Comedy as Self-Forgetting: Implications for Sallis's Reading of Plato's Cratylus

Abstract

Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato was reputed to have been so “well regulated” (kosmiois) as never once to have been seen to “laugh excessively” (gelon huperagan . . . komikon). Nietzsche describes Plato as so humorless as to be positively “boring” (1968, 117). John Sallis not only ascribes to this notoriously solemn philosopher a sense of humor but reads one of his most inscrutable dialogues—the Cratylus—as a comedy. There are plenty of reasons to find this surprising, not the least of which come from the dialogues themselves, where comedy is named twice as playing a role in Socrates’s condemnation (Apology 18d, 19c), where it seems to describe the Shadenfreude of the malicious person (Philebus 48c), or where it is simply equated with what is stupid Comedy as Self-Forgetting: Implications for Sallis’s Reading of Plato’s Cratylus