Nagarjuna · Theology
Nagarjuna’s startling logic - denying that a thing is, is not, both is and is not, or neither - and his refusal to hold any thesis at all.
Confront Nagarjuna with any metaphysical question - does the self exist? did the world begin? is the enlightened one still present after death? - and he does something disorienting. He denies all four possible answers. The thing in question, he says, neither exists, nor does not exist, nor both exists and does not exist, nor neither exists nor does not exist. This is the catuskoti, the ‘four corners’ or tetralemma - a logical net that seems to catch and reject every conceivable position, leaving the questioner with nowhere to stand.
Here is Nagarjuna’s most radical claim about his own method: he asserts no thesis. He does not argue that things are empty as a positive doctrine to replace the views he refutes; emptiness is not his ‘theory of what reality is really like.’ His arguments work entirely by reductio - taking an opponent’s view and drawing out its hidden contradictions, until the view collapses under its own weight. He adds nothing of his own to defend. Like a doctor who cures a disease without thereby asserting a rival disease, Nagarjuna dissolves mistaken views without erecting a new position to be attacked in turn. His philosophy is a medicine, not a metaphysics.
Why this relentless dismantling of every position? Because, for Nagarjuna, the goal is not to win the philosophical game by holding the correct view, but to be free of the grasping that all fixed views express. Every metaphysical position - ‘the self exists,’ ‘the self doesn’t exist’ - is a form of clinging, a place the mind tries to stand and grab hold. Emptiness, rightly understood, is not one more such place but the relinquishing of all of them. To turn emptiness itself into a view - ‘the doctrine that everything is empty’ - is, Nagarjuna warns, the worst error of all, like grasping a snake by the wrong end. The four-cornered negation is meant to pry the mind loose from every handhold, until there is nothing left to cling to - and in that letting-go, peace.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Nagarjuna negates all four corners of the tetralemma and claims to assert no thesis. Explain how this method works and what he thinks it accomplishes, in your own words.
Leads to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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