‘Snakes and Ladders’ – ‘Therapy’ as Liberation in Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

This paper reconsiders the notion that Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus may only be seen as comparable under a shared ineffability thesis, that is, the idea that reality is impossible to describe in sensible discourse. Historically, Nagarjuna and the early Wittgenstein have both been widely construed as offering either metaphysical theories or attempts to refute all such theories. Instead, by employing an interpretive framework based on a ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus, I suggest we see their philosophical affinity in terms of a shared conception of philosophical method without proposing theses. In doing so, this offers us a new way to understand Nagarjuna’s characteristic claims both to have ‘no views’ (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13.8 and 27.30) and refusal to accept that things exist ‘inherently’ or with ‘essence’ (svabhāva). Therefore, instead of either a view about the nature of a mind-independent ‘ultimate reality’ or a thesis concerning the rejection of such a domain, I propose that we understand Nagarjuna’s primary aim as ‘therapeutic’, that is, concerned with the dissolution of philosophical problems. However, this ‘therapy’ should neither be confined to the psychotherapeutic metaphor nor should it be taken to imply a private enlightenment only available to philosophers. Instead, for Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are cast as a source of disquiet for all of us; what their work offers is a soteriology, a means towards our salvation

Why is there nothing rather than something? An essay in the comparative metaphysics of nonbeing

The paper is an essay in the comparative metaphysics of nothingness that begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the opposite question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral ‘zero’ (śānya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g. ‘In the beginning was neither non-being nor being’ RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries, variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools, in respect of the function of negation /the negative copula, nãn, fraying into ontologies of non-existence and extinction; not least also the suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After some passing references to interests in non-being and nothingness in contemporary (Western) thinking, the paper dwells at some length on Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1927 inaugural lecture ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, published later as What is Metaphysics? The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Nihilism