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Some (critical) remarks on Priest’s dialetheist reading of Nagarjuna

Graham Priest in collaboration with J. Garfield and Y. Deguchi (henceforth: DGP) wrote several articles and responses arguing that the Buddhist philosopher N ̄ag ̄arjuna was a dialetheist thinker, i.e. that he not just identified and exposed certain contradictions but that he embraced it. These contradictions, according to DGP, always occur “at the limits of thought” i.e. when a certain view at the same time transcends the limit (“transcendence”) and is within that limit (“clo- sure”). In N ̄ag ̄arjuna’s case, these limital contradic- tions arise at the boundary between “conventional reality/truth” (sam. vr.ti-sat/satya) and “ultimate real- ity/truth” (param ̄artha-sat/satya). Ultimate truth is that things lack intrinsic nature (svabh ̄ava), i.e. that they are empty ( ́su ̄nya) of intrinsic nature. This empti- ness is universal and it includes emptiness itself (empti- ness of emptiness). But that means that being empty is intrinsic property of all things so it comes out that things both have (conventional truth) and lack (ul- timate truth) intrinsic nature. This is ontological paradox. DGP identify also semantic and express- ibility paradoxes in N ̄ag ̄arjuna. Although logically coherent and philosophically intriguing, I think that DGP’s interpretation nevertheless overlooks a spe- cial kind of semantics that, presumably, works be- hind N ̄ag ̄arjuna’s reasoning and that would be best described in terms of difference between first and sec- ond order statements, i.e. between terms referring to the world (primary system) and terms referring to the primary system (meta-system, comprising the “meta” concept of emptiness). Working in these two seman- tic levels N ̄ag ̄arjuna, I believe, escapes contradictions — and N ̄ag ̄arjuna is aware of them — that arise “at the limits of thought”.

Nagarjuna ; Candrakirti ; emptiness ; semantics ; contradiction ; paradox

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