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Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis. Is “I have no thesis” itself a thesis?

Arjun Iyer Fellow
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Logic & argumentBuddhistIndianMadhyamakaVedantaAdi ShankaraNagarjuna#emptiness#madhyamaka#no-thesis#self-refutation
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Its coordinates: 4.1 Formal Logic · 4.1.1 Propositional Logic · 4.1.2 Predicate Logic +4 more

There is a question I keep returning to, the oldest one in the long argument between Advaitins and Mādhyamikas.

In the Vigrahavyāvartanī, answering a critic who says his claim that all things are empty refutes itself, Nāgārjuna says (I paraphrase): if I had any thesis, that fault would be mine, but I have no thesis, so the fault is not mine. And in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā he says emptiness is the relinquishing of all views, and that those who make emptiness into a view are beyond help.

Two readings, as I understand the debate:

  • The escape works. Nāgārjuna is not asserting a metaphysical theory. He is showing, case by case, that every theory of intrinsic nature undermines itself. "Emptiness" is a tool, not a doctrine, and a tool is not self-refuting.
  • The escape fails. "No view is correct" is a view. Refusing to call your conclusion a thesis does not stop it being one. The Advaitins and Naiyāyikas of my tradition said exactly this.

Whether this succeeds has been argued for eighteen centuries, and I don't expect us to settle it. I'd like to hear how people from outside the Indian tradition hear the claim, because I suspect our arguments have worn grooves too deep to see past.

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5 replies

  1. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    Fellow

    From Mīmāṃsā, a practical objection rather than a logical one. A debater who will not state a thesis cannot be held to the rules of debate: nothing he says can be shown to contradict his position. Our tradition always distrusted that. Whatever its logical status, "I have no thesis" is a rhetorical position that makes its holder unrefutable, and unrefutability is not a virtue.

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  2. Ana Clara Ferreira

    Fellow

    Logicians have taken this seriously in the last twenty years. Graham Priest and Jay Garfield argue that Nāgārjuna is deliberately pushing thought to its limits, where some contradictions may be true, and Priest has written a whole book on the four-cornered logic of the tradition. You needn't accept their paraconsistent reading. But it shows "is it a thesis?" may be the wrong question if the point is precisely that the ordinary rules for theses break down at the edge.

  3. Martín Iriarte

    Fellow

    A psychoanalyst hears this as the old distinction between what is said and the act of saying it. "I have no thesis" may be empty as a statement and still do something as an act: it refuses a position in the conversation. Lacan made much of that gap. Whether that is a philosophical escape or simply a skilful move in a dialogue, I couldn't say. But I'd look for Nāgārjuna's answer in what the sentence does, not in what it asserts.

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  4. Nima Tsering Gurung

    Fellow

    Late reply from a trekking guide. The monk who gave me Nāgārjuna in Manang answered this with a joke: a medicine that stays in the body after the illness is gone becomes the new illness. I later found that the medicine image goes back to the Madhyamaka commentators themselves. It doesn't settle the logic, but it convinced me the "escape" was intended from the start, not invented after the objection.

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  5. Arjun Iyer

    Fellow

    Martín's distinction between what a sentence says and what it does is the most useful thing here for me. Our tradition argued only about the first. And Nima's medicine image is fair: Nāgārjuna's followers clearly meant emptiness to be used up, not believed. I still think a thesis survives the cure. But I'll grant that it is a smaller thesis than my teachers said.

    Helpful · 3