Headaches and Nagarjuna
When I want to give myself a bad headache and knacker my chances of decent sleep (which may sound irrational and masochistic-and it probably is), I try to read the verses of Nagarjuna (Buddhist philosopher from India in the 2nd century). The treatise’s title is translated as “the Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way”(Mulamadhyamakakarika). ‘Middle way’ here refers to the Buddhist disposition to abandon conceptual extremes in terms of radical dualities like eternalism and annihilationism, of existence and non-existence.
Nagarjuna is not a philosopher I go to often for contemplation. I’m not very well developed in terms of Buddhist understanding and meditation, and I still do grasp at words and concepts to base my thinking (or non-thinking!) off. Nagarjuna's verses are not ones I grasp at. If anything, the composition makes me more confused. But I still see the immense value in his work (I’m just not often willing to stick my own mind into it!)
(Very) briefly, Nagarjuna’s method of the negation of propositions concerning the nature of reality- of causes and conditions, of phenomena and discernment, of views- pushes what could be called objective logic to it’s limits and in so doing negates it’s claims to ultimacy; ultimacy in having anything substantial to say about the world, or ultimate truth. But then, of course, in negating it’s absolute claims Nagarjuna reveals it’s relative validity. The doctrine, or paradox, of the two truths; the phenomena of the world as we perceive and understand them -including the ordinary perceptions of ourselves- and our practical reasoning abilities have a conventional existence and have access to relative truths. Those phenomena and our perceptions of them and of ourselves are ultimately unreal in that they have no underlying substantial reality apart from their existence as phenomena.
The world is illusion,
but the illusion does exist.
What can be pointed to (what I point to anyway!) with Nagarjuna’s analysis is the practical nature of human reasoning and it’s own limitations. Not to dismiss the value of practical reasoning in getting a handle on what is presented to us through the senses as the empirical universe. Simply to realise the practicality of it’s relative truths to ourselves as embodied living organisms and to understand that taken to extreme ends, logical analysis breaks apart into absurdities and impossibilities.
We dwell in, and as, this contradictory identity; not quite Kant’s epistemological dualism of phenomenon and noumenon, nor even Schopenhauer’s wherein he eventually did posit an at least internally discernible essence he called the will. Nagarjuna’s ultimate truth is more radical; it is the absolute denial of any essence, of anything that can be said outside of relative truth while also, by implication, not denying ultimate truth as the contradictory identity of the conventional existence of phenomena and their ultimate non-existence.
Whatever is ultimate is not subject to the kind of objectification and analysis that our language is structured according to. Whatever we pick out from experience, ‘internally or externally’ for analysis is, right there, an abstract based more on our interests either for sensible manipulation (as in using, production, creative work etc) and or practical reasoning and explanation than any ultimate individuality of that thing and any individual essence. Taken to an extreme as we find in both Plato and Aristotle, the conversion of what began as a practical tool through language (the understanding of things according to our interests as living human beings) to reification through philosophical positions lumbered western philosophy with concepts the genesis of which lay in and was shaped by very anthropocentric interests. What cannot be merely objectified, merely expressed, merely analyzed is (?) in a sense, ultimately real.
Not to forget to live when analysing life, not to eliminate analysis from living. That is what I get from my own limited understanding of Nagarjuna. That, and...oh dear...
Time for a headache....