Cratylus--Desire or Necessity?

Soc. I will tell you my own opinion; but first, I should like to ask you which chain does any animal feel to be the stronger? and which confines him more to the same spot—desire or necessity?

Socrates asks Hermogenes this leading question in Cratylus. When he starts with, “I will tell you my own opinion” it sounds as if Socrates is setting Hermogenes up. The modern reader is surprised when Socrates heartily agrees with Hermogenes’s answer, “desire.” Framing what might otherwise be a simple comparison and contrast question by asking which is the strongest chain rather than the strongest motivator might also sound strange, but the reason for that will come out later in the dialogue.

The modern reader is the only one who would be surprised by Hermogenes’s answer and Socrates’s agreement, since the power of desire, the strongest of all emotions, was a commonplace in Classical Athens. However, most readers immersed in analytical philosophy would not only understand the answer, but would nod their head in agreement. I should note that Plato does have a trick in store for his contemporary reader. Such trickery is common in the Socratic Dialogues, where Socrates is more likely to come off as a satyr than a philosopher, or in his own words a “gadfly” whose duty is to irritate Athens out of its complacency.

Socrates’s question and Hermogenes’s answer does have a surprising twist, since it is asked in the context of a discussion of Hades and how Hades got his name. Before we go on to that reason, I should note that prior to explaining Hades’s name, Socrates has made two conflicting arguments about the origins of names, first, that names were given by legislators, and thus had the power of laws, of fixing the identity of whoever was so named; and second, that names evolve from the character and actions of those so named. Interestingly enough, Socrates argues that the names of men are fixed or given, and the names of gods and heroes evolve, a schema that disrupts popular notions of Platonic forms—cleverly setting his modern reader up..  

At question at this point, though never overtly stated, is why anyone would stay in Hell, what chains constrain them? In that context, Socrates argues a few lines later that Hades doesn’t physically bind those in Hell to the place, but convinces them to stay by playing on their desires. One desire, the one Socrates says is the strongest, is the desire to be a part of a community, a polis. He asks Hermogenes, “Is any desire stronger than the thought that you will be made better by associating with another?” Once again modern readers, with Judeo-Christian concepts of Hell, as well as less focused on communal association, find themselves shaking their head. One would be willing to stay in Hell because of the opportunity to associate with its ruler, or the other condemned? 

That modern reader might also miss the one advantage of Hell, or more precisely of death. With death, one is no longer imprisoned by a body, which is the seat of all emotions. Socrates argues that when “the soul is liberated from the desires and evils of the body,” the dead are actually in a “liberated state [and] he can bind them with the desire of virtue.”

At that moment in the dialogue, a discussion of names that is deceptively simple, and appears to be about using names as a vehicle to fix identity, thus making passage a de facto argument for Platonic Forms, uses Forms to identify what blocks virtue. Thus, Socrates (at least as much as he is Plato’s mouthpiece) is not arguing for forms as an alternative model for reality  to the Protagorean argument for “flux.” The only “inference,” to borrow one of Plato’s favorite words, is that Forms should be preferred over flux—for flux, a sister to desire, is a function of the body, and only by escaping the body’s changeable, emotional nature, can one truly begin the search for virtue, the prize of wisdom.