[1. The Megarics.]
Because Euclides (who is regarded as the founder of the Megaric way of thinking) and his school held to the forms of universality, and, above all, sought, and with success, to show forth the contradictions contained in all particular conceptions, they were reproached with having a rage for disputation, and hence the name of Eristics was given them. The instrument for bringing all that is particular into confusion and annulling this particular, was supplied by dialectic, which, indeed, was brought by them to very great perfection, but, as was privately stated, they did it in a kind of anger, so that others said that they should not be called a School (σχολή) but a gall (χολή).[143] With a dialectic thus constituted, we find them taking the place of the Eleatic School and of the Sophists; and it seems as though the Eleatic School had merely been reproduced,[144] since they were essentially identical with it. But this was only partly true—in that the Eleatic dialecticians maintained Being as the one existence in relation to which nothing particular is a truth, and the Megarics considered Being as the Good. The Sophists, on the other hand, did not seek their impulse in simple universality as fixed and as enduring; and similarly we shall find in the Sceptics, dialecticians who maintain that the subjective mind rests within itself. Besides Euclides, Diodorus and Menedemus are mentioned as distinguished Eristics, but particularly Eubulides, and later on Stilpo, whose dialectic likewise related to contradictions which appeared in external conception and in speech, so that it in great measure passed into a mere play upon words.
[a. Euclides.]
Euclides, who is not to be confused with the mathematician, is he of whom it is said that during the enmity between Athens and his birthplace, Megara, and in the period of most violent animosity, he often secretly went to Athens, dressed as a woman, not fearing even the punishment of death in order to be able to hear Socrates and be in his company.[145] Euclides is said, in spite of his stubborn manner of disputing, to have been, even in his disputation, a most peaceful man. It is told that once in a quarrel his opponent was so irritated, that he exclaimed, “I will die if I do not revenge myself upon you!” Euclides replied, “And I will die if I do not soften your wrath so much by the mildness of my speech that you will love me as before.”[146] It was Euclides who said that “the Good is one,” and it alone is, “though passing under many names; sometimes it is called Understanding, sometimes God; at another time Thought (νοῦς), and so on. But what is opposed to the good does not exist.”[147] This doctrine Cicero (ibid.) calls noble, and says that it differs but little from the Platonic. Since the Megarics make the Good, as the simple identity of the true, into a principle, it is clearly seen that they expressed the Good as the absolute existence in a universal sense, as did Socrates; but they no longer, like him, recognized all the approximate conceptions, or merely opposed them as being indifferent to the interests of man, for they asserted definitely that they were nothing at all. Thus they come into the category of the Eleatics, since they, like them, showed that only Being is, and that all else, as negative, does not exist. While the dialectic of Socrates was thus incidental, in that he merely shook some current moral ideas, or the very first conceptions of knowledge, the Megarics, on the contrary, raised their philosophic dialectic into something more universal and real, for they applied themselves more to what is formal in idea and speech, though not yet, like the later Sceptics, to the determinations of pure Notions; for knowledge, thought, was not yet present in abstract conceptions. Of their own dialectic not much is told, but more is said of the embarrassment into which they brought ordinary consciousness, for they were in all kinds of ways alert in involving others in contradictions. Thus they applied dialectic after the manner of an ordinary conversation, just as Socrates applied his mind to every side of ordinary subjects, and as we also, in our conversation, try to make an assertion interesting and important. A number of anecdotes are told of their disputations, from which we see that what we call joking was their express business. Others of their puzzles certainly deal with a positive category of thought; they take these and show how, if they are held to be true, they bring about a contradiction.
[b. Eubulides.]
Of the innumerable multitude of ways in which they tried to confuse our knowledge in the categories, many are preserved with their names, and the principal of these are the Sophisms, whose discovery is ascribed to Eubulides of Miletus, a pupil of Euclides.[148] The first thing which strikes us when we hear them is that they are common sophisms which are not worth contradiction, and scarcely of being heard, least of all have they a real scientific value. Hence we call them stupid, and look at them as dreary jokes, but it is in fact easier to set them aside than to refute them. We let ordinary speech pass, and are content with it, so long as everyone knows what the other means (when this is not so—we trust that God understands us), but these sophisms seem in a way to mislead common speech, for they show the contradictory and unsatisfactory nature of it when taken strictly as it is spoken. To confuse ordinary language so that we do not know how to reply, seems foolish, as leading to formal contradictions, and if it is done we are blamed for taking mere empty words and playing upon them. Our German seriousness, therefore, dismisses this play on words as shallow wit, but the Greeks honoured the word in itself, and the mere treatment of a proposition as well as the matter. And if word and thing are in opposition, the word is the higher, for the unexpressed thing is really irrational, since the rational exists as speech alone.
It is in Aristotle, and in his Sophistical Elenchi that we first find numerous examples of these contradictions (coming from the old Sophists equally with the Eristics), and also their solutions. Eubulides, therefore, likewise wrote against Aristotle,[149] but none of this has come down to us. In Plato we also find, as we saw before (p. 370), similar jokes and ambiguities mentioned to make the Sophists ridiculous, and to show with what insignificant matters they took up their time. The Eristics went yet further, for they, like Diodorus, became jesters to courts, such as to that of the Ptolemies.[150] From historic facts we see that this dialectic operation of confusing others and showing how to extricate them again was a general amusement of the Greek philosophers, both in public places and at the tables of kings. Just as the Queen of the East came to Solomon to put riddles to him, we find at the tables of kings witty conversation and assemblages of philosophers joking and making merry over one another. The Greeks were quite enamoured of discovering contradictions met with in speech and in ordinary ideas. The contradiction does not make its appearance as a pure contradiction in the conception, but only as interwoven with concrete ideas; such propositions neither apply to the concrete content nor to the pure Notion. Subject and predicate, of which every proposition consists, are different, but in the ordinary idea we signify their unity; this simple unity, which does not contradict itself, is to ordinary ideas the truth. But in fact, the simple self-identical proposition is an unmeaning tautology; for in any affirmation, differences are present, and because their diversity comes to consciousness, there is contradiction. But the ordinary consciousness is then at an end, for only where there is a contradiction is there the solution, self-abrogation. Ordinary consciousness has not the conception that only the unity of opposites is the truth—that in every statement there is truth and falsehood, if truth is to be taken in the sense of the simple, and falsehood in the sense of the opposed and contradictory; in it the positive, the first unity, and the negative, this last opposition, fall asunder.
In Eubulides’ propositions the main point was that because the truth is simple, a simple answer is required; that thus the answer should not, as happened in Aristotle (De Sophist. Elench. c. 24), have regard to certain special considerations; and, after all, this is really the demand of the understanding. Thus the mistake is to desire an answer of yes or no, for since no one ventures on either, perplexity ensues, because it is a fool’s part not to know what to reply. The simplicity of the truth is thus grasped as the principle. With us this appears in the form of making such statements as that one of opposites is true, the other false; that a statement is either true or not true; that an object cannot have two opposite predicates. That is the first principle of the understanding, the principium exclusi tertii, which is of great importance in all the sciences. This stands in close connection with the principle of Socrates and Plato (supra, pp. 455, 456), “The true is the universal;” which is abstractly the identity of understanding, according to which what is said to be true cannot contradict itself. This comes more clearly to light in Stilpo (p. 464). The Megarics thus kept to this principle of our logic of the understanding, in demanding the form of identity for the Truth. Now in the cases that they put, they did not keep to the universal, but sought examples in ordinary conception, by means of which they perplexed people; and this they formed into a kind of system. We shall bring forward some examples that are preserved to us; some are more important, but others are insignificant.
α. One Elench was called the Liar (ψευδόμενος); in it the question is put: “If a man acknowledges that he lies, does he lie or speak the truth?”[151] A simple answer is demanded, for the simple whereby the other is excluded, is held to be the true. If it is said that he tells the truth, this contradicts the content of his utterance, for he confesses that he lies. But if it is asserted that he lies, it may be objected that his confession is the truth. He thus both lies and does not lie; but a simple answer cannot be given to the question raised. For here we have a union of two opposites, lying and truth, and their immediate contradiction; in different forms this has at all times come to pass, and has ever occupied the attention of men. Chrysippus, a celebrated Stoic, wrote six books on the subject,[152] and another, Philetas of Cos, died in the decline which he contracted through over-study of these paradoxes.[153] We have the same thing over again when, in modern times, we see men worn out by absorbing themselves in the squaring of the circle—a proposition which has well nigh become immortal. They seek a simple relation from something incommensurable, i.e. they fall into the error of demanding a simple reply where the content is contradictory. That little history has perpetuated and reproduced itself later on; in Don Quixote the very same thing appears. Sancho, governor of the island of Barataria, was tested by many insidious cases as he sat in judgment, and, amongst others, with the following: In his domain there was a bridge which a rich man had erected for the good of passengers—but with a gallows close by. The crossing of the bridge was restricted by the condition that everyone must say truly where he was going, and if he lied, he would be hung upon the gallows. Now one man came to the bridge, and to the question whither he went, answered that he had come here to be hung on the gallows. The bridge-keepers were much puzzled by this. For if they hanged him, he would have spoken the truth and ought to have passed, but if he crossed he would have spoken an untruth. In this difficulty they applied to the wisdom of the governor, who uttered the wise saying that in such dubious cases the mildest measures should be adopted, and thus the man should be allowed to pass. Sancho did not break his head over the matter. The result which the statement was to have, is made its content, with the condition that the opposite of the content should be the consequence. Hanging, understanding it to be truly expressed, should not have hanging as result; non-hanging as an event, should, on the other hand, have hanging as result. Thus death is made the consequence of suicide, but by suicide death itself is made into the content of the crime, and cannot thus be the punishment.
I will give another similar example along with the answer. Menedemus was asked whether he had ceased to beat his father. This was an attempt to place him in a difficulty, since to answer either yes or no, would be equally risky. For if he said ‘yes,’ then he once beat him, and if ‘no,’ then he still beats him. Menedemus hence replied that he neither ceased to beat him, nor had beaten him; and with this his opponents were not satisfied.[154] Through this answer, which is two-sided, the one alternative, as well as the other, being set aside, the question is in fact answered; and this is also so in the former question as to whether the man spoke truly who said he lied, when the reply is made, “He speaks the truth and lies at the same time, and the truth is this contradiction.” But a contradiction is not the true, and cannot enter into our ordinary conceptions; hence Sancho Panza likewise set it aside in his judgment. If the consciousness of opposition is present, our ordinary ideas keep the contradictory sides apart; but in fact the contradiction appears in sensuous things, such as space, time, &c., and has in them only to be demonstrated. These sophisms thus not only appear to be contradictory, but are so in truth: this choice between two opposites, which is set before us in the example, is itself a contradiction.