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There are, roughly speaking, two philosophical approaches to an antagonistic constellation of either/or: either one opts for one pole against the other (Good against Evil, freedom against oppression, morality against hedonism, etc.), or one adopts a "deeper" attitude of emphasizing the complicity of the opposites, and of advocating a proper measure or the unity. Although Hegel's dialectic seems a version of the second approach (the "synthesis" of opposites), he opts for an unheard-of THIRD version: the way to resolve the deadlock is neither to engage oneself in fighting for the "good" side against the "bad" one, nor in trying to bring them together in a balanced "synthesis," but in opting for the BAD side of the initial either/or. Of course, this "choice of the worst" fails, but in this failure, it undermines the entire field of the alternative and thus enables us to overcome its terms. (Say, in politics, in the choice between organic unity and destructive terror, the only way to arrive at the truth is to begin with the "wrong" choice.) Therein resides the insurmountable difference between Hegel and the New Age notion of balancing the opposites.<br><br>
Gorgias's <i>On Nature, or the Non-Existent</i> (the text survived only in summary form in Sextus Empiricus, and Aristotle's <i>On Melissus, Xeonphanes, and Gorgias</i>) can be summed up in three propositions: (a.) Nothing exists; (b.) If anything existed, it could not be known; (c.) If anything did exit, and could be known, it could not be communicated to others. If there ever was a clear case of the Freudian logic of the borrowed kettle (providing mutually exclusive reasons), this is it: (1) Nothing exists. (2) What exists, cannot be known. (3) What we know, cannot be communicated to others... But more interesting is the repeated "diagonal" mode of division of genre into species: Things exist or not. If they exist, they can be known or not. If they can be known, they can be communicated to others or not. - Surprisingly, we find the same progressive differentiation at the opposite end of the history of Western philosophy, in the XXth century sophistics called "dialectical materialism." In Stalin's <i>On Dialectical and Historical Materialism</i>, when the four features of dialectics are enumerated:
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