensible human speech, and it boils down to the assertion that the names by which we know things are not given to them randomly and merely by convention, but have in fact an intrinsic connection to those things. Names are thus of divine origin, and by studying them we can arrive at knowledge. The thing which makes the most sense here is that once we cannot “know” things by talking about them, there has to be another way of gaining knowledge, which is by analyzing the esoteric meanings of them. Cratylus’ idea is not as insane and inane as it may first appear, for his approach allows us to pursue the study of verbal etymology, which is rendered useless by adopting the opposing conventionist approach.

And finally, on the subject of “Cratylism” in modern usage, it represents a kind of linguistic theory based on three underlying principles: (1) the imitation principle (each fact imitates things); (2) the analogy principle (each fact is carried out in an analogous manner); and (3) the protolanguage principle (each language proceeds from the original and perfect language by degradation).

…Well, Cratylus has proved himself worthy of our attention, after all.