The non-Kantian interpretation of Nāgārjuna is also a better Kant interpretation

03 Feb, 2024

I'm just going to put a little marker in the ground here instead of arguing for the different parts of this view. To quickly set the stage: when, in the 20th century, Western philosophers became interested in the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, the first influential interpretations were apparently "Kantian" ones. Here's Westerhoff¹ on this phase of interpretation:

A clear example from the first phase is Theodore Stcherbatsky’s The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāna, which was first published in 1927. Stcherbatsky interprets Nāgārjuna as dividing the world into appearance and reality, the former corresponding to samsāra, the realm of cyclic existence, the latter to nirvāna, liberation. In his attempt to defend Nāgārjuna against the charge of nihilism, especially clear in the exposition given by La Vallée Poussin, Stcherbatsky ascribes to Nāgārjuna the assumption of an absolute noumenal reality which underlies the constantly changing and ephemeral world of phenomena. (9)

I was struck in reading this that it is an extremely Platonistic Kantian interpretation. (This is not to say that could only be a Western interpolation; positions like this are also advanced by some in the Indian Buddhist tradition.)

Westerhoff sharply disagrees with this Kantian interpretation of Nāgārjuna, and presents Nāgārjuna as arguing against any absolute, even an ineffable and non-conceptual absolute. Belief in such an absolute is still a form of realism and at odds with the teaching that all things are empty.

The difficulty with this [e.g. Yogacara] interpretation is that if we regard the true nature of things as ineffable, we still assume that there are objects with a mind-independent intrinsic nature, namely that of ineffability. This position assumes that there is a way things are from their own side, by svabhāva, which is not in any way affected by us. \ldots The doctrine of emptiness tries to establish that there are no objects with intrinsic natures, whether they are knowable or not. (206)

Westerhoff goes on to explain his version of the position in what I take to be very Kantian terms:

A key element of the rejection of the view of ineffable substances is denying that it makes any sense to speak of objects lying beyond our conceptual frameworks\ldots. These frameworks are all we have, and if we can show that some notion is not to be subsumed under them, we must not conclude that it therefore has some shadowy existence outside of the framework.\ldots It is not that there are some objects within the grasp of our cognitive capacities as well as some beyond them, but rather that the very concept of an object is something established by these capacities. It is not that parts of the world might not correspond to our linguistic and conceptual frameworks but that the idea of a structure of reality independent of these practices is incoherent. (206-7)

To me, this (very attractive) position is also how I understand Kant's transcendental idealism, although, as we can see from above, this is not at all the universal position in Kant interpretation. Peirce wrote, "Kant (whom I more than admire), is nothing but a somewhat confused pragmatist." It is the pragmatist Kant that I find most congenial and whose echoes I hear in Westerhoff's Nāgārjuna interpretation.