Abstract

In this dissertation, I offer a narrative reading of the Cratylus , which separates it from debates about language, and instead, by focusing on the dynamics of the interactions of the characters, discovers in it a portrait of Socrates' interaction with two men with very different reactions to the new and radical teachings of the philosophers and sophists. Socrates appeals to Hermogenes, who is immersed in the conventional aristocratic life, with a fantastic promise of an impossible art of names, and uses it in order to rhetorically encourage his interest in philosophy by giving it the praise of the gods and the ancients and by proving that it does not have to abandon the values of the city. Cratylus has already embraced this new teaching with an uncritical dogmatism. Where Socrates offers illusory promises to woo Hermogenes to these new teachings, he encourages doubt and re-examination for Cratylus. Cratylus has abandoned the city and with it the mortal life in an attempt to live entirely theoretically and divinely. Between the two of them, they illustrate the two perpetual obstacles to philosophical growth for human beings. Entirely immersed in what is immediately around us, we are unable to see beyond these things; but once we discover the need and the pleasure of the transcendent, we forget our actual state and pursue these new ideas in a way which lacks the grounding and definition that human life requires---a saving regulation that is only found by staying immersed in the practical world and in community. As a mixture of body and soul, human beings are caught between these two worlds, a duality which is mirrored in the mixture of being and non-being, truth and falsehood in the world, and in the puzzling status of names: always pointing to something else than what they are, something not found in any of the sensible material that actually makes them up. They surround us, linked always to the things that they name, but never being all of these things named which are never present