We see that Protagoras possesses great powers of reflective thought, and indeed reflection on consciousness came to consciousness with Protagoras. But this is the form of manifestation which was again taken by the later sceptics. The phenomenal is not sensuous Being, for because I posit this as phenomenal, I assert its nullity. But the statements “What is, is only for consciousness,” or “The truth of all things is the manifestation of them in and for consciousness,” seem quite to contradict themselves. For it appears as though a contradiction were asserted—first that nothing is in itself as it appears, and then that it is true as it appears. But objective significance must not be given to the positive, to what is true, as if, for example, this were white in itself because it appears so; for it is only this manifestation of the white that is true, the manifestation being just this movement of the self-abrogating sensuous Being, which, taken in the universal, stands above consciousness as truly as above Being. The world is consequently not only phenomenal in that it is for consciousness, and thus that its Being is only one relative to consciousness, for it is likewise in itself phenomenal. The element of consciousness which Protagoras has demonstrated, and owing to which the developed universal has in it the moment of the negative Being-for-another, has thus indeed to be asserted as a necessary moment; but taken for itself, alone and isolated, it is one-sided, since the moment of implicit Being is likewise essential.
[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]
α. “That which is not, is not; for if Being belonged to it, there would at the same time be existence and non-existence. That is, in so far as it is thought of as non-existent, it is not; but in so far as it is the non-existent, it must exist. But it cannot at the same time be and not be. Again, if the non-existent is, the existent is not, for the two are opposed. Thus, if Being pertained to non-being, non-being would belong to Being. But if Being does not exist, no more does non-being.”[109] This is with Gorgias a characteristic mode of reasoning.[110]
β. “But in proving,” Aristotle adds to the passages just quoted, “that the existent is not, he follows Melissus and Zeno.” This is the dialectic already brought forward by them. “If Being is, it is contradictory to predicate a quality to it, and if we do this, we express something merely negative about it.”
αα. For Gorgias says: “What is, either is in itself (ἀΐδιον) being without beginning, or it has originated,” and he now shows that it could neither be the one nor the other, for each leads to contradiction. “It cannot be the former, for what is in itself has no beginning, and is the infinite,” and hence likewise undetermined and indeterminable. “The infinite is nowhere, for if it is anywhere, that in which it is, is different from it.” Where it is, it is in another, “but that is not infinite which is different from another, and contained in another. Just as little is it contained in itself, for then that in which it is, and that which is therein, would be the same. What it is in, is the place; that which is in this, is the body; but that both should be the same is absurd. The infinite does not thus exist.”[111] This dialectic of Gorgias regarding the infinite is on the one hand limited, because immediate existence has certainly no beginning and no limit, but asserts a progression into infinitude; the self-existent Thought, the universal Notion, as absolute negativity, has, however, limits in itself. On the other hand, Gorgias is quite right, for the bad, sensuous infinite is nowhere present, and thus does not exist, but is a Beyond of Being; only we may take what Gorgias takes as a diversity of place, as being diversity generally. Thus, instead of placing the infinite, like Gorgias, sometimes in another, sometimes within itself, i.e. sometimes maintaining it to be different, sometimes abrogating the diversity, we may say better and more universally, that this sensuous infinite is a diversity which is always posited as different from the existent, for it is just the being different from itself.