[82] Plato, Kratyl. pp. 384 C. 391 A. συζητεῖν ἕτοιμός εἰμι καὶ σοὶ καὶ Κρατύλῳ κοινῇ … ὅτι οὐκ εἰδείην ἀλλὰ σκεψοίμην μετὰ σοῦ.
Theory laid down by Sokrates à priori, in the first part — Great difficulty, and ingenuity necessary, to bring it into harmony with facts.
Sokrates opens his case by declaring the thesis of the Absolute (Object sine Subject), against the Protagorean thesis of the Relative (Object cum Subject). Things have an absolute essence: names have an absolute essence:[83] each name belongs to its own thing, and to no other: this is its rectitude: none but that rare person, the artistic name-giver, can detect the essence of each thing, and the essence of each name, so as to apply the name rightly. Here we have a theory truly Platonic: impressed upon Plato’s mind by a sentiment à priori, and not from any survey or comparison of particulars. Accordingly when Sokrates is called upon to apply his theory to existing current words, and to make out how any such rectitude can be shown to belong to them — he finds the greatest divergence and incongruity between the two. His ingenuity is hardly tasked to reconcile them: and he is obliged to have recourse to bold and multiplied hypotheses. That the first Name-Givers were artists proceeding upon system, but incompetent artists proceeding on a bad system — they were Herakleiteans who believed in the universality of movement, and gave names having reference to movement:[84] That the various letters of the alphabet, or rather the different actions of the vocal organism by which they are pronounced, have each an inherent, essential, adaptation, or analogy to the phenomena of movement or arrest of movement:[85] That the names originally bestowed have become disguised by a variety of metamorphoses, but may be brought back to their original by probable suppositions, and shown to possess the rectitude sought. All these hypotheses are only violent efforts to reconcile the Platonic à priori theory, in some way or other, with existing facts of language. To regard them as intentional caricatures, would be to suppose that Plato is seeking intentionally to discredit and deride his own theory of the Absolute: for the discredit could fall nowhere else. We see that Plato considered many of his own guesses as strange and novel, some even as laying him open to ridicule.[86] But they were indispensable to bring his theory into something like coherence, however inadequate, with real language.
[83] One cannot but notice how Plato, shortly after having declared war against the Relativity affirmed by Protagoras, falls himself into that very track of Relativity when he comes to speak about actual language, telling us that names are imposed on grounds dependant on or relative to the knowledge or belief of the Name-givers. Kratylus, pp. 397 B, 399 A, 401 A-B, 411 B, 436 B.
The like doctrine is affirmed in the Republic, vi. p. 515 B. δῆλον ὅτι ὁ θέμενος πρῶτος τὰ ὀνόματα, οἷα ἡγεῖτο εἶναι τὰ πράγματα, τοιαῦτα ἐτίθετο καὶ τὰ ὀνόματα.
Leibnitz conceived an idea of a “Lingua Characterica Universalis, quæ simul sit ars inveniendi et judicandi” (see Leibnitz Opp. Erdmann, pp. 162-163), and he alludes to a conception of Jacob Böhme, that there once existed a Lingua Adamica or Natur-Sprache, through which the essences of things might be contemplated and understood. “Lingua Adamica vel certé vis ejus, quam quidam se nosse, et in nominibus ab Adamo impositis essentias rerum intueri posse contendunt — nobis certé ignota est” (Opp. p. 93). Leibnitz seems to have thought that it was possible to construct a philosophical language, based upon an Alphabetum Cogitationum Humanarum, through which problems on all subjects might be resolved, by a calculus like that which is employed for the solution of arithmetical or geometrical problems (Opp. p. 83; compare also p. 356).
This is very analogous to the affirmations of Sokrates, in the first part of the Kratylus, about the essentiality of Names discovered and declared by the νομοθέτης τεχνικός
[84] Plato, Kratyl. p. 436 D.
[85] Plato, Krat. pp. 424-425. Schleiermacher declares this to be among the greatest and most profound truths which have ever been enunciated about language (Introduction to Kratylus, p. 11). Stallbaum, on the contrary, regards it as not even seriously meant, but mere derision of others (Prolegg. ad Krat. p. 12). Another commentator on Plato calls it “eine Lehre der Sophistischen Sprachforscher“ (August Arnold, Einleitung in die Philosophie — durch die Lehre Platons vermittelt — p. 178, Berlin, 1841).
Proklus, in his Commentary, says that the scope of this dialogue is to exhibit the imitative or generative faculty which essentially belongs to the mind, and whereby the mind (aided by the vocal or pronunciative imagination — λεκτικὴ φαντασία) constructs names which are natural transcripts of the essences of things (Proklus, Schol. ad Kratyl. pp. 1-21 ed. Boissonnade; Alkinous, Introd. ad Platon. c. 6).