Etymegory

Pickstock again, same article. She examines Socrates’ use of etymologies, and argues that this is not a crude effort to take words back to some fixed starting point. Rather, Socrates “analyzes words by supplementing, removing, exchanging or bending letters or syllables according to sometimes whimsical rules of phonetic resonance and crude punning.” Far from seeking a final foothold, Socrates etymologies seem designed to show that there is no such foothold in language.

She denies that the etymologies are part of Plato’s critique of sophist over-valuation of language or evidence of Platonic essentialism. She suggests that Plato is proposing a more allegorical notion of meaning. Allegory here doesn’t mean a particular mode of reading, but instead an inherent feature of language. Allegory is the way things mean. Sorates’s etymologies are, as Proclus says, “etymegories.”

How so? Socrates’ etymological chains fail to find a foothold, but Pickstock does not think that Plato considers this a failure of language. The problem is not that words fail to rest in a simple one-to-one correspondence with meanings. The chains of etymological connection instead disclose the way language gives access to meaning: Names “give allegorical access to a plethora of meanings none of which entirely exhausts the truth, but none of which betrays it either.” Names and their chains of associations create a web, and new meanings arise in the history of a word because the words are at the “center of a web of allegorical echoes” that reverberate backward and forward along the web, along the chain.

To put it differently, what Socrates demonstrates is not the tragic fact that the covenant of word and thing is broken. What he demonstrates is that “the chain between words and things has already been broken, or rather, one could say, things were always words and word were always things.” When Socrates links together the words for body, sign, tomb, and safe, and argues that “the body can be understood as the outer sign of the inner soul, and can be said to be the tomb of the soul, as well as its safeguard,” he is indicating that the links of sound in words “confirm that the elements of the chain are essentially connected and that words can give substantive indication of this relation.” What Socrates demonstrates is not a tragic breach, but a foundational aporia.

Pickstock insists this is not because at the end of the chain language allows us to leap from one sensible level of reality into the intelligible level of reality. The chain is not a ladder that enables us to climb out to another world. Rather, the chain “forms a continuum on a single but variously-articulated plane, since all the components of the phenomenal world are themselves signs of higher realities in which they participate; the sensible realm is made up of signs or words in its entirety, with no substantive sublunary end-point for words to reach the consummation of their semantic or genealogical chain.” When Socrates compares language to craft and says speech is a form of action, he is underscoring the fact that “words are part of the reality which they signify.”

Etymology is thus an illustration of the inherently allegorical character of meaning and language themselves.