Note 40 — Chapter XXXI · KRATYLUS.

See Plato, Kratyl. p. 437 A-B.

This occurs in the latter portion of the dialogue carried on by Sokrates with Kratylus, and is admitted by Lassalle to be seriously meant by Plato: though Lassalle maintains that the etymologies in the first part of the dialogue (between Sokrates and Hermogenes) are mere mockery and parody. (Lassalle, Herakleitos der Dunkle, vol. ii., pp. 402-403).

I venture to say that none of those Platonic etymologies, which Lassalle regards as caricatures, are more absurd than those which he here accepts as serious. Liddell and Scott in their Lexicon say about θυμός, “probably rightly derived from θύω by Plat. Crat. 419 E, ἀπὸ τῆς θύσεως καὶ ζέσεως τῆς ψυχῆς.” The manner in which Schleiermacher and Steinhart also (Einleit. zum Kratylos, pp. 552-554), analysing this dialogue, represent Plato as passing backwards and forwards from mockery to earnest and from earnest to mockery, appears to me very singular: as well as the principle which Schleiermacher lays down (Introduct. p. 10), that Plato intended the general doctrines to be seriously understood, and the particular etymological applications to be mere mockery and extravagance (um wer weiss welche Komödie aufzuführen). What other philosopher has ever propounded serious doctrines, and then followed them up by illustrations knowingly and intentionally caricatured so as to disparage the doctrines instead of recommending them?

It is surely less difficult to believe that Plato conceived as plausible and admissible those etymologies which appear to us absurd.

As a specimen of the view entertained by able men of the seventeenth century respecting the Platonic and Aristotelian etymologies, see the Institutiones Logicæ of Burgersdicius, Lib. i. c. 25, not. 1. Lehrsch (Die Sprachphilosophie der Alten, Part i. p. 34-35) agrees with the other commentators, that the Platonic etymologies in the Kratylus are caricatured to deride the boastful and arbitrary etymologies of the Sophists about language. But he too produces no evidence of such etymologies on the part of the Sophists; nay, what is remarkable, he supposes that both Protagoras and Prodikus agreed in the Platonic doctrine that names were φύσει (see pp. 17-19).