Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka

A very interesting and clearly written book. Westerhoff "reads Nagarjuna in his own philosophical context," and "does not hesitate to show that the issues of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy have at least family resemblances to issues in European philosophy." The exposition is not philological but philosophical, not a quasi-biographical exposition of the philosophy of an individual called Nagarjuna but an charitable and systematic organization of the philosophy of Nagarjuna in conjunction with the commentary tradition. Nagarjuna is not regarded as an authority, so uncertainties in his writings are discussed and loopholes filled, the two methodological maxims being "attempt consistency with the commentarial tradition" and "reconstruct an argument in the philosophically most successful way.

Nagarjuna's philosophy, as presented by Westerhoff, is in many ways in agreement with my own, while since I'm not a Buddhist I cannot and do not accept the whole; I prefer something positive and my metaphilosophy doesn't focus on the annihilation of suffering, but rather, crudely speaking, the generation and construction of suffering.

Now, in Westerhoff's account, there are three distinct notions of svabhava:

1. Essence-svabhava: Epistemological essence, the essential property of a phenomenon, not haecceity [which cannot be shared] or quiddity [that which makes a thing that kind of thing]. It is unclear to me how this notion of svabhava is distinguished from quiddity, but it seems to me that quiddity is e.g. that which makes an individual man a man, and (essence-)svabhava in this case is more like a sort of human characteristic, which can accidently be instantiated by certain robots or sculptures, but is after all 'essentially' human. But this essensce-svabhava is a notion quite vague.
2. Substance-svabhava: Unchanging, irreducible, uncaused, cognition-independent, foundational substratum of things. In particular, not dependent on anything else, neither existentially nor notionally.
3. Absolute-svabhava: Emptiness. True and intrinsic nature of phenomena.

Nagarjuna's characteristically anti-realist, anti-foundationalist metaphysics centers around the denial of svabhava as in substance-svabhava, and absolute-svabhava is identified with, or at least constitutes the essence-svabhava of any phenomenon. His epistemology is very similar to that of American pragmatists, in that means of knowledge and their objects have to be mutually established. However it seems to me that Nagarjuna's philosophy is largely negative and hence barren, since, as indicated before, I prefer something generative and constructive, rather than something that seems to be pure negation and deconstruction. Nevertheless, penetrating and illusion-shattering analyses made by Buddhists always caution that things are much more complex than one thinks, and are oftentimes much more interesting than plain and matter-of-fact philosophies in the style of Aristotle.