I would consider Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka works (the “yukti-corpus”) to be “trans-philosophical,” which is to say that he (as the prefix “trans-” suggests) goes “beyond” or “across” philosophy.
His works are not philosophical, because they do not attempt to build a system of thought that speculatively induces or transcendentally deduces the conditions of experience formed as a categorical scheme, nor do they provide meta-analyses of the structures of thought itself (via studies of logic, language, and reason). Neither are they meta-philosophical, because they are not philosophical reflections on the nature of philosophical thinking. Yet they are not strictly non-philosophical either, because many of the views he subjects to rigorous analytic scrutiny can be rightly seen as philosophical in nature. Therefore Nāgārjuna’s dispositional stance towards philosophy can be construed as one that is responsive yet disengaged: playing with, but not playing as, the philosopher.
I believe Nāgārjuna’s works are trans-philosophical because he demonstrates (through negative dialectical reasoning) that the genetic origin — as well as the teleological terminus — of all thought is (the mis/recognition of) the truth of the principle of Open/Emptiness. In theoretical terms open/emptiness is understood as the ultimate nature of reality qua absence of any inherent, existential grounding in the four “extreme” states of being, non-being, both being and non-being and neither being nor non-being. In practical terms open/emptiness is realized as the non-dual, gnoseological basis of the mind itself. The theoretical concept of open/emptiness (what has been called the “categorical ultimate”) is a conventional means of turning our mind towards an intimation with the genuine open/emptiness in our own, direct, unmediated experience of reality (what has been called the “non-categorical ultimate”) in living praxis. Nāgārjuna needs to provide us with the categorical, theoretical concept of open/emptiness at least provisionally because, as he says, “the ultimate truth is not taught independently of customary walks of talking and thinking.¹” In spite of (or perhaps, because of) its highly functional practical nature, the concept of open/emptiness does not assent to the status of philosophical concept precisely because “open/emptiness is taught by the conquerors as the expedient to get rid of all views².”
So clearly, Nāgārjuna does not intend to do philosophy, for his ultimate intent is driven by a soteriological pragmatism that aims for the transformation of the mind-body complex from a stressful state of spiritual nescience to a blissful state of spiritual omniscience, and affording the very possibility of this transformation is precisely the prime function of open/emptiness. Nāgārjuna does not embark on what Hilary Putnam calls the “ontological project” to generate an exhaustive taxonomy of ultimate existents, for in fact the pretense that such a project is even feasible is what he ruthlessly criticizes when engaging with his real or hypothetical textual interlocutors, the Abhidharma Buddhist scholastics who reified the elements of the Great Physician’s treatment protocol into an abstract stand-alone system of thought and the non-Buddhist realists who ground their dogmatic metaphysics on supra-sensible and unverifiable ontotheological foundations. Nor is Nāgārjuna quite as concerned as Derrida would be to deconstruct and destabilize the reign of master signifiers, since arguably open/emptiness itself is a kind of master signifier, the ultimate “signless sign” upon which all signs depend for their meaning. Nāgārjuna simply cannot be found in either the mainstream normative or antinomian threads that compose the magisterial tapestry of world-philosophy.
Open/Emptiness — when originally mis-cognized and then when finally re-cognized — is the alpha and the omega of all thought as such, and philosophy (thought thinking thought) can only live (can only exist and function) insofar as its genetic condition is systematically excluded (extracted, exploited and expelled), an exclusion that ironically damns it to its own inevitable and inexorable oblivion due to its asymmetrical relation to this condition (philosophy depends on emptiness, but emptiness does not depend on philosophy; philosophy only exists on borrowed time). Yet paradoxically it is precisely by means of this circuitous self-abolition that philosophy finally comes to achieve its own emancipation, having liberated itself from itself, by re/turning to the great cosmic voidness — what Quentin Meillassoux calls the “Great Outdoors”— that is its M/Other. Subsequently reborn upon meeting its maker beyond the threshold of death, the lover of wisdom returns no longer simply seeking, but really becoming, Sophia.
While Nāgārjuna utterly dispelled his disputers when he asserted that he could never be wrong because he held no position to be wrong about³, I know I am welcoming many disputants when I take the great risk of staking out my position on Nāgārjuna’s lack of a position: I insist emphatically that Nāgārjuna is not a philosopher, not even “ironically”. If he has any relation to philosophy at all, it is as a trans-philosopher whose mission is not to provide us with more conceptual proliferations with which to interpret reality but to induce — like his master Gautama — a fundamental change in how our very minds operate: a “becoming sophianic”, simultaneously bypassing and fulfilling the whole “philosophical moment” in an instant, disclosing reality as it is independent of thought i.e. reality as such (tathatā).
Nāgārjuna is a trans-philosopher, not a philosopher: this is a difference that makes the difference between “grasping the snake” of the concept of emptiness incorrectly and seeing it for what it really is (a dependent concept⁴), and being afforded its power to obliterate stressful ignorance and consummate blissful gnosis; it is a difference that makes the difference between those patriarchs of sedentary Royal institutions (whether they are the despotic monastery or the capitalist academy) who configure “the Madhyamaka” as a distinct “system of tenets” or “school of thought” (i.e. as a philosophical view) and those ḍākinīs who trace their gotra or spiritual genealogy back to the Tathāgata, those nomadically distributed Crowned Anarchies who univocally embody the perfection of wisdom herself through the open/empty and inclusively-transcendent process of becoming-sophianic. Nāgārjuna, like the Tathāgata, had one mission and one mission only: to teach the relinquishing of all views for the purpose of Nirvāṇa as the auspicious cessation of hypostatization.
- Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:10
- Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 13:8
- Vigrahavyāvartanī 29
- Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 24:18.
Holopoiesis 