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.
