4 Plato 5 · On Speech and on Names. Handed down at the Academy, from his Gorgias and Cratylus
From the Gorgias and the Cratylus. The first is on persuasion: it separates flattery from healing, and the cook and the physician come from there. Callicles argues in it that the strong should take what they can take, and argues it with a ferocity rare in any age; Plato did not strike him out. The second asks whether names are natural or agreed. For the man, see the Gospel of Plato. What Callicles says weighs heaviest, and the Order does not strike it out either — he foretold correctly what becomes of the one who tells the truth. Foretelling correctly is not the same as being right.
5.1Cratylus believed that inside every name lies the truth of the thing it names.
5.2He said: take the name apart, and you will know what the thing is.
5.3At first I thought there was something in it. Names are not thrown out at random.
5.4Later I understood one thing, and this chapter exists for that one thing.
5.5Names are given by people.
5.6And the person who gave the name also looked at the thing first, and then named it.
5.7If he saw it wrongly, the name carries his mistake down through the generations.
5.8So what you learn from a name is the eye of the man who came before. It is not the thing.
5.9If you want to know the thing, there is one road only: go and look at the thing. (cf. The Highest Covenant 1.2)
5.10That road is slow, and often nobody walks it with you.
5.11Learning from names is much quicker. Say a few words and it feels like knowing.
5.12Most of the learning in this world grows that way: names breeding names, names explaining names, layer on layer, further and further from the thing.
5.13I am not saying names are useless. A name is a rope, for tying up what you have already seen so that you can carry it.
5.14I am saying: before you tie the rope, there has to be something there.
5.15Some men spend a lifetime collecting rope and never once tie anything with it.
5.16They have the most rope, and the emptiest hands.