Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
2. GORGIAS.
This scepticism reached a much deeper point in Gorgias of Leontium in Sicily, a man of great culture, and also distinguished as a statesman. During the Peloponnesian war he was, in Ol. 88, 2 (427 B.C.), a few years after Pericles’ death in Ol. 87, 4, sent from his native town to Athens.[107] And when he attained his object, he went through many other Greek towns, such as Larissa in Thessaly, and taught in them. Thus he obtained great wealth, along with much admiration, and this lasted till his death at over a hundred years of age. He is said to have been a disciple of Empedocles, but he also knew the Eleatics, and his dialectic partakes of the manner and method of the latter; indeed Aristotle, who preserves this dialectic, in the work _De Xenophane, Zenone et Gorgia_, which has indeed only come to us in fragments, deals with them together. Sextus Empiricus also gives us in full the dialectic of Gorgias. He was strong in the dialectic requisite for eloquence, but his preeminence lies in his pure dialectic respecting the quite universal categories of Being and non-being, which indeed is not like that of the Sophists. Tiedemann (Geist. der Spec. Phil. vol. I. p. 362) says very falsely: “Gorgias went much further than any man of healthy mind could go.” Tiedemann could say of every philosopher that he went further than healthy human understanding, for what men call healthy understanding is not Philosophy, and is often far from healthy. Healthy human understanding possesses the modes of thought, maxims, and judgments of its time, the thought-determinations of which dominate it without its being conscious thereof. In this way Gorgias undoubtedly went further than healthy understanding. Before Copernicus it would have been contrary to all healthy human understanding if anyone had said that the earth went round the sun, or before the discovery of America, if it were said that there was a continent there. In India or in China a republic would even now be contrary to all healthy understanding. The dialectic of Gorgias moves more purely in Notion than that found in Protagoras. Since Protagoras asserted the relativity, or the non-implicit nature of all that is, this only exists in relation to another which really is essential to it; and this last, indeed, is consciousness. Gorgias’ demonstration of the non-implicitness of Being is purer, because he takes in itself what passes for real existence without presupposing that other, and thus shows its own essential nullity and separates therefrom the subjective side and Being as it is for the latter.
Gorgias’ treatise “On Nature,” in which he composes his dialectic, falls, according to Sextus Empiricus (adv. Math. VII. 65), into three parts. “In the first he proves that” (objectively) “nothing exists, in the second” (subjectively), “that assuming that Being is, it cannot be known; and in the third place” (both subjectively and objectively), “that were it to exist and be knowable, no communication of what is known would be possible.” Gorgias was a congenial subject to Sextus, but the former still proved, and this is what the Sceptics ceased to do. Here very abstract thought-determinations regarding the most speculative moments of Being and non-being, of knowledge, and of bringing into existence, of communicating knowledge, are involved; and this is no idle talk, as was formerly supposed, for Gorgias’ dialectic is of a quite objective kind, and is most interesting in content. _a._ “If anything is,” (this “anything” is, however, a makeshift that we are in the habit of using in our conversation, and which is, properly speaking, inappropriate, for it implies an opposition of subject and predicate, while at present the “is” alone is in question)—then “if it _is_” (and now it becomes for the first time defined as subject) “it is either the existent or the non-existent, or else existence and non-existence. It is now evident of these three that they are not.”[108]
“In the same way Being has not originated, because it must then have come either from the existent or from the non-existent. From the existent it did not arise, for then it would be already; just as little from the non-existent, because this cannot beget anything.”[112] The sceptics followed this up further. The object to be contemplated hence ever becomes posited under determinations with ‘either’ ‘or,’ which then contradict one another. But that is not the true dialectic, because the object resolves itself into those determinations only; when nothing follows respecting the nature of the object itself, then, as is already proved, the object must be necessarily in one determination, and not in and for itself. _ββ_. In a similar way Gorgias shows “of what exists, that it must either be one or many; but neither is possible. For as one, it would have a certain magnitude, or continuity, or number, or body, but all this is not one, but different, divisible. Every sensuous one is, in fact, necessarily another, a manifold. If it is not one, it cannot be many, for the many is many ones.”[113]
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