Opposition

Parmenides had laid it down that what is not can neither be thought nor spoken. The Eleatic Stranger of the Sophist undertakes what he calls a kind of parricide against this teaching. If the sophist is to be defined as a maker of falsehoods, and if to speak falsely is to say what is not, then non-being must in some manner be. The solution proposed is that non-being is the other of being rather than its contrary. Each of the greatest kinds, in being what it is, is not what the rest are; and this not-being, which belongs to Motion no less than to Rest, amounts to difference and nothing more. On this view the negative term does not annihilate the positive term to which it stands opposed, and the prohibition Parmenides laid upon discourse may be lifted without contradiction.

Much depends on the distinction between the contrary and the other. Motion and Rest exclude one another, and the Stranger does not deny it; yet both partake of Being, each is the same with itself, and each is different from the other. Opposition of this second sort appears in things as a condition of their being intelligible at all. Were the kinds wholly unmixed, nothing could be said of anything; were they wholly commingled, anything could be said of everything. Between these extremes Plato places the weaving together of the forms, in which some kinds combine and others refuse combination, and he assigns to dialectic the art of discerning which do which. Whether difference thereby enters into what each form is, or remains external to it, later Platonists answer differently.

Opposition serves Plato elsewhere as a principle of division and of proof. In the fourth book of the Republic he argues that the same thing cannot at the same time and in the same respect act or be acted upon in opposite ways, and from this he infers that the soul has distinct parts, since a man may at once desire drink and refuse it. That argument, considered further under the idea of Soul, treats opposition as a mark by which things really distinct may be told apart. The Phaedo observes that opposites arise from their opposites, the greater from the less and the waking from the sleeping, and draws from this a consideration bearing on the soul's survival. The fifth book of the Republic, in turn, uses the opposition of knowledge and opinion, and of being and becoming, to separate the philosopher from the lover of sights and sounds.

The task of sorting the varieties of opposition more exactly falls to Aristotle, who divides opposite terms into four kinds and reserves contrariety for closer analysis. Plotinus takes the Platonic account in another direction, asking how difference and opposition stand to a One which lies beyond being and therefore beyond all contrariety. Both lines of inheritance preserve the point on which the Sophist turns, that negation and contrariety are not the same, and that what a thing is not enters somehow into the account of what it is.

Where Plato had traced opposition through the kinds as difference, Aristotle undertakes to distinguish the several senses in which one thing is said to be opposite to another. The Categories proposes a fourfold division. Opposites are correlative, as double and half, which imply one another; or contrary, as black and white or just and unjust, which stand at the greatest remove within some genus; or opposed as possession and privation, as sight and blindness, where one term marks the absence of what naturally belongs to a subject; or opposed as affirmation and negation, as man and not-man, which divide everything whatever between them. Each type is said to behave differently, and only contrariety, in Aristotle's judgment, calls for further subdivision.

That subdivision turns on whether intermediates are possible. Odd and even, both positive terms, exhaust a definite class and admit nothing between them. White and black stand as extreme limits of a continuous series and permit an indefinite number of shades, any of which may be counted the opposite of either extreme. Things which differ in degree are contrary in the second manner, things which differ in kind in the first. The distinction bears on classification, since whether the species of a genus differ in kind or only in degree depends on which contrariety relates them, a question treated more fully under the idea of Evolution. It bears also on the method of definition. Aristotle objects, in the Parts of Animals, that division by dichotomy breaks up natural groups and rests on negative terms, of which there can be no further species; he therefore prefers to differentiate a genus by positive characters into more than two species.

The opposition of propositions follows in part from the opposition of terms. Contrary statements about the same subject cannot both be true, though both may be false, since the number in question may be a fraction and neither odd nor even. Contradictory statements admit no such escape: one must be true and the other false. Arranging universal and particular, affirmative and negative, Aristotle sets out the scheme later known as the square of opposition, in which contradictories, contraries, and subcontraries exhaust the ways two propositions may be opposed. On this scheme rests his account of demonstration, for a truth is necessary when its contradictory is impossible, and dialectical dispute is possible only where the contradictory of a probable statement remains itself probable.

The fourfold scheme passes to the medieval and early modern writers as the received account. Aquinas employs the opposition of possession and privation in treating the nature of evil, and the opposition of relation in treating the divine persons. Leibniz turns the logic of opposition toward the question of which possibles can exist together. Later disputes about opposition, whether they concern the antinomies of reason or the conflict of classes, may usually be read as disagreements about which of Aristotle's four kinds is in play, and whether the principle of contradiction governs being as well as thought.

If evil stands opposed to good, the question remains under which of the modes of opposition it falls. The Manichees had made evil a cosmic power coordinate with good, which is to treat it as a contrary. Augustine denied this, and Aquinas restates the denial in Aristotle's terms. Evil is opposed to good as privation to possession. Blindness is not a quality contending with sight but the want of sight in a nature to which sight is due; and evil, likewise, is the absence of a good which a subject ought to have. Aquinas is careful to add that a mere negation will not serve, since a stone lacks sight without being thereby defective. What makes a lack an evil is that the good lacked is owed to the nature in question.

The argument rests on the convertibility of being and goodness. Whatever exists, insofar as it exists, is in some measure good, so that evil cannot be a substance or a nature of its own. It has its being in another, as a wound has its being in a body and corruption in something capable of being corrupted. From this it follows that evil cannot be complete, for a subject wholly deprived of good would not exist at all. Aquinas distinguishes the evil of fault from the evil of penalty, the first a defect of the will's order to its end, the second a defect suffered in the good of nature, and finds both to be privations rather than positive contraries.

Whether privation will bear this weight is a question the doctrine invites, and it is not the only place where Aquinas puts the modes of opposition to work. Since God is the cause of all being, an evil which were a contrary of good, and thus a being in its own right, would require a cause outside the order of what God creates. On the privation account there is no such requirement, for a falling-short of being needs no positive principle. The opposition of good and evil, so understood, is asymmetrical: the good may exist without the evil, but the evil not without the good it deprives. Aquinas draws on another of the Aristotelian modes in treating the Trinity, where the distinction of the divine persons is said to arise from relative opposition alone, since relatives are opposed without either being the privation or the contrary of the other. The bearing of these distinctions on the divine nature is considered further under the idea of God.

The privation theory becomes the settled position of Latin Christian philosophy, and the terms in which the problem of evil is afterward stated. Leibniz takes over the framework and adds to it the question why God permits the privation, answering that certain evils cannot be removed without removing goods incompatible with their absence. Others have doubted whether privation can bear the weight placed upon it, and whether the graver moral evils are adequately described as absences. The question is bound up with the account of good and evil given under the idea of Good and Evil, and with the several senses of causation treated under the idea of Cause.

Hobbes proposes to found the whole account of opposition upon motion. Bodies move, and where two motions meet and each resists the other, opposition consists in that resistance and nothing further. The scholastic apparatus of form, privation, and potency he regards as words without empirical content, to be replaced by the doctrine of impact set out in De Corpore. Contrary qualities such as hot and cold he takes to be diverse motions of insensible parts of bodies, and what the tradition called a privation he takes to be the ceasing or slackening of some motion. On this view contrariety belongs to physics rather than to logic, and is discovered by inquiry into bodies rather than by the division of genera.

In man the same account is carried over into the passions. Every voluntary act begins in those small beginnings of motion within the body which Hobbes calls endeavour; appetite is endeavour toward an object, aversion endeavour away from it. Deliberation he describes as the alternate succession of appetites and aversions concerning one and the same thing, and the will as the last appetite in deliberating. Conflict between men follows from the same principle, for where two desire what both cannot enjoy, they become enemies. The state of nature is thus a condition of war, and the sovereign is instituted to arbitrate those oppositions which men left to themselves have no means of resolving, a matter treated further under the ideas of State and War and Peace.

Opposition also enters Hobbes's account of speech. Absurdity in discourse arises when contradictory names are joined, as when men speak of incorporeal substances or of free will, and the remedy is the settling of definitions at the outset of reasoning. Yet if opposition among bodies is always the meeting of particular motions, there are no natural contraries in the Aristotelian sense, no fixed poles standing maximally apart within a genus. What counts as opposite depends on which motions happen to encounter one another. Opposition so conceived is local and contingent, a matter of fact rather than of necessity, though the names by which men mark contraries remain subject to the rules of consistent speech.

Later empiricists inherit from Hobbes a suspicion of accounts which make opposition a structure of reason or of being. Hume takes up the treatment of the passions and their conflicts, and considers opposition as a matter for observation of the mind rather than for demonstration. Those who follow Aristotle and Aquinas continue to hold, against this, that contrariety is discovered in the definition of things and not merely in the collisions they undergo. The competition of appetites which Hobbes places at the root of civil strife reappears in the accounts of factions and classes considered under the idea of Revolution.

Leibniz shifts the question of opposition from the relation between predicates to the compatibility of things which might exist together. Each simple substance has a complete notion containing everything that can be said of it. Some such notions agree with one another and may enter into one and the same world; others do not, and Leibniz calls these incompossible. The exclusion here is not contradiction in the strict sense, for nothing forbids either possible taken by itself; it is rather that two things each possible cannot both be realized. Aristotle had held that opposites cannot coexist in the same subject at the same time and in the same respect; Leibniz extends a like restriction to the whole order of what exists, so that not all possibilities can be brought together in one world.

The doctrine bears directly on the argument of the Theodicy. If God chooses among possible worlds, and if the possibles are limited in this manner, then the presence of evil in the world need not be laid to a defect of divine goodness. The best world is the one containing the greatest amount of perfection which can stand together, and the removal of certain evils would carry with it goods incompossible with their absence. Leibniz accepts the account of evil as privation which he inherits from Aquinas and distinguishes metaphysical evil, which is the limitation belonging to any creature, from physical evil, which is suffering, and moral evil, which is sin. The first he treats as inseparable from creation itself, since a creature which lacked all limitation would not be a creature.

The principle of sufficient reason requires that every such exclusion have its ground. No opposition is merely brute; that one possible excludes another follows from what the two are, and could in principle be traced in their complete notions, though the tracing exceeds finite understanding. Here Leibniz stands opposed to Hobbes, for whom opposition was the accidental meeting of motions. What appears in nature as the conflict of forces Leibniz refers to a deeper harmony in which the apparent opposition is resolved, since the monads do not act upon one another but agree by a correspondence established at the outset. The bearing of this on the conservation of force in bodies is considered under the idea of Mechanics.

The question Leibniz leaves to his successors is whether reason can in fact adjudicate among opposed demonstrations concerning things beyond experience. If the world is a resolved system of compossibles, reason ought to be able to trace the resolution. Kant, who was trained in the Leibnizian school, comes to hold that reason attempting this on transcendent questions produces opposed proofs of equal apparent force. He also distinguishes, in his early essay on negative magnitudes, real opposition between forces from the logical opposition of contradictory predicates, a distinction which bears on how far the principle of contradiction may be taken as a principle of being as well as of thought.

Kant restricts the office of the principle of contradiction. In an analytical judgment, where the predicate is already contained in the subject, the principle suffices as a criterion of truth, for to deny such a judgment is to contradict oneself. But in forming a synthetical judgment one goes beyond the given concept to join something else with it, and here, Kant says, neither identity nor contradiction is involved, and nothing in the judgment itself reveals its truth or falsehood. Truths of this second sort may be necessary and known independently of experience, yet the principle of contradiction furnishes neither their ground nor their validation. The distinction is set out more fully under the idea of Judgment, and it separates Kant from Aristotle, for whom whatever does not derive necessity from that principle belongs to opinion rather than to knowledge.

From this restriction follows Kant's treatment of the antinomies. In the Transcendental Dialectic he presents four pairs of arguments, thesis and antithesis, each pair concerning matters beyond possible experience and each argument bearing the appearance of a demonstration. Has the world a beginning in time and limits in space, or neither? Is every composite made of simple parts, or is matter divisible without end? Is there a causality of freedom, or does natural necessity govern all? Does an absolutely necessary being exist? Since contradictory propositions cannot both be demonstrated, Kant concludes that the proofs on either side are illusory, and that reason has been employed beyond the conditions of its legitimate use.

The two pairs are handled differently. In the mathematical antinomies both thesis and antithesis are held to be false, since each supposes the world of appearance to be a thing in itself possessing a determinate magnitude. In the dynamical antinomies both may be true, provided the thesis is referred to things as they are in themselves and the antithesis to appearances, so that freedom may be affirmed of the intelligible order while natural necessity holds throughout the sensible one. Whether this constitutes a resolution of the opposition or an avoidance of it has been disputed since. What follows on Kant's account is that a pair of opposed demonstrations need not indicate a fallacy in one of them, but may indicate that the question itself lies beyond the reach of theoretical reason.

Hegel accepts the finding that reason necessarily generates oppositions and rejects the conclusion drawn from it. Where Kant takes the antinomies as marking a boundary, Hegel takes them as exhibiting the movement of thought, to be worked through toward a unity which contains both sides. Between these two stands the older position, common to Aristotle and his medieval followers, that a contradiction must be resolved by the truth of one opposite and the falsity of the other. Which of the three accounts is adopted determines how the great disputes of philosophy are to be read, and whether they require the reader to take sides. The conflict of arguments in matters admitting only probability is treated under the idea of Dialectic.

Where Aristotle holds that contradictions must be resolved in favor of one of the opposites, and Kant that certain contradictions cannot be resolved at all, Hegel proposes a third way, which is the resolution of all contradictions by a synthesis uniting the opposites and reconciling their difference. Every finite phase of reality, everything short of the Absolute Idea, is said to have its contradictory, as real as itself and existing along with it. Contradictories on this account imply and require one another, somewhat as correlative opposites do, since whatever is partial and incomplete presupposes something partial and incomplete in an opposite respect. The opposition between them may therefore be overcome by a third term which includes them both and completes each by joining it to the other.

The Science of Logic begins with the barest instance. Pure Being, taken without any determination whatever, is not to be distinguished from Nothing; the two are the same in their emptiness, and yet each is meant as the opposite of the other. Their truth is Becoming, in which both are preserved as moments. The like movement is repeated through quality, quantity, essence, and notion. Essence is the region where opposition is treated in its own right, under the headings of identity and difference, the positive and the negative, ground and consequent. Hegel argues that identity already contains difference within it, since to say that A is A is to mark A off from what it is not.

The same movement is traced in the Philosophy of History and the Philosophy of Right. Each stage of world history is said to be a necessary moment in the idea of the world mind, and the world mind itself a synthesis of the conflicting national minds, each restricted by its own particularity. In the account of the division of labor, the opposition between the particular good of each man and the universal good of all is overcome by that advance in social organization through which a man, in earning and producing on his own account, produces for the enjoyment of everyone else. Opposed classes, opposed institutions, and opposed principles are thus taken to call for a resolution which unites rather than excludes them. The bearing of this on the account of progress in history is treated under the idea of Progress.

Marx retains the dialectical movement and locates its contradictions in the relations of production rather than in the self-development of the Idea. Mill takes the contrary course, confining opposition to the relations among terms and propositions and declining to find in it a principle of reality. The issue between them and Hegel concerns whether the principle of contradiction governs being as well as thought, a question raised under the idea of Being, and whether the union of opposites in a more inclusive whole is intelligible at all, or merely names the difficulty it was introduced to remove.

Mill takes over the received distinctions among opposites and considers what use they serve in the discovery of truth. He observes the difference between contradictory propositions, of which one must be true and the other false, and contrary propositions, which cannot both be true but may both be false, and he attributes a number of common fallacies to the confusion of the two. Negative names he treats with the reserve Aristotle had shown toward them, since a negative name marks off nothing determinate and cannot be further divided into species. On these points Mill remains within the tradition of the logicians, and his contribution lies less in amending the square of opposition than in showing what work the relation of presence to absence performs in the investigation of nature.

That work is the burden of his account of induction. The Method of Difference compares an instance in which the phenomenon occurs with an instance in which it does not, the two agreeing in every other circumstance; the Joint Method assembles positive and negative instances together. Causal knowledge is obtained by observing what varies when something is added or taken away, so that the opposition of presence and absence becomes the instrument by which antecedent is separated from consequent. Whether nature offers instances so cleanly opposed, and whether the uniformity of nature on which the methods rest can itself be established by induction, are difficulties Mill acknowledges and which are considered further under the idea of Induction.

Mill declines to extend opposition beyond this office into a principle of reality. That a term has its contrary he does not take as evidence that things move by the conflict of opposites, and the doctrine that Being passes over into Nothing he regards as a confusion of the properties of names with the properties of what is named. Yet opposition has for Mill a productive function of another sort. In On Liberty he argues that truth in matters of opinion is reached only through the collision of adverse views, that a doctrine held without challenge is held as prejudice, and that even an erroneous opinion serves by compelling its opponents to understand the grounds of their own. The conflict of opinions, considered under the idea of Liberty, is thus for Mill a condition of knowledge, though not a structure of the world.

Mill's restriction of opposition to the relations among propositions stands as one of the alternatives left to the nineteenth century, the others being the dialectical accounts of Hegel and of Marx. Later philosophers writing in the analytic manner largely follow Mill in this, treating opposition as a relation among statements and leaving the dialectical doctrines to another tradition. The question which divides the two remains what Aristotle had raised, whether contrariety is discovered in things or imposed upon them by the arrangement of names, and the answer given determines whether the conflicts recorded in the history of thought are to be resolved by demonstration, by dialectic, or by neither.

Marx retains the dialectical movement he learned from Hegel and transfers it from the development of thought to the conditions of material life. The oppositions which move history are, on his account, conflicts between classes distinguished by their relation to the means of production. In every epoch a class which owns the conditions of labor stands opposed to a class which performs it, as patricians to plebeians, lords to serfs, and the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. The opposition is held to follow from the organization of production rather than from the dispositions of individuals, so that reform of manners leaves it untouched. The struggle of factions and orders within the state, which earlier writers had treated as a disorder to be prevented, becomes here the principle by which one form of society passes into another.

The analysis in Capital undertakes to exhibit the workings of this opposition within capitalist production in particular. The commodity is presented as a unity of opposed aspects, use-value and exchange-value, and the labor which produces it as at once concrete and abstract. From the extraction of surplus value there arises what Marx calls the contradiction between the social character of production, in which many cooperate, and the private character of appropriation, in which the product is claimed by the owner of capital. Accumulation gathers wealth at one pole and want at the other, until, in his statement of the matter, the productive forces outgrow the relations of production within which they have developed.

The resolution Marx anticipates is practical rather than theoretical. Philosophers, he writes in the Theses on Feuerbach, have interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Where Hegel had the opposition overcome by a synthesis in thought, Marx holds that the opposition of classes is ended only by the transformation of the relations of production themselves. Whether such a resolution is properly called dialectical, and whether an opposition of material conditions can be said to contradict in the sense that propositions contradict, are questions his critics have pressed. The nature of the change he expects, and the means by which it is to be accomplished, are treated under the idea of Revolution.

With Marx the discussion of opposition returns to the ground on which Plato and Aristotle had also considered it, the conflict of parties within a city, though the account given of that conflict differs at every point. The tradition has treated opposition as a relation among terms, as a condition of change in nature, as a division within the soul, and as the movement of thought toward the Absolute; Marx adds the claim that its primary seat is in the manner by which men produce their means of life. Whether opposition is finally logical, metaphysical, or material remains the question at issue among these accounts. The competition of classes and the strife of rich and poor are considered further under the ideas of Labor and Wealth.