Metaphysics and Mystery: The Why Question East and West

By Thomas Dean

Metaphysics and Mystery: The Why Question East and West is a critical analysis, comparison and evaluation of philosophical answers, Western and Asian, to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The question, first posed by the 17th C. philosopher, Leibniz, was reintroduced in the 20th C. by Heidegger. Volume One begins with an introduction that lays out the issues raised by the Why question. It then analyzes contemporary Western philosophers who provide either cosmological-metaphysical or existential-ontological answers to the question. It also considers transitional answers that bridge the two. Volume Two examines Asian philosophers, classical and contemporary, who, though rejecting the assumptions behind the question, put forward nondualist answers that have a direct bearing on it. It concludes with an argument for a revised understanding of the Why question that draws on the strengths and weaknesses of these Western and Asian philosophies and explores implications for ethics and religious thought

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532076206

Thomas Dean

Thomas J. Dean is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Enterprise in the College of Business at Colorado State University. His research and teaching passions are at the intersection of entrepreneurship and sustainability and the economic opportunities inherent in the transition to a sustainable economy. He previously taught at the University of Colorado, where he served as Faculty Director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship and founded the Cleantech Venture Challenge business plan competition, Sustainable Opportunities Summit, and Sustainable Venturing Initiative. Professor Dean began teaching sustainable venturing courses in 2001 and has developed new conceptual links between the fields of environmental economics and entrepreneurship. He also co-founded one of the first environmental management programs at the University of Tennessee, where he served as Faculty Associate at the Energy, Environment, and Resources Center. He is currently writing a textbook on sustainable venturing and pursuing further research on the topic. Professor Dean has consulted with a number of leading organizations on strategic and environmental issues and worked with universities in the U.S., United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, and Asia to develop curricular programs in entrepreneurship, environmental management, and energy.

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Contents

PART THREE

Answering the Why Question: (II) Asia

Introduction

From Being to Nothingness.

Classical Asian Views of Emptiness and Nothingness

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nagarjuna and Emptiness

Why Nagarjuna?

Nagarjuna’s ‘Negative’ Method (Catuskoti).

Emptiness (Sunyata)

Two Truths

Soteriology

Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER TWELVE

Taoism and Nothingness

Emptiness and Nothingness

‘Daoist’ Buddhism

Nothingness in the Daodejing

Hermeneutical Issues

Concluding Remarks

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dogen and Emptiness

Why Dogen?

Practicing Emptiness

Thinking Emptiness

Language of Emptiness

Contemporary Importance of Dogen

Critical Issues.

Concluding Remarks.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nishida and Absolute Nothingness

Recapitulation

Why Nishida?

The Problem of the Relation of Religion and Philosophy.

Nishida and the Why Question

Why ‘Nishida Philosophy’?

Pure Experience.

Basho

Absolute Nothingness

Self-Identity of Absolute Contradictories

Nishida’s Philosophy of Religion and Religious Thought (I)

Nishida’s Philosophy of Religion and Religious Thought (II)

Critical Issues in Nishida’s Thought.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Nishitani: Emptiness, No Holiness

Why Nishitani?

Nishitani and Heidegger

Nishitani on Religion

Nishitani on Philosophy

Nishitani on Nihilism.

Nishitani on Science

Nishitani on Emptiness (Sunyata).

Nishitani and Time

Emptiness and Time.

Nishitani and Christianity

Nishitani and Buddhism.

Nishitani and Global Philosophy East-West

Nishitani and Ethics

Nishitani: Critique

Nishitani and the Why Question

Conclusion

The Why Question Revisited

Eschatology of the Everyday

Bibliography (Volume Two)

For Seiko

PART THREE

Answering the Why Question:

(II) Asia

Introduction

There was neither non-existence nor existence then. Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning. Poets seeking in their hearts for wisdom found the bond of existence in non-existence. (Rig Veda 10.129)

The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

Everything in the world comes out of Nothing.

While Heaven, the mother, is the creator of all beings.

(Dao De Jing, chapter 1)

We do not assert ‘empty’

We do not assert ‘nonempty’

We neither assert both nor neither.

They are asserted only conventionally, being such in name only

(Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika XXII:11)

Things are not empty because of emptiness; to be a thing is to be empty.

(Candrakirti, commenting on Nagarjuna’s MMK XIII:8)

Everything is empty … even emptiness.

(Jay Garfield, on Nagarjuna)

From Being to Nothingness.

There may be problems with Heidegger’s thinking of Being as an answer to the Why question. But why look for a better answer by turning to the East? Why the alleged need to turn from Heidegger to the traditions and thinkers of East Asia? It may be true that a critique of the problematics in Heidegger’s thought shows there are aspects of the Why question he did not satisfactorily address. But are there any compelling reasons to look in the direction of East Asia for better answers rather than, say, to thinkers in the South Asian (Indian) tradition? One could argue that there are. As Heidegger himself considered, perhaps Western thinking, in particular Western metaphysics, is tied to and limited by the grammatical structures of the Western languages, which includes Sanskrit. If so, in the search for entirely different ways of thinking about the Why question, the obvious candidates are the writing systems and philosophical traditions of East Asia. What makes this choice more thought-provoking is that in the traditions of East Asia the starting point for thinking is not being but nothingness or emptiness. East Asian thinkers do not presuppose that being or beings take priority over nothingness. Perhaps East Asian thought makes possible a radical reinterpretation of and answer to the Why question itself. At the very least this would indicate a very different construal of Heidegger’s mantra, ‘Being:Nothing:Same.’

There are further considerations. We have contended that the proper ‘object’ (Sache) of the Why question is not the existence of beings or even of the world as a whole, but rather the fact that something exists rather than nothing. What if this question is heard differently by East Asian ears? For them the Why question may not pertain to beings or world as distinguished from something; it may pertain to nothingness, to emptiness. How would this affect an interpretation of the question? To what different, unexpected, perhaps completely new solutions might that lead?

In light of this possibility, it is puzzling why a cottage industry has sprung up around the question whether Heidegger’s thinking of Being, especially in its later, more poetic formulations, was either compatible with, offered resources for, or drew on the traditions of East Asia for rethinking the question of Being – whether East Asian traditions offered new possibilities for Heidegger’s thinking or whether Heidegger’s thinking opened new doors for contemporary East Asian thinkers. What if those ‘doors’ had been ‘open’ long before and were in no need of the stimulus of Heideggerian or Western thought? Some have argued that Heidegger was not really interested in learning from East Asian thinking, that he only cherry-picked concepts or images fitting into or reinforcing positions he had already arrived at independently. Complicating things further, it could be that contemporary East Asian thinkers too, in a reversal of direction, engaged in the same procedure, stimulated by their encounter with Heidegger or other Western thinkers but only to the end of rethinking the tracks laid down for them already in their own traditions.

We should not be naive, therefore, in turning to East Asian sources and thinkers for help in finding answers to unresolved issues in Heidegger’s thinking about the Why question. In examining their thinking on those issues, we may find that East Asian thinking poses problems of its own. East Asian thinking may not succeed any better than Heidegger in answering the Why question entirely satisfactorily. East Asian thinkers too, like Heidegger, may, despite their talk of nothingness, be focused on the existence of beings, or the world, not the fact that there is something rather than nothing. Moreover, it may be that, unlike Heidegger, contemporary East Asian thinkers, even those ‘influenced’ by Heidegger, are not interested in raising the Why question at all. If so, why not? Should it matter? Is it because they find the whole problematic misguided from the start? Is it that the Why question was never a problem in the first place, only a mistaken, misleading, increasingly irrelevant issue in an era given over wholly to science, technology and the ‘thinking’ that goes along with that global fate? In this, at least, they might draw near to Heidegger after all.

Before we succumb to that dispiriting conclusion, however, we should first look at some of the differences and/or problems involved in turning to East Asia for help in thinking the Why question. What are some of the questions we should be considering, on what aspects of East Asian thought should we be focusing? Where are the problems in moving from Heidegger and the West to the thinkers of the East, from thinking of Being to thinking of Nothingness or Emptiness? As we pursue these questions, we must keep in mind the positive insights, which we should in no way abandon, of Munitz, Rundle, Post and Wittgenstein, the rich phenomenology of ‘global’ feelings of Smith, the double aspectival nature of wonder as shock and awe (Rubenstein), and of existence as anxiety and joy (Heidegger), the nature of Being as gift and an originary ethics of care and love (Witherall, Heidegger). We will be looking to see whether the pacific, irenic character of Taoism and Zen Buddhism accommodates these values so important to Western thinking.

It is important to note, in this regard, however, that this is not conceived as an exercise in ‘comparative’ philosophy. We are trying to follow the thread of our guiding question. The point is not to adjudicate, like scholars, the question of influences either way, whether upon Heidegger by East Asian thinkers or upon East Asian thinkers by Heidegger. Rather, helped by these thinkers, our goal is to pursue in our own way, on our own terms, the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? In the rich, many-sided and multi-dimensional traditions of East Asian thinking, as could be expected, there are many approaches to the issues we have been following. In particular, Asian philosophy from Nagarjuna and the Daodejing through Dogen and Zen Buddhism to the Kyoto School harbors as many views of the central concept of nothingness or emptiness as there are of being in the West from Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, through Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In the following we will not, however, be interested primarily in the ancient answers of the East Asian traditions but in the help that the contemporary Kyoto School thinkers, heirs to both classical Asian sources and modern Western philosophical thought, can give us in thinking and re-thinking the guiding question of this inquiry. Heidegger once asked why Japanese thinkers, instead of chasing after the latest vogue in Western philosophy, did not focus their efforts on rethinking and reappropriating the originary thoughts of their own classics. In this question he was mistaken. That is precisely what the Kyoto School thinkers tried to do. Whether Heidegger himself really drew on Asian thinking to rethink the Western tradition, a point of ongoing debate, the Kyoto thinkers did not see any incompatibility, in fact saw the positive benefit of learning from Western thinkers as part of what was needed as they tried to rethink their own tradition. As we shall see, in this undertaking not only were they entirely successful, in the process they have given the entire enterprise of thinking across cultural borders a profound and rewarding example of creative philosophical thinking at its best.

Classical Asian Views of Emptiness and Nothingness

The first thing one notices in moving from Western philosophy to East Asian philosophy is that the major traditions of East Asian thought are ‘religious’ philosophies, Buddhism for example, but ‘religious’ in a non-Western, that is, non-monotheistic way. The thinkers we will be looking at – the Madhyamikan Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna, the Chinese Taoists Lao-tzu and Chuang-zu, the Japanese Zen Buddhist Dogen, and two major thinkers of the Kyoto School – all without exception do their thinking about emptiness or nothingness from within a religious framework. Thus for East Asian thinkers, unlike for thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, the distinction between secular and religious worldviews is, if not nonexistent, not a primary or motivating factor. As we explore these representative East Asian philosophers, we will want to keep in mind what impact this difference has on East Asian ‘answers’ to the Why question. Not only that. How will it affect their understanding of the Why question itself? For Asian thinkers, especially Buddhists and Daoists, there is in one sense no ‘Why’ question, only a wondrous ‘That.’ The Buddha dismissed ‘why’ questions for the practical reason that they were not conducive to ‘edification.’ The ‘Why question’ throws us back onto a ‘That,’ not a ‘mere that,’ rather a transformed ‘That,’ a wondrous ‘That’ – the wondrous mystery or miracle expressed in an Asian version of a ‘felt’ metaphysics. This suggests that there are philosophical considerations inherent in the alternative ‘Way’ of thinking that characterizes Asian thought.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nagarjuna and Emptiness

Why Nagarjuna?

Historical Importance.

Nagarjuna (ca. 150-200 CE) is widely acknowledged as the most important figure in Buddhist thought after the Buddha, indeed one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of Indian philosophy. His reputation rests on several factors. He is seen as having revived the Buddha’s original philosophical ideals (Kalupahana). He is the first thinker in the Asian tradition to analyze the concept of emptiness (sunyata) in a rigorously philosophical way. Though the concept already had a long history behind it, it was Nagarjuna who gave it its central role in Buddhist thought. His philosophy of the ‘middle way’ (Madhyamika) was based on a systematical articulation of the notion of sunyata. Through him Mahayana Buddhism was given a philosophical foundation. Most Mahayana schools regard him as their founder (Nagao). Considered a ‘titanic figure’ in Buddhism, his impact on Mahayana Buddhism is without parallel in that tradition. He is taken seriously not only by the leading Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese philosophers, but more recently by many Western philosophers. That alone justifies attention to his thought. (Garfield). Specifically, given the grounding of the Kyoto School thinkers in Zen, it is significant that although a predecessor to the development of Zen Buddhism, [Nagarjuna] is, nevertheless, traditionally regarded as a patriarch of the Zen tradition (Kasulis, 1981, 16). Finally for our purposes, among the other East Asian views of emptiness or nothing we will be looking at, it is Nagarjuna who is the first to offer a radically different approach to the focal question of this study, Why is there something rather than nothing?

Nagarjuna’s philosophy.

Nagarjuna’s thought rests on three interlinked pillars: his ontological concept of emptiness (sunyata), his epistemological theory of two truths (conventional and ultimate), and the logical method (catuskoti) he uses to clear the way for the first two. These three dimensions of his philosophy in turn clear the way for a double-aspectival religious goal, the attainment of wisdom (prajna) and practice of compassion (koruna). In this we see a feature that distinguishes Asian thinking of nothing or emptiness from Western thinking of being, Heidegger included: logical, epistemological and ontological thinking are carried out in a practical spiritual context. Thus Nagarjuna’s motives as a philosopher are twofold: a critique of attempts to ground Buddhist theory in metaphysics and an adherence to spiritual practice as the existential realization of emptiness.

Emptiness (Sunyata).

The origin of Nagarjuna’s stress on emptiness was the Buddha’s silence on metaphysical questions. The Buddha’s refusal to engage in metaphysical speculation was consistent with his single-minded focus on the achievement of the spiritual goal of liberation from the samsaric cycle of birth, suffering, death and rebirth. This critique of metaphysics could be thought analogous to Heidegger’s understanding of the question of being as that which puts the being of the questioner in question since in the Buddhist context the question of emptiness only makes sense from an existential perspective that calls the self’s existence into question, the doctrine of non-self (agnate), which in turn is the origin of Buddhism’s later ‘anti-metaphysics’ or ‘an-ontology.’ Missing from Heidegger’s thinking, however, is the explicitly religious motif.

Two Truths.

Nagarjuna did not limit his thinking to an insistence on the centrality of emptiness. As important was his theory of two truths, that is, the identification (‘sameness,’ ‘belonging together,’ ‘interpenetrating’) of the ultimate truth of emptiness with the conventional truth of dependent co-origination (pratitya samutpada). For Nagarjuna this was the basic teaching of the Buddha himself. Nagarjuna saw his theory of two truths as constituting a ‘middle way’ similar to the Buddha’s, a ‘way’ that avoided the two extremes of substantialism/eternalism (sarvastavada) and annihilationism (ucchedavada)– an existential, anti-metaphysical ‘way’ that precluded all attachment (‘clinging’) to ‘views’ (drsti), even to the Buddhist teachings themselves, including, paradoxically, the truth of emptiness.

Catuskoti.

The so-called ‘negative’ or dialectical logic which Nagarjuna deployed in service of his ‘anti-metaphysics’ of emptiness and two truths is a four-valued logic called catuskoti, similar to the Greek tetralemma. It featured a structure of affirmation, negation, double affirmation and double negation: P, not P, both P and not P, neither P nor not P. Wielding this radically deconstructive, if not destructive logical weapon, his recondite arguments made of Nagarjuna a philosopher’s philosopher, notorious for a laconic, knife-edged logic that wields distinctions that no one had noticed before and that many since have been unable to see the point of (Loy, 1999). It enabled Nagarjuna to carry out a program of critical argument of reductio ad absurdum (prasanga) showing that all concepts, propositions or ‘views’ claiming to refer to or describe reality are really ‘empty of any essence or reference to allegedly self-subsistent entities, that phenomena (dharmas) lack ‘self-being’ (svabhava) and do not ‘exist’ in any ultimate sense. Nagarjuna’s deployment of the catuskoti became a watershed not only in the history of Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole, as it calls into question certain philosophical assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world (Berger).

Kyoto School.

Nagarjuna’s impact was not limited to the Indian scene. As noted, he also plays an important role as the progenitor of a contemporary line of thinking about the concepts of emptiness and nothingness that are the foundation of the 20th C. Kyoto School of thinkers (Kitaro Nishida, Keiji Nishitani, Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, Masao Abe et al). The Kyoto School thinkers specifically address the bearing of the concepts of emptiness and nothingness on the Why question in a way that takes into account the thinking of being in the Western tradition, above all that of Heidegger. However, unlike Heidegger and other major Western thinkers, with the notable exception of Schopenhauer, they do so by drawing also on the constructive resources of their own Asian philosophical traditions beginning with Nagarjuna as the first to think sunyata in a philosophical way. To understand the Kyoto School’s thinking about emptiness and nothingness, therefore, it is important to go back to the influential starting point of that tradition with Nagarjuna’s thinking of emptiness (sunyata), as Heidegger did with Parmenides’ initiation of Western thinking of being. Nagarjuna was for the Kyoto School thinkers an indispensable point of reference for their own philosophical inquiries (Westerhoff, 2014). Abe refers to Nagarjuna on numerous occasions when it comes to a discussion of the concept of ‘absolute nothingness.’ Nagarjuna also clearly influenced Nishitani as well. When Nishitani replaced ‘absolute nothingness’ (zettai mu) with ‘emptiness’ (Jp: ku, Skt: sunyata), he did so in memory of Nagarjuna (Waldenfels). For this reason, too, we must begin by asking: What are the implications of Nagarjuna’s thought for constructive thinking about the Why question?

Contemporary Importance.

There are in other words other, more than historical reasons for beginning with Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna is important in his own right still today as a thinker who can address the Why question quite apart from what later thinkers, drawing on or diverging from his thought, have said. How so? For what reasons? It might seem implausible to think that an ancient 1st-2nd century CE thinker of emptiness from India can have anything useful to say about a question not posed until centuries later in a faraway land in a Western-Christian context by a 17th-18th century CE thinker and reprised in a non-religious setting by a 20th century Western thinker of being. Several commentators on Nagarjuna’s continuing relevance explain why we should think so. How do we] explain the significance of Nagarjuna’s arguments today: for why should we be concerned about metaphysical debates between obscure Buddhist schools that thrived two thousand years ago? The significance of those philosophical views increases for us, though, if they are attempts to resolve an inconsistency that plagues our ordinary ‘commonsense’ way of understanding the world (Loy, ibid.). Again: "the questions Nagarjuna asked and the system of philosophy he founded in the second century remain very much alive in the twenty-first. The Madhyamaka project consists not just in the explanation and defense of these arguments but has to be continued in the debate with the defenders of svabhava in the contemporary philosophical discussion" (Westerhoff, ibid.). In other words, Nagarjuna’s employment of the logical method of catuskoti to deconstruct metaphysical concepts of being, grounded in our commonsense way of ‘viewing’ things, is very much to the point in this post-Heideggerian, post-Derridean era of 21st century philosophy. As has been observed, our ordinary experience is not ‘self-evident,’ for what we uncritically accept as common sense is permeated with metaphysical beliefs. (Loy, 1988, 260. Is it too much to expect that his thinking of emptiness may in fact offer a way out of the impasse generated by Western attempts to deploy the concept of being as an answer to the question why there is something rather than nothing?

We can break this query down into a series of further questions: Does Nagarjuna’s thinking of emptiness answer the Why question? If so, what can we learn from this answer? Can we discern in Nagarjuna’s ‘negative’ method ‘positive’ help in answering the Why question, even before turning to thinkers influenced by Nagarjuna or to a 21st century context? Or would Nagarjuna think the Why question is unanswerable? If so, why? What could we learn from that?

Is it rather that Nagarjuna would dismiss the Why question as a distraction from the spiritual quest for liberation, as the Buddha did vis-a-vis metaphysical questions? If so, what can we learn from that? In the latter two cases, are there not nevertheless hidden assumptions in Nagarjuna’s dismissal of metaphysics? How are we to understand Nagarjuna’s ‘middle way’ between metaphysical substance and metaphysical nihilism if he is not drawing on an implicit metaphysics of the ‘middle’? Or does it not make sense of ask that of a thinker committed to the rejection of all metaphysical ‘views’? These are the questions we will pursue as we turn to his thinking about emptiness (sunyata), his theory of two truths (conventional and ultimate), and his method of four-fold negation (catuskoti).

Critical Issues.

Before we do so, however, we must briefly remind ourselves that there may still be issues in Nagarjuna’s thought left unexplored or where his line of thinking about emptiness and nothing needs to be challenged or reinterpreted. We might confront a problematic in the tradition of East Asian thinking influenced by Nagarjuna analogous to the one confronted by Heidegger vis-a-vis the thinking of being that began with Parmenides. It may be that Nagarjuna’s ‘anti-metaphysical’ thinking, as well as that of his East Asian successors, does not after all constitute a satisfactory ‘answer’ to the Why question; it may not yet be radical enough. It may be that, despite his use of the corruscating method of catuskoti, Nagarjuna’s philosophy will prove to be nothing more than an Asian version of a metaphysical system, albeit as Loy observes a very odd one (Loy, 1988, 259). Even that, however, may be a constructive step forward in this inquiry. And so to Nagarjuna.

Nagarjuna’s ‘Negative’ Method (Catuskoti).

Nagarjuna’s method of negative argument, which deployed the critical dialectic of catuskoti, has been dubbed a logic machine that dissolved Buddhist metaphysical positions (Berger). By way of introduction, what is it that Nagarjuna’s catuskoti was not, and what in general was it intended to do? Nagarjuna’s catuskoti was not:

1. the negation of the existence of a particular;

2. a negative predicate, including the denial of a predicate;

3. a hypothetical negation whereby something which is usually considered to exist is denied;

4. a blank of unconsciousness equal to a state of dreamless sleep or death;

5. the abstract concept of ‘nothingness,’ as the opposite to being or ‘somethingness (Streng, 169). As Nagarjuna says in MMK 15:10, ‘It is’ is a notion of eternity. ‘It is not’ is a nihilistic view./Therefore, one who is wise does not have recourse to ‘being’ or ‘non–being.’

Rather, Nagarjuna’s critical dialectic (catuskoti) was a devastating dialectic, one that moves toward a radical analysis. It is a dialectic which denies the ultimate validity of any view by the negation of every assertion without admitting its opposite. As Streng clarifies: The logical procedure applied only to conventional truth and in no way could ‘establish’ absolute Truth. It only denies the assertions of the metaphysicians by accepting the rules of logic. Its purpose is "not to describe via negativa an absolute which cannot be expressed, but to deny the illusion that such a self-existent reality exists." Thus for Nagarjuna the logic of catuskoti in the MMK was a potent tool to cut into the net of illusory metaphysical dogmas based on the inherent limitations of discursive thought. It exposed a crucial dilemma: on the one hand, discursive reason can be illusory if one derives metaphysical content from the terms or logical structure of the discourse; on the other hand, "it can be revelatory if used in a critical dialectic to indicate the non-absolute quality of any assertion. (Streng, 86-87, 94, 96-97, 146, 151-152). Thus for Nagarjuna the method of catuskoti revealed the propositions of metaphysics to be like the illusions of a dream: As a magic trick, a dream or a fairy castle./Just so should we consider origination, duration, and cessation MMK 7:34).

Building on Streng’s introductory remarks we can ask several questions. What are some examples of catuskoti? How does this so-called ‘negative’ method work? What are the targets of his attacks? Does it deliver on its deconstructive claims? What paradoxes does it generate? Does it have any offsetting constructive implications, or does it have nothing positive to say? Is Nagarjuna guilty, as his critics charged and as Heidegger too was charged, of ‘ontological nihilism’? If so, it would seem unlikely that Nagarjuna’s ‘skeptical’ method could have any significance for addressing the Why question.

Examples of catuskoti.

What is Nagarjuna’s four-fold ‘negative’ method of catuskoti? The following examples illustrate the logical structure that gives form to Nagarjuna’s concept of the emptiness of all metaphysical ‘views’ (drsti) and the spiritual perspective in which it is grounded. If a reminder is needed, Nagarjuna tells us in the first selection that emptiness, in the form of the refutation of all views, it not itself a view; it is a method for deconstructing all views. To think otherwise is to succumb to the disease of turning emptiness itself into an ultimate truth.

Emptiness is proclaimed by the victorious one

as the refutation of all views;

but those who hold ‘emptiness’ as a view

(the true perceivers) have called those ‘incurable.’ (MMK 13:8)

The next three examples display the structure of affirmation, negation, double affirmation and double negation:

Everything is real, not real;

both real and not real;

neither not real nor real:

this is the teaching of the Buddha. (MMK 18:8)

Do not say empty, or not empty,

or both, or neither

these are mentioned for the sake of (conventional) understanding. (MMK 22:11)

Is there this? Is there the other?

Is there permanence? Is there impermanence?

Is there both permanence and impermanence?

Is there neither? (MMK 25: 24)

The answer to this last series of deconstructive questions is, of course:

Totally pacifying all referents

totally pacifying fixations is peace

the Buddha nowhere taught

any dharma to anyone. (MMK 25: 25)

Not all of Nagarjuna’s stanzas in the MMK take the form of ‘negative’ catuskoti. Some express his own ‘viewless’ formulation of ‘the middle way’:

Whatever is dependently co-arisen

That is explained to be emptiness.

That, being a dependent designation,

Is itself the middle way. (MMK 24:18)

There does not exist anything

That is not dependently arisen

Therefore there does not exist anything

That is not empty. (MMK 24:19)

We can paraphrase this as a Heideggerian-style mantra of wisdom (prajna): ‘Dependently Co-Arising:Empty:Same’

Finally, the paradoxical identity statement expressing the spiritual tautology of the ‘middle way’:

Samsara does not have the slightest distinction from Nirvana.

Nirvana does not have the slightest distinction from Samsara.

Whatever is the limit of Nirvana, that is the limit of Samsara.

There is not even the slightest bit of difference between these two. (MMK 25: 19-20)

Nagarjuna’s mantra of enlightened bliss: ‘Samsara:Nirvana:Same’

The Use of Catuskoti.

What is the context of Nagarjuna’s ‘negative’ method? As mentioned, the structure of the catuskoti method was not new with Nagarjuna. Already the Buddha had used a version of the method in his refusal to answer metaphysical questions. As just seen, it is this logical form to which Nagarjuna turned to articulate his concept of emptiness. Through its multiple illustrations in the MMK, the (four-valued) logic of emptiness, which could have seemed (and was in fact) the suspension of (two-valued) logic, can be seen instead as the necessary form of a devastating critique of every possible metaphysical view, whether ‘eternalism’ or ‘nihilist.’

Garfield argues that the catuskoti is a reflection of the structure of emptiness and its relationship to reality… when unpacked, the negative tetralemma is in fact a profound logical and rhetorical device for exploring the positive ontological significance of the Madhyamaka doctrine that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature. This raises a question. How can Nagarjuna’s radical, seemingly ‘nihilistic’ method be construed as having any positive ontological truth-value? What actually happens to metaphysics, indeed to thinking itself, when the ‘negative’ method of catuskoti is applied? [Nagarjuna] asserts that there are two truths, and that they are one; that everything both exists and does not exist; that nothing is existent or non-existent; that he rejects all philosophical views including his own; that he asserts nothing (Garfield & Priest, 2003). What is going on here? Where is the constructive truth in that?

Garfield goes on to say that Nagarjuna demonstrates the need for the catuskoti: We need to be able to talk about getting it right [P], getting it wrong [not P], speaking only when contradictions can reveal the truth [P and not P], and when all speech fails [neither P nor not P] (brackets added). One can imagine Nagarjuna’s response to this interpretation of his point: There is no ‘getting it right’ [P], there is no ‘getting it wrong’ [not P], there is no ‘contradiction’ [P and not P], and there is no ‘failure of speech’ [neither P nor not P]. What seems absurd for a two-valued logic is not absurd for a four-valued logic. Thinking ‘P’ or thinking ‘not P’ do not exhaust the possibilities of logic, nor does thinking ‘P-and-not-P’ represent the breakdown of logic. For Nagarjuna also asserts ‘neither P nor not P.’ Thereby he transcends two-valued logic altogether. What for two-valued logic is a failure of speech is for a four-valued logic the capstone of the logic of emptiness.

Then what is it that the negative tetralemma does accomplish? Briefly, it reduces to absurdity metaphysical propositions grounded in or claiming to ground dualities of any sort without making any metaphysical assertions itself, yet its consequences are not therefore ‘negative,’ not, as his critics charged, ‘nihilistic.’

Reductio Ad Absurdum. Nagarjuna’s object was the reductio ad absurdum (Skt. prasanga) of all opposing theories. On Nagarjuna’s view, many of our pre-theoretical and philosophical conceptions regarding the world are indeed riddled with incoherence (Garfield and Priest). Demonstrating that was the task of his MMK. Nagarjuna’s argumentative strategy was ingenious. Employing the same methods and distinctions of his opponents he aimed to convince them of the falsity of their own views without offering a view of his own. He deconstructs the type of dualities that constitute our commonsense but delusive distinction between substance and attribute, subject and predicate (Loy, 1999) on which metaphysical views are grounded. As seen in the previous section, his arguments reduce to absurdity the contradictions in both the assertion and the denial of any metaphysical claim. Every metaphysical construction of reality necessarily encapsulates irresolvable oppositions, they are intrinsically self-destructive (Kasulis, 1981, 61). The dualities on which metaphysical claims rest thus prove to be empty of any truth or reality.

Reply to Critics. Nagarjuna’s anti-metaphysical use of the catuskoti was not without its critics. His opponents were not so easily silenced. But neither was he. In his Vigrahavyavartani, v. 29, he replies: If I had even one proposition thereby it would be just as you have said. Though if I had a proposition with the characteristic that you described, I would have that fault, I have no proposition at all. Thus, since all phenomena are empty, at peace, by nature isolated, how could there be a proposition? How can there be a characteristic of a proposition? And how can there be a fault arising from the characteristic of a proposition? Thus, the statement, ‘through the characteristic of your proposition you come to acquire the fault’ is not true.

Results not Negative. In fact the results of Nagarjuna’s use of the catuskoti, while not issuing in any counter-propositions, are not for that reason simply ‘negative,’ and by no means ‘nihilistic.’ For one thing, to discover the contradictions and paradoxes that arise at the limits of thought need not be construed as a negative result. Deconstructing the ‘common sense’ views inscribed in metaphysical theories and prescinding from offering an alternative ‘view’ of his own, Nagarjuna allows something else–obvious but hitherto overlooked–to manifest (Loy, 1999). Though as the Buddha contended, there was no answer to so-called ultimate, i.e. metaphysical questions, the illness of human suffering could be diagnosed and cured with the scalpel of the catuskoti. The negation of all metaphysical propositions was a necessary step on the ‘way’ toward and outcome of a prior, existential realization of emptiness. Despite the deconstructive force of his arguments, Nagarjuna was not primarily concerned with radical negation in the realms of logic and ontology. He dissolved metaphysics in the acid bath of the catuskoti on behalf of a radical, self-composed letting go as the way to full enlightenment (Ornatowski, 1997).

The capstone double negation of the catuskoti is therefore not a ‘failure of speech,’ not a descent into speechless silence viewed from the standpoint of a two-valued logic. The double negation of two mutually negating items, neither P and nor not P, it is an absolute negation that is the ‘same’ as an ultimate affirmation. This is not an affirmation in the relative sense, but rather an affirmation in the absolute sense, because this is an affirmation realized through the double negation. This is a logical formulation of the realization of emptiness (Abe, 1997, 107).

The targets.

Before taking a closer look at the negative force of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti and the lessons it might have for thinking the Why question, it is necessary to look more closely at the target of his critique. As noted, in general it consisted of the various dualities embodied in the grammar of ordinary discourse – for example, the relation of subject to predicate elevated in the language of metaphysics to the status of absolute categories – the relation of self-subsisting substances [svabhava] to their necessary or contingent attributes. Nagarjuna called into question the basic categorical presuppositions and criteria of proof assumed by almost everyone in the Indian tradition to be axiomatic (Berger, IEP, n.d.). That such dualities are ingredient in and perhaps even pragmatically necessary for practical communication as markers of ‘lower’ or conventional truth, offering us everyday access to the empirical or instrumental world of persons and things, does not mean they describe the ‘higher’ or metaphysical truth of ‘the way things really are.’ What Nagarjuna’s deconstructive logic shows is that, despite its entrenched status in the ‘common sense’ of ordinary language, once put under the coruscating lens of the catuskoti the ‘relationship’ between the two elements of the dualities cannot stand up to closer analysis.

"Nagarjuna’s arguments against self-existence [svabhava] show the inconsistency in our everyday, taken-for-granted way of ‘taking the world’ (Loy, 1999). Both the grammar of ordinary language and the structures of metaphysics build upon them dissolve into hopeless nonsense if taken as descriptions of absolute truth or ultimate reality. Nirvana, as Yadav observed, is cognitive nonsense, a ‘scandal’ for logic. It is nonsense because it is not a category that admits of either cognitive affirmation or cognitive denial. Not only that, it is an offense to metaphysics as well. It is this logic as the methodology of making ontological claims that Nagarjuna seeks to destroy. For Nagarjuna, the metaphysical, theological and ideological controversies cannot be resolved on a rational level. This would be mistaking a symptom for the cause. Metaphysics proves to be a methodological fantasy; to be committed to category mistakes is its structural requirement" (Yadav, 451-452, 463, 466, 468- 469). Thus, Nagarjuna’s critique was not limited to the linguistic categories we normally use for understanding the world. It embraced the alleged metaphysical referents of those categories as well. He extended the original Buddhist idea of ‘no-self’ to include not only the idea of a self distinct from its properties but to the notion of entities as such.

It might seem that for Nagarjuna the catuskoti is simply directed against an epistemological-cum-ontological conundrum to be dissolved by linguistic or cognitive analysis. It is surely designed to do that. But that is not its primary point. It is in service of a larger, spiritual goal. Its point is to dissolve our existential attachment to persons and things mistaken as enduring realities [svabhava] capable of resisting the corrosive effects of time. By hypostatizing such a ‘thingness’ out of the flux of experience we become attached to things–again, the primal attachment being (to) the sense of self (Loy, 1999).

Nagarjuna’s rampage through the notions of the philosophers is directed at uncovering their ultimate nonsense with a view to releasing men from humiliating bondage to them….Nagarjuna attacks more than the philosophical fancies of Indian metaphysicians, for there is a metaphysics, although an inconsistent one, inherent in our everyday view – most personally and painfully in the contradiction between my sense of myself as something nontemporal and unchanging (i.e., as distinct from my attributes, such as body) and the awareness that I am growing older and subject to death (indistinguishable from attributes such as ‘my’ body). It is one or another aspect of this dualistic view that is made absolute in systematic metaphysics. This commonsense understanding is what makes the world samsara for us, and it is this samsara that Nagarjuna is concerned with deconstructing. (ibid.)

"This ‘I’, a dispositional heritage as it is, grasps and selects; it measures, judges and makes truth-claims (managatam), it generalizes, collectivizes and then transcendentalizes its dispositions and thinks it is making ontological claims. It now confuses seeing as with seeing" (Yadav, 469). Thus the catuskoti is intended to act as an antidote to the dis-ease, the many forms of suffering, intrinsic to existence itself. If the hold of these attachments could be exorcised, one could live in a way that no longer experienced things as impermanent and their loss as painful; one could accept the world ‘as it is.’ Nagarjuna’s catuskoti opens the door to the diagnosis and removal of suffering (Berger, IEP, n.d.).

One point remains to be settled. Several commentators (e.g. Garfield, Loy, and Garfield-Priest) see Nagarjuna’s critique of metaphysical dualities as itself generating another dualism, namely, one between language and silence. Is this alleged meta-duality an essential or inescapable dualism at the heart of Nagarjuna’s critique? Does a dualism between the metaphysical deceptions embedded in ordinary language and a so-called ‘higher’ truth or ‘enlightenment’ to which silence is alleged to point constitute an inherent problematic at the heart of Buddhism itself? Or does Nagarjuna call that meta-duality into question as well? Is that what Nagarjuna was trying to say in his paradoxical identity statement, his mantra of enlightened bliss: ‘Samsara:Nirvana:Same’?

Negative implications.

Before exploring the liberative potential of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti, we should take a closer look at two of the targets of his critique so see what lessons it might have for thinking the Why question. As noted, Nagarjuna’s arguments are not directed simply at the mistaken dualities of metaphysics, but at the even more pernicious view that metaphysical theories were the condition and justification of religious truth. Hence his insistence on the undermining of metaphysical views tout court by means of a strategy of methodical doubt as methodical as that of the metaphysical theories it was meant to eliminate. His case revolved in particular around showing and then critiquing the dependence of metaphysical views of the world and the self on the concepts embedded in ordinary language.

Critique of the ‘Own-Being’ of the Self. The metaphysical self is conceived as the unchanging subject, a ‘ghost in the machine,’ that ‘has’ and holds together our changing mental and bodily states, the agent that makes the choices that give shape to our lives. But according to Nagarjuna, our ascribing these states and actions grammatically and conceptually to the ‘own-being’ (svabhava) of a self does not mean that such a self-being exists in an ontologically ultimate sense. To speak of the self and its properties in terms of a substratum and its qualities is perfectly acceptable as long as we do not assume that such talk is based on a distinction with an ontological grounding (Westerhoff, 2014). Then what ‘is’ the self? For Nagarjuna, as for the Buddha, the self is a continuously changing array of five psycho-physical aggregates….without an inner core. Even more radically, If we conceive of the self as a temporally stretched-out compound of psycho-physical events, then there is no fundamental difficulty that the same type of event turns up on the cognizing subject side on one occasion, and on the cognized object side on another (ibid.). Does William James and his radical empiricist phenomenology of the ‘double-barreled’ nature of experience – now subject, now object – come to mind here? As Westerhoff clarifies:

The emerging view of the self is characterized by two main properties. Firstly it is to be regarded as a sequence of events that stand in close temporal and causal relations….The self is not seen as a cognitive nucleus which stays constant amidst the stream of changing sensory impressions and mental deliberations, but rather as the entire set of such sensory and mental events which are interconnected in complicated ways. Not only does the self depend for its existence on the constituents, but the constituents only acquire their existence as distinct parts of the stream of mental and physical events by being associated with a single self, which, regarded as a constitutive property, produces the basis for postulating the individual in which the various properties of the self inhere. Secondly, the self is characterized by a mistaken self-awareness….To this extent it is deluded about its real nature. (ibid.)

Critique of the ‘Own-Being’ of the World. As already mentioned, Nagarjuna’s critique of the substance or ‘own-being’ (svabhava) of the self applies not only to the world of subjects, our own ‘self’ ‘and that of others, it applies as well to the world of objects, the things in our ‘environing’ world. Here too Westerhoff provides a helpful precis of what he terms Nagarjuna’s ‘anti-foundationalism’ or what we have been calling his ‘anti-metaphysics.’

Only establishing that conceptual dependence does not have a foundation is sufficient for establishing the absence of svabhava in the comprehensive sense intended….Only if we can show that no objects exist independently with respect to conceptual dependence are we able to establish Nāgārjuna’s anti-foundationalism in the full sense…. it is this dependence on cognition or conceptualization that is generally regarded as the most profound understanding of emptiness. [Again] There is no ready-made world that is already sliced in such a way. The very notion of such a ‘way things really are’ is argued by the Madhyamika to be incoherent. There is no way of investigating the world apart from our linguistic and conceptual practices, if only because these practices generate the notion of the ‘world’ and of the ‘objects’ in it in the first place. To speak of conventional reality as distorted is therefore highly misleading, unless all we want to say is that our way of investigating the world is inextricably bound up with the linguistic and conceptual framework we happen to employ (ibid.).

Something which zunachst and zumeist, at first and for the most part, reflects our pragmatic concerns, that is, our ‘view’ of things as free-standing individual entities, turns out not to reflect their intrinsic, i.e. ‘empty’ nature. Our concepts of those allegedly independent phenomena collapse when subjected to the critical solvent of the catuskoti. Rather, the dual ‘realities’ – substance and property, cause and effect, agent and act – the alleged ‘poles’ of our concepts of things and their relations – prove not to be independent realities (svabhava) that must somehow be brought into ‘relation’ with one another. Rather they are dependently co-arising, that is, they mutually depend for their ‘existence’ on one another. ‘Ontologically’ the situation is even more radical than that. It is not simply that the substances depend on their properties for their existence, that causes depend existentially on their effects, that agents would not exist apart from their actions. Substances are their properties, and vice versa; causes are their effects, and vice versa; agents are their actions, and vice versa. Substance:Property:Same. Cause:Effect:Same. Agent:Actions:Same.

Paradoxical conundrums.

Those Heideggerian paraphrases – Substance:Property:Same, etc., and the tautological statements they summarize, ‘Substances are their properties,’ etc.. – may be too hasty, may misstate the logical paradox in which the catuskoti entangles itself. The problem is that Nagarjuna’s use of the four-fold device appears to end up in self-contradictory propositions in which talk of ‘emptiness’ evaporates into thin air, into mystery. Kasulis comments perhaps wryly: [Nagarjuna] appreciated the logical paradox of absolutely denying the absoluteness of all philosophical standpoints (Kasulis, 1981, 17). But to revel in paradox does not necessarily mean one is on the way to enlightenment. It could mean, as critics charged, that Nagarjuna simply ends up tying himself in nihilistic ‘nots.’ Nagarjuna seems to have landed us in a logical impasse – to be to saying what cannot be said. Does he not violate the mystical wisdom of Wittgenstein’s Whereof one cannot speak, thereof he should be silent (Tractatus 7)? Can Nagarjuna be ‘saved’ from himself? Is there a ‘positive shadow’ in Nagarjuna’s ‘deep paradox’?

The answer hinges on whether the distinction between statements made at the conventional level and statements made at the ultimate level, between as it were first-order language and the meta-language of second-order speech, offer a way out. Garfield seems to think it does. What is his argument? At the conventional level, he claims, Nagarjuna’s catuskoti does not involve paradox. Drawing on the later Tibetan Prasangikan Tsongkhapa, he argues that in the first verse of the Mulamadhyamakakarika on causality, for example, the four statements at the conventional level can be ‘parameterized,’ that is, rewritten to make explicit the implied modifying phrase ‘inherent,’ thus rendering the assertions mutually consistent.

Not from itself

Not from other,

Not from both,

Not without a cause

Does anything anywhere ever arise. (MMK I:1)

Inserting ‘inherent’ (svabhava) the negative assertions would read:

Not from an inherent self,

Not from an inherent other,

Not from an inherent both,

Not from an inherent nothingness (i.e. causelessness)

Does anything anywhere ever arise

There is no contradiction if the catuskoti is now read: ‘x does not arise from an inherent self, x does not arise from an inherent other self, nor does x arise from an inherent self and inherent other, nor does x arise from inherent nothingness/causelessness.’ Thus at the level of conventional discourse P and not P can both be true individually as can their conjoined affirmation and their conjoined denial. (Note that there is no ‘inherent nothingness,’ that is, no ‘inherent emptiness’; emptiness is not an inherent ‘something’, it is itself ‘empty.’)

Each the statements is a non-affirming negation which negates the subject (an inherent cause for the arising of a conventional phenomenon) without affirming some other entity in its place. These four possibilities include all the possible ways that a conventional entity could come to be if it arose through an inherent cause. Each of the modes of inherent causality (or causelessness) is negated in sequence – from self, from other, from both, from no cause – leaving an absence of inherent causality. Thus Wittgenstein’s fly is out of the fly bottle!

But if so, where does this leave the status of statements made at the ultimate level? Or are the assertions of the catuskoti already made from the perspective of ultimate truth? If so, then what are we to make of statements made from the standpoint of conventional ‘truth’? Are they hopelessly mired in delusion, what Buddhism calls ‘ignorance’? Is this the ‘deep paradox’ to which Garfield alerted us? If so, where or what is the ‘positive shadow’?

Unfortunately here Garfield threatens to leave us hanging in mid-air, at a loss for words, speechless, for he tells us that at the ultimate level the catuskoti takes us straight to paradox, since we are forced to say what we cannot say, in other words to silence, to a silence that is itself paradoxical – paradox upon paradox! "Silence, if it is articulate, lands us in a paradox. For it says both that nothing can be said, and that. Silence, that is, if it is to be articulate, is a kind of speech, it lands us back in the paradox it seeks to avoid." Nagarjuna’s catuskoti reveals that ultimate reality is deeply paradoxical. (Garfield, 52). But what, exactly, is that which cannot be said? The MMK is composed to twenty-six chapters some of which run to many stanzas. Nagarjuna at least seemed to have had a lot say despite the paradox of silence!

With yet another surprise of his sleeve, Garfield tells us, faithfully restating Nagarjuna’s MMK 25:19-20, that in fact the catuskoti shows us that "the consistent conventional truth is identical with the paradoxical ultimate truth" (ibid.; my emphasis). Of course! If, that is, we take the statements of the catuskoti showing the consistency of the conventional level as made from the standpoint of ultimate truth, i.e., the anti-svabhava truth of emptiness. But that leaves us faced with a puzzling ambiguity: are the statements of the catuskoti allegedly made at the conventional level of discourse statements made at the conventional level of delusive discourse, or are they statements made at the level of conventional-as-rewritten discourse, that is, at the level of enlightened discourse? In other words, are they already-enlightened statements, not conventional ones at all? If so, then we should not be surprised that such ‘consistent’ conventional truths are ‘identical’ with statements of ‘ultimate’ truth. The only question then would be: why would anyone think they suddenly became ‘paradoxical’ at the level of ‘ultimate’ truth? The consistent, i.e. re-written non-paradoxical conventional truth just is the ultimate truth; ultimate truth just is non-paradoxical conventional truth. QED! Harking back to Benavides, isn’t it the case that conventional statements of P, not P, etc., taken to be paradoxical as normally, i.e., delusively understood, are converted into tautologies when interpreted as rewritten, i.e, from the standpoint of enlightened (‘ultimate’) wisdom? Is it Nagarjuna who needs to be saved here, or is it Garfield? Obviously something more needs to be said. But what?

Garfield and Priest jointly authored an article that may yet save the interpreters and Nagarjuna both. The title alone indicates where the conundrum lies: Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought (although the title of Loy’s essay does just as well: Language against its own Mystifications: Deconstruction in Nagarjuna). The problem Nagarjuna and his interpreters are facing is how to make sense of linguistic utterances at the limits of linguistic utterance. Was Wittgenstein right after all? There are some things, such as the ‘ultimate truth’ or the ‘intrinsic nature’ of things, of which we cannot speak, where words run up against their limits, the point at which we encounter either paradox or tautology where nothing more can or remains or even needs to be said, in which case regarding such mysterious or mystical matters we cannot and therefore should not try to make problematic, pretentious or portentous metaphysical pronouncements. No more P’s please!

So how do Garfield and Priest propose to help Nagarjuna (assuming he needs help) square the circle? How do they propose to get that nirvanic fly out of the samsaric fly bottle? Or can they?

They try to do so by drawing on a theory about how language functions, or fails to function, at what they term ‘the limits of thought,’ where language falls victim to, or succeeds in avoiding, the trap of its own ‘mystifications.’ The problem, they say, is that such theories end up implying that they themselves cannot be thought, described or grasped. Yet it would appear that they can be thought, described and grasped. Otherwise, what on earth is the theory doing?

That is precisely Nagarjuna’s question. What are the ‘non-affirmation negations’ of the catuskoti actually doing? Garfield and Priest go even further. The reason why language ends up in self- contradiction, mystified by its own limits, why any theory of the limits that is anywhere near adequate will be inconsistent, is because "those limits are themselves are contradictory (Garfield & Priest, 2003; my emphasis). The limits themselves resist any attempt to speak consistently about them. Any such attempt would have to speak from the other side of those limits, would have to transcend them, in other words, would have to use language to do what language by definition cannot do – have linguistic access to a trans-linguistic reality to which, by definition, it could have no access. (Wittgenstein: the limits of language are the limits of my world," Tractatus 5.6)

Interestingly our authors argue that Nagarjuna himself did not try to avoid but rather endorsed the contradictions that arise the limits of thought. Nagarjuna seems to have hit upon a limit contradiction unknown in the West, and to suggest connections between ontological and semantic contradictions worthy of attention. The citations from Wittgenstein indicate that this may not be entirely true. However, it is an assertion that has to be tracked down and either made sense of or dismissed as having missed Nagarjuna’s point. It is important to note where Nagarjuna’s alleged ‘limit contradictions’ are located. We have already seen that Garfield, and now Garfield and Priest, do not think that for Nagarjuna they are located at the level of conventional speech (though we have noted an ambiguity – fatal? – in the referent of the phrase, ‘conventional’). As they maintain: "Nagarjuna himself never asserts that there are true contradictions in this realm… Nagarjuna takes reductio arguments to be decisive in this domain…in particular cases Nagarjuna himself rejects the contradiction and endorses the conventional claim whose negation entails the contradiction" (Garfield & Priest, 2003). Again, it is not clear what the referent of ‘conventional claim’ is here: P as normally, i.e., delusively understood, or P as understood from the ‘ultimate’ standpoint of emptiness, i.e. enlightenment?

The risk they see, however, is that Nagarjuna’s ‘positionless position’ may itself be open to the charge of inconsistency. They see their task as rescuing him from that propositional fate. Nagarjuna’s critics of course have not been so charitable. To them his view smacks of something much worse than a logical peccadillo. Nagarjuna’s reductios represent a calamitous betrayal of Buddhism itself, an abject descent into nihilism. At first glance Nagarjuna’s ‘position’ does indeed seem hopeless. They see two possible ways out.

First, take the foundation stone of Nagarjuna’s ‘middle way,’ the claim that everything is empty, including emptiness itself. They call this Nagarjuna’s ‘first limit contradiction’: "Ultimate truths are those about ultimate reality. But since everything is empty, there is no ultimate reality. There are, therefore, no ultimate truths (Garfield & Priest, 2003; my emphasis). Alternatively: To express anything in language is to express truth that depends on language, and so this cannot be an expression of the way things are ultimately. All truths, then, are merely conventional. In other words, the views one must surrender are those about ultimate reality: there is no such thing as the ultimate nature of reality. That is what it is for all phenomena to be empty. What is the contradiction here? [Nagarjuna] is telling us about the nature of ultimate reality. There are, therefore, ultimate truths. Indeed, that there is no ultimate reality is itself a truth about ultimate reality, and is therefore an ultimate truth" (ibid.; my emphasis). So are there or are there not ultimate truths? Well, yes…and no. So this first way seems to end up in a (limit) paradox.

Perhaps there is a second way to save Nagarjuna from (apparent) inconsistency. What if we say Nagarjuna’s assertions that appear to be statements of ultimate truth state merely conventional, and not ultimate, truths after all? When Nagarjuna says that things are ultimately empty, he is simply saying that when we analyze them critically we can find no essence, no ‘own-being’ (svabhava). But this dodge does not work either. For this is to say that the result of this ultimate analysis is the discovery that all things are empty, and that they can be no other way. This, hence, is an ultimate truth about them. Their conclusion seems a less than ringing endorsement of Nagarjuna’s ‘non-affirming negations’:

There is, then, no escape. Nagarjuna’s view is contradictory. The contradiction is, clearly a paradox of expressibility. Nagarjuna succeeds in saying the unsayable, just as much as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. We can think (and characterize) reality only subject to language, which is conventional, so the ontology of that reality is all conventional. It follows that the conventional objects of reality do not ultimately (non-conventionally) exist. It also follows that nothing we say of them is ultimately true. That is, all things are empty of ultimate existence; and this is their ultimate nature, and is an ultimate truth about them. They hence cannot be thought to have that nature; nor can we say that they do. But we have just done so. As Mark Siderits (1989) has put it, the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth. (Garfield and Priest, 2003)

Alas, poor Nagarjuna! We thought we knew him well, but apparently he is not going to be ‘saved’ from his (non-intrinsic) self after all!

Critical Remarks.

Is this what it all comes down to? A conventionalist, nominalist theory of language imposed on Nagarjuna’s catuskoti? A straightforward affirmation of conventional discourse suitably ‘paramenterized’ to yield a level of discourse that is consistent, free of paradox? Is that the ‘positive shadow’ lurking behind the alleged ‘deep paradox’ of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti? After all the paralogical fireworks, the logical legerdemain, a rather lame, disappointing, indeed ‘empty’ conclusion! Something has gone badly wrong here. What is the problem? Where is it located?

It is found in the ambiguities inherent in their over-logicized (or perhaps under-logicized) understanding of both conventional-level and ultimate-level statements and the relationship of those different level statements, thus interpreted, to truth/reality.

The statements they cite as contemporary reformulations of Nagarjuna’s alleged contradictions at the limits of language – the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth (Siderits); the intrinsic nature of things is to lack intrinsic nature (Garfield, 52) – rest on an ambiguity in their use of the offending words, ‘ultimate’ and ‘intrinsic.’ In each case the first use of those terms is not Nagarjuna, not an ‘empty’ use. To engage in our own hermeneutical sleight-of-hand, these two statements can be ‘parameterized,’ i.e., disambiguated without loss of meaning, to read: the empty truth is that there is no ultimate truth, i.e. an unparadoxical meta-assertion, there is no ultimate truth; claims to such truths are empty of substance; again: the empty nature of things is to lack intrinsic nature, this latter being a stipulated or tautological definition: to be a thing is to be empty of intrinsic nature.

The problem is even worse than that. Their reading of Nagarjuna’s ‘non-affirmative negations’ is a total inversion, an upside-down, topsy-turvy misreading of the whole point of Nagarjuna’s catuskoti. From the point of view of two-valued logic, that is, conventional logic, Nagarjuna’s