The Difficulty of Nāgārjuna

0. Whatever else a text is, it is at least this: a series of marks on a physical surface (ink on a page, pixels on a screen) presenting themselves as marks of language. How these and not other marks ‘present themselves’ as marks of language—how these and not other marks manage to count as writing—is a hard question for the theory of language to answer. It is a question whose difficulty the humanities in general, and philosophy and literature in particular, have the unique responsibility to remind us of. For whatever difficulties already attach themselves to the study of humanity and its artefacts, writing poses a special one.

The special difficulty is that among artefacts—among things we create and leave behind—writing is a unique form of self-expression: expression of someone’s point of view, from that very point of view. Writing is not like stone tools or smartphones: it is direct expression, not a sign, of self-conscious life. Writing is not some thing indicating the existence of some other thing, rational life. Rather, writing is someone telling us something, someone speaking. It is rational life speaking for itself, to itself: a human being speaking for themselves, yet therein speaking to another. Written words seem to be dead signs, awaiting the breath of life tempting to call ‘interpretation,’ only from within a fantasy of words being something else than we human beings, separately and self-standingly existing. But this is fantasy. Written words are not the signs of a human perspective, but the embodied, living expression of a human perspective. This means there is no extricating what a text is—a tally of grain, a poem, an argument—from what someone, somewhere, was once (and is now) trying to express.

1. Engagement with Nāgārjuna’s texts is liable to remind us—or at least, to remind me—of the above difficulty about the nature of text. For the words of Nāgārjuna’s texts present the deep problem of expression. ‘What are you really saying?’ is a common question for a reader of a difficult text to ask of the author. It is a question expressing puzzlement. But the puzzlement is typically lifted by reading more. In Nāgārjuna’s case, the puzzlement is only deepened by reading more. His texts present a special form of difficulty to the reader, what we might call a self-intensifying difficulty.

The sort of self-intensifying difficulty Nāgārjuna produces is, arguably, distinctly philosophical. The difficulty produced is part and parcel with a difficulty distinctive of doing philosophy, namely of distinguishing mere appearances of understanding (sophistry) from genuine understanding. There may well be a strong aesthetic effect to such work, but aesthetic effect is not the point. And fellow travelers with Nāgārjuna here would not be all philosophical texts (or at least, not all texts presently classified as philosophical). It would exclude the treatise and other texts of intellectual persuasion. But among the fellow travelers would be texts such as Descartes’s Meditations, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Kierkegaard’s Postscript, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

If these are works of illumination, it is illumination of a peculiar and perverse sort. For to read these texts is to become less rather than more sure of oneself, to progressively unlearn and discover oneself to be more and more ignorant. Their aim is not to persuade. Their aim is to show you the way out of illusions of knowing. The words of such philosophical texts are the voice of neither orator nor scholar, who would aim to win you over to a thesis or worldview, be it by passion or intellect. Rather, their words are the voice of a friend. Such philosophical texts are Socratic—or as we might more precisely put it, with Socrates in mind, daimonic texts. Such texts do not sooth or pacify, but are likely to induce rude and unwelcome awakening. They induce not wonder and marvel but instead disorientation and stupefaction. They induce a distinctively spiritual suffering—and yet, not pointlessly. Daimonic texts make your human life less easy, yet therein more luminously human.

2. Nāgārjuna’s texts are daimonic texts. By ‘Nāgārjuna’s texts,’ I do not mean the 116 texts attributed to the historical Nāgārjuna by the Tibetan canon, but rather the set of six texts known as the Yukti-corpus. Yet on what grounds do I say that Nāgārjuna’s texts are daimonic? I say so on the basis of three simple and uncontroversial observations about the words of these texts:

i) Nāgārjuna’s words seem to be telling us—indeed, quite emphatically—how things are: that everything is empty, including the doctrine of emptiness; that the meaning of ‘emptiness’ is dependent origination; and that the realization of emptiness leads to the cessation of suffering. That is, he appears to hold theses.

ii) Nāgārjuna’s words also appear to be arguments. That is, he seems to be explaining—indeed, quite systematically—why what he is telling us is the case: why everything is empty, including the doctrine of emptiness; why the meaning of ‘emptiness’ is dependent origination; and why the realization of emptiness leads to the cessation of suffering. And he often seems to argue for his positions in the manner of rigorously defending these positions from objections.

iii) However, Nāgārjuna avows both directly (VV 29) and indirectly (YṢ 50-51) that he holds no theses.

3. This puzzle is not new. Traditionally, it has been treated via the Prasaṅgika/Svataṅtrika dispute, concerning whether prasaṅga is Nāgārjuna’s only form of reasoning. But shared between disputants is an assumption: that if prasaṅga is the only form, then he holds no theses. I challenge this assumption. I do so by examining whether, quite independently of the success of Nāgārjuna’s tetralemmas, the appearances of assertoric content in his texts are indeed assertoric, or whether they are rather elucidatory by way of a renunciation—much in the way proposition 6.54 of Wittgensteins' Tractatus reveals that what appeared to the reader as a series of positive claims were, in fact, well-disguised nonsense aimed at bringing her own confusion to light.