Footnotes to Heraclitus in Plato’s Cratylus: Examination as Process Philosophy
Leila Kincaid
Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
School of Consciousness and Transformation, California Institute of Integral Studies
There is no happiness where there is no wisdom.
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
~Sophocles, Antigone
Plato's Cratylus can be read as a profoundly Heraclitean text. It could even be said that this dialogue from Plato’s middle period can be characterized as a series of footnotes to Heraclitus. That the character, Cratylus, in the eponymous dialogue is thought to have introduced Plato to the thought of Heraclitus stands as evidence that some form of homage is occurring in the dialogue about the lasting debate over the nature of words, their relationship to reality, and our capacity to know. Plato brings forth key ideas in Heraclitus in this dialogue, in which Socrates prevaricates around the notion that words can mean what they represent. Ultimately, words are not the thing, it is the process of examining our ideas of them that is important to Plato, as is the engagement in examination important to Heraclitus. Both hail the self-reflexive, inquiring, knowledge-thirsty spirit that characterizes the first Axial age[1] in human history as of primary importance in human endeavor.
The philological importance of this text is highlighted by Nietzsche’s own exegesis on the Heraclitian dialogues and his lectures on the Cratylus during his position as a professor, with a doctorate in philology, at the University of Basel. Taking up the call from Heraclitus to “comprehend the underlying meaning of things (183), Plato posits language as an important subject and process for understanding life, truth, and reality. By stating that people have difficulty comprehending reality (Cratylus, 414d) -echoing Heraclitus (183)-, Plato establishes his epistemological view as conditionally omniscient. People can know reality, but not necessarily through the activity and function of language, though language can lead us to an understanding of the truth, we must continually investigate and re-examine our assumptions and ideas to get to deeper understanding.
An important function of the Cratylus dialogue is captured in Socrates’ attempt to tell us not to despair about the insufficiency of language, but to hope for justice, and he posits justice as the most important word[2]. Plato seems to say to us that word as representation is not important. We are not to worry whether or not a word is representative of the real thing it symbolizes. Instead, we are to maintain the hope that we can understand and know justice, the most important word (413a). Because we cannot make true statements about words (439d), and their naturalism is not ultimately knowable (439e), we are to rest upon the faith that they get at a semblance of truth and help us communicate what we mean, and it is this process of investigation that stands paramount to the entire dialogue and human life itself (428d).
This pursuit of truth as a virtue to Socrates comes through the dialogue in the Cratylus, and he makes the claim that examining the word “justice” can help us understand reality. He defines justice through his argument about the etymology, naturalness, and usefulness of names, words and language as “that which pasess through all things” (413a). This “passes through all things” sounds a lot like the logos in Heraclitus as something from which everything emerges and everything moves. Socrates says that “justice as the governor and penetrator of everything else is the just and the cause of everything that comes into being” (413a1–2).
Much like Heraclitus’ belief that the logos exists whether people believe in it or not, Socrates also seems to say that justice, and truth, exist whether people can understand and know it or not, but that we should dwell in a state of continual examination, nevertheless (ibid). The value of asking about the meaning and origin of words like justice is in knowing the ideal implicit in them and not whether or not the word is sufficient or accurately representative. Justice with any other name is still justice.
The ability to know reality is an important endeavor for both philosophers and they hold it up as a virtue. The two thinkers present what could be considered a philosopher’s virtue: to examine, to search, to investigate[3]. Heraclitus said that “wisdom consists in understanding the way the world works[4]” (226) and that it is our highest activity to engage in searching for truth. “I sought myself” (b101), he utters in a refrain to the maxim of the Delphic Oracle at the Temple of Apollo[5] that infused the zeitgeist of ancient Greece. Socrates is famous for uttering his apology through his refrain of the Delphic maxim, going so far as to say that it alone makes life worth living. By couching the value and purpose of human life in the imperative to “know thyself” Plato and Heraclitus position the process of philosophizing as paramount to other human endeavors. Plato’s Cratylus is profoundly Heraclitean and Heraclitus is profoundly ancient Greek. They both show loyalty to the Delphic virtue of self-knowledge and examination.
The relationship between wisdom, knowledge, the gods, and happiness comes through in the Fragments of Heraclitus and the Cratylus and other dialouges of Plato. They can be understood as representing a virtue in ancient Greece described in the last lines of Sophocles’ Antigone[6] as intimately tied up in Greek onto-epistemological ethics. Wisdom is gained from pursuing knowledge, knowledge is gained from submitting to the highest organizing principle of reality – namely, the gods, by way of the logos (for Heraclitus) and justice (for Plato)[7]. Happiness depends on the synthesis of both. Heraclitus incites Zeus as the “only truly wise” (228) and says, “The Lord, who is the Oracle at Delphi, neither speaks nor hides but signifies” (Brawn, 23). Socrates tells Hermogenes that only the Gods are able to call things by their true names (284b), and he says that they are responsible for “fixing the names of things in the proper way” (284).
Heraclitus and Plato, though influenced by earlier Greek writers like Hesiod and the tragedians, only sometimes say that the gods are gatekeepers of reality, truth, and wisdom. They both give agency to the human being and place the hallmark of humanity as the ability to pursue knowledge – knowledge of the good, the just, and the true. “The name man indicates that the other animals do not examine or consider…” (399c).
An essential message from Heraclitus is that the method of contemplative self-examination is a vital part of human life - a philosophy that influenced Plato and Nietzsche (among others). In Cratylus, Plato places a high value on the virtue of knowing through examination and investigation. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates urges Cratylus to “investigate courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly” (440d)[8]. Hailing the ancient Greek maxim from the Oracle at Delphi, Heraclitus and Plato situate the importance of examination as the sine qua non of philosophical life. They both wrote about their consternation over the epistemological and rational limitations of the common person. Heraclitus thought that people were not able to comprehend logos (194), and Socrates says something like this in the Cratylus dialogue (414d). He says that people are not able to comprehend the true meaning of words. A way to conceive of them both as process philosophers is that they thought that people do not comprehend reality and therefore must live a life dedicated to understanding and investigating truth and reality. They were both proponents of the importance of the process of philosophy, even if those are not the words they used to describe their philosophies.
Further synergy between the two ancient Greek thinkers is found in their concepts of the nature of reality. For Heraclitus, logos figures as the pre-eminent eminence from which all reality emanates. For Plato, justice is the process by which all things come into being (413). Eva Brann points out that Heraclitus considered the logos as the process by which “all things come into being and by which they are designed” (21) and he says that all things happen in accordance to the logos (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 194). This seems to correspond with Plato’s idea of justice in Cratylus: “justice is the governor and penetrator of everything else and is the just and the cause of everything that comes into being” (413a). Plato plays around with the word psyche as a “cause of living” (399c) in a way that evokes Heraclitus’ description of the psyche as driven by logos (b45). This leads into further process philosophizing by the two when Heraclitus posits the notion of nature as change and flux, which Plato echoes in his description of justice as that which passes through all things in the Cratylus.
Heraclitus described logos as a principle of the cosmos that operated on a rationality, “a higher ordered reason that governs nature” (DK22B50). He saw logos as the one intelligence in all things. “Listening not to me but to the Word (logos) it is wise to agree that all things are one” (Ibid.). An interpretation of Hercalitus’ logos could see it as an ethical imperative to acknowledge our ultimate entanglement with one another amidst our plurality. A recognition of our oneness leads to a sense of responsibility, and perhaps love, for all that is, and a sense of care toward this logos and its manifestation as the world and all things. The logos is “above all a relation” (38). In this relational state of consciousness and state of being, one dwells in awareness of the logos, the oneness and relationality, that naturally leads to an ethical positionality in relation to all else. I can see stewardship, care, compassion, and co-creativity as manifestations of a logos-centric consciousness. And as Heraclitus says, the logos exists whether people are aware of it or not, and becoming aware of it enhances the quality of our lives (and consciousness).
The contemplative life, in which we seek within to find our sense of being, our truth, seems to undergird Plato's characterization of Socrates as a philosopher promoting a contemplative methodology. It is as though Plato believes that his art (his dialogues) is fully expressive and has a natural affinity to the nature of human understanding (and I think this is where Hume makes his nod to Plato's epistemology). The very act of investigating and examining our thoughts, beliefs, and values is an authentic engagement of “gnothi seuton”, perhaps the highest Greek virtue (though they seem to say it is “justice” and the “good”). But it is the process of examination and investigation that underlies how we ascertain, understand, and know justice and the good. And this process stands as a fully developed, expressive artform in Plato’s dialogues with Socrates as the shining star of this process. It seems that the concept of continual becoming in Heraclitus’s philosophy influenced Plato’s theory of knowledge in this sense. Through the art of investigation and examination, we express our authentic nature as continually becoming more or less aware of ourselves (the ancient Greek virtue of gnothi seuton). It is not the word as representation that matters as much as the process of revelation (of the truth) through dialogue.
Perhaps the Cratylus can be read as a profoundly Heraclitean text in the sense that we are to understand from both thinkers that our philosophizing is more important than any conclusions we can come to about the subjects of our analysis. The process of examination takes center stage as Plato’s biggest contribution to the world of ideas, and he seems to have picked up this torch from Heraclitus to pass it on to the rest of us. In the spirit of these thinkers, may we carry on in our pursuit of justice with the firm faith that there is a higher good and truth at work behind the multivalent nature of our continual examinations.
References
Bloom, Harold. 2007. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Updated ed. New York: Chelsea House.
Brann, Eva. T. H. 2011. The Logos of Heraclitus: The First Philosopher of the West on Its Most Interesting Term. 1St Paul Dry books ed. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books.
Kirk G. S., J. E Raven and Malcolm Schofield. 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. 2nd ed. Cambridge Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press.
Plato. 1998. Cratylus. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub.
Plato. 2023. “Cratylus” In The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Horan, David. https://www.platonicfoundation.org/cratylus/
Plato. 1921. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 12. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd.
West, Thomas G. and Plato. 1979. Plato's Apology of Socrates: An Interpretation with a New Translation. Ithaca N.Y: Cornell University Press.
Notes
[1] Karl Jaspers coined this term to refer to the period between 500-300 BCE in which numerous world religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions were born.
[2] Because it “passes through all things” (413a).
[3] This is the subject of Jacob Sherman’s Philosophy in a Time of Crisis talk and various writings.
[4] This line continues, “which involves understanding the logos” and will be discussed in this paper.
[5] Plato lists traits of Apollo in Cratylus that can be understood to correspond with the virtue of self-examination and investigation. (Socrates says Apollo has four attributes: 1. Shooting, being single-minded and focused 2. Having the good in mind, 3. Washer, purifier who purifies souls 4. Harmonizer who harmonizes movements, makes them move in concert [405a]). The reference to Apollo refers, at least in part, to the importance and meaning of the Temple of Apollo where the Oracle at Delphi issued the maxim, gnothi seuton (know thyself) that acts as Socrates’ apology in the eponymous dialogue.
[6] In the Epigraph for this paper.
[7] This is the subject for a larger paper and research inquiry.
[8] This is translated as “easily” in the Horan and Reeve translations. Akedia is translated as “carelessly” in the Fowler translation and seems a more apt interpretation because it means something that Socrates always expresses concern about in the Platonic dialogues: careful attention and regard for the truth. Akedia, translated as indifference and lack of care, captures the apparent intention in Socrates’ final message to Cratylus to continue his investigation into the meaning of words.
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