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ABSTRACT
This paper deals with an important strand of nihilistic arguments to be found in the works of two philosophers who have so far never been studied comparatively: the sophist Gorgias and the Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna. After having reconstructed Gorgias' moves in the first section of On What is Not (Sections 1-4), the paper shows how the nihilist arguments Gorgias uses mostly feature, under a new light, in the philosophy of emptiness developed by Nāgārjuna (Sections 5-8). The paper ends with a hermeneutical suggestion: that is, to replace traditional ‘sceptical’ interpretations of Gorgias and Nāgārjuna with an alternative one, which takes them as possibly committed to nihilism.
Acknowledgements
I thank Amber Carpenter and Jan Westerhoff for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Two anonymous referees for the journal and the editor have also provided extremely helpful feedback that has greatly benefited the paper. I also thank Cristiana Zilioli, Roberta Ioli, Joachim Aufderheide, and Diego Zucca for their perceptive comments, both oral and written. I warmly thank the Leverhulme Trust for its generous support.
Notes
1 As far as I am aware, there is only a brief account (one page) on Gorgias and Mādhyamika in McEvilley, The Shape, 427–8. McEvilley’s interpretation is very different from the one argued for in this paper: see Section 9.
2 I champion Di Iulio, Gorgias’ Thought as the most recent attempt to discharge Gorgias’ nihilism as a serious philosophical position. Alternatively, see Sedley “Zenonian Strategies”, especially 5–6; 17; 24–5, for an interesting attempt to take Zeno and Gorgias as thinkers endorsing nihilism. On Gorgias as mainly a rhetor, see Wardy, The Birth, especially Part I.
3 See below, Section 5.
4 Metaphysical nihilism is a view that has recently gained some traction in analytic philosophy: see e.g. Turner, “Nihilism”; Benovsky, Eliminativism; and Westerhoff, “Nihilism”. Westerhoff takes metaphysical nihilism as the combination of ontological eliminativism (as he puts it, “only the fundamental exists”: “Nihilism” 1) and non-foundationalism (“it’s dependence all the way down”, 1).
5 Sedley, “Zenonian Strategies”, 24 suggests with good reasons Eudemus of Rhodes as the possible author of MXG exactly in light of the nihilist lineage in ancient thought that the MXG seems to be addressing.
6 Since Ioli’s edition provides an Italian translation of Gorgias’ treatise, I shall use the English translation of PTMO that Laks and Most have prepared in their 2016 Loeb Collection (Early Greek Philosophy. Sophists. Part 1, vol. VIII, pages 218–25, henceforth LM). I will rely on Ioli’s own English translation for those key passages of Gorgias’ dialectical logos that as a locus deperditus Laks and Most do not translate (see Ioli, “Against Motion”).
7 The fact that Sextus uses the trilemma in his presentation of Gorgias’ arguments has often been taken as evidence that he moulded Gorgias’ original arguments into the favourite sceptical way of argumentation, thus distorting Gorgias’ original views. On the basis of this argument, the Anonymous’ version has been preferred, because it was allegedly closer to Gorgias’ PTMO. This view has been recently challenged by Rodriguez, “Untying”. I am not going to address the long-standing dispute about which is to be preferred between the two accounts of Gorgias’ PTMO, since it is the actual combination of them that allows us to get a good understanding of Gorgias’ views (Bett, “Gorgias”, 190–4).
8 Following Ioli, “Against Motion”, 6, note 2, I replace the LM translation: ‘the unlimited could not ever be’ with: ‘the unlimited could not be anywhere’.
9 Following Ioli, “Against Motion”, 8, note 7, I replace the LM translation: ‘and certainly it could not come to be from what is either’ with the more cogent: ‘Nor certainly could it come to be from what is not’.
10 It is worth highlighting that in the reconstruction of Gorgias’ arguments in the dialectical logos some references to other arguments originally put forward by Zeno and Melissus are often made. In the context of the present paper, it is impossible, if not only briefly, to show how Gorgias originally modified or indeed reinvented Eleatic arguments for his own philosophical scopes: on the topic, see Rossetti, “Trilemmi”, and Ioli, “Against Motion”. On Zeno and Nagārjunā, see also McEvilley, The Shape, 422–6.
11 We do not know much about Zeno’s argument about place (see 20 D 13a&b LM), which seems to be closely related to his famous argument against motion (20 D17 LM; see also 20 D14,15, 16, 18 and 19LM). Relying on Eudemus of Rhodes’ reconstruction (to be found in Simplicius), Sedley has thus reconstructed and widened Zeno’s argument on place along nihilist lines that are very suitable for Gorgias’ move here. Here is Sedley’s reconstruction: “Since whatever exists must be in a place, if place itself existed it would be in a place, and that place in a further place, and so on and so forth, which is absurd. Therefore place does not exist. But if anything existed it would be in a place. Therefore nothing exists” (Sedley, “Zenonian Strategies”, 23–5).
12 I add: ‘and if it had thickness, it would have parts, and would no longer be one’ as the final line of the fragment, which is missing in LM. The attribution to Melissus of this fragment is still dubious, some claiming that it could reflect Zeno’s views: Palmer, “Incorporeality”.
13 Bett, “Gorgias”, 194 writes that “one could also regard the argument against motion as an additional element in the case its being one or many”. This is certainly the case; yet the two arguments against motion that Gorgias is reported to have used in his dialectical logos do have a philosophical life on their own.
14 This argument rests on the Eleatic assumption that being is fully and completely homogeneous, that is, always identical to itself and undergoing no ontological change whatsoever. On Melissus and being as homogeneous, see 21 D19 LM ( = MXG 974a12–14).
15 On Melissus on motion and divisibility, see 21 D9 LM.
16 See VV( = Vigrahavyāvartanī) 11–12; 61–4 and ŚS 15 (spoken by an opponent). For Nāgārjuna as denying any commitment to nihilism, see MMK 5:6–8; 8:12–13; 15:6–7.
17 Some passages of the MMK can indeed be read as pointing towards nihilism: 15:1–4; 5:5; 23:8; see also ŚS 58 and 67. On Nāgārjuna as a philosopher well aware of the kind of nihilism that is implicit in his theory of emptiness, see Wood, Disputations; on Nāgārjuna as unaware of this, see Burton, Emptiness.
18 For MMK, I mainly rely on the excellent translation by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura (Middle Way).
19 For ŚS, I usually rely on the transition of either Tola and Dragonetti (in Voidness) or Lindtner (in Nagarjuniana), which remains fundamental for a detailed overview of all the works by Nāgārjuna (with very useful notes on editions and manuscripts).
20 I take all these works to be genuine works by Nāgārjuna: on the question of authenticity, see Lindtner, Nagarjuniana.
21 On the Abhidharma schools, see Westerhoff, Golden Age, 35–83; on the notion of svabhāva as substance, see Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna, 29–40; Burton, Emptiness, 90–4 and 213–20. The Sanskrit term ‘svabhāva’ is a compound term, with ‘sva’ meaning ‘one’s own’ or ‘oneself’ and ‘bhāva’ referring to a thing, the actual nature of a thing or, more generally, to the existence of a thing. The idea behind all this is that to exist, a thing must have ‘bhāva’ on its own, that is, without depending ontologically on anything else.
22 It is true that generation and causation are two different concepts. It can however be argued that what ‘generation’ does in the philosophical arguments of the PTMO can well be compared to what ‘causation’ does in Nāgārjuna’s works. I am also ready to admit that the role Nāgārjuna recognizes to causation in his philosophy is much greater than the one Gorgias gives to generation in the PTMO; yet this does not prevent us from comparing the two ideas fruitfully, at least in the context of the kind of comparison I am drawing in this paper.
23 On causation as conceptually constructed for Nāgārjuna, see Siderits, “Causation”. See also Garfield, “Co-Origination” and “Sacred and Profane”.
24 On Nāgārjuna’s use of the tetralemma, see Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna, Chapter 4.
25 For Abhidharmikas, the dispute between eternalism and annihilationism mainly concerns persons and selves, while Nāgārjuna widens it to material things too: see Siderits and Katsura, Middle Way, 203–5; 235–9.
26 On the One-Many argument in both Ancient Greek and Buddhism, see McEvilley, The Shape, Chapter 2.
27 On this argument, see Carpenter, “Atoms”, with an Appendix offering a fresh translation on the relevant passage from Abhidharmakośabhāsya. See also Kapstein, “Considerations”; Tola and Dragonetti, Consciousness, 127–9; 142–5 (where the relevant stanzas and sections of Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses are translated and commented on).
28 Similar argument against atomism and partless entities are to be found in a short treatise, likely to be by Nāgārjuna’s disciple, Āryadeva, which often goes under the Tibetan title of Treatise on the division of parts: see Tola and Dragonetti, Voidness, 1–17, especially 11–13.
29 I thank the anonymous reviewers for helping me reshape my main argument here.
30 See, respectively, Siderits and O’Brien, “Zeno”; Mabbett, “Motion” and Galloway, “Notes” for the first kind of reading and Westerhoff, “Motion” and Nāgārjuna, Chapter 4 for the second reading. More recently, see Arnold, “Simplicity”.
31 This paper falls short of any pretence about historical transmission. Much has been done in recent years to show that East and West were much linked that we thought of decades ago – and this is especially true when we refer to Greek and Buddhist thought: for a start, see McEvilley, The Shape, Chapters 1, 14 and all the four Appendixes and Stoneman, Experience; see also Beckwith, The Greek Buddha, and Halkias, “The Greeks” on Pyrrho and the Buddhists. But to speculate on the possible ways Gorgias’ arguments may have reached East goes well beyond this contribution’s limits. On the point, see McEvilley, The Shape, Chapter 18.
32 On Democritus’ ontological eliminativism, see Kechagia, Colotes, 180–212; on Protagoras’ ontological relativism in the Theaetetus, see Buckels, “The Secret Doctrine”; on the possible metaphysical commitments of the Cyrenaics, see Zilioli, “Indeterminists”. On Pyrrho’s indeterminacy thesis, see the next paragraph.
33 For a reading of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy as mainly sceptical or dialectical, see Burton, Emptiness, Part I and McEvilley, The Shape, Chapters 17 and 18. On the main reasons for which the sceptical reading is to be refuted, see Burton, Emptiness, 30–44.
34 The first lines of Aristocles’ passage on Pyrrho ( = Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 14.18.3–4 = Chiesara F4 = T53 Decleva Caizzi) go like this: “He [Timon] says that he [Pyrrho] says that things are equally undifferentiated and unstable and indeterminate (tà mèn oûn prágmatá phēsin apophaínein ep’ísēs tòn adiáphora kaì astáthmēta kaì anepíkrita)”. For a full analysis of what Bett calls the indeterminacy thesis as well as of Aristocles’ passage, see Bett, Pyrrho, Chapter 1, especially 18–29.
35 The statement Beckwith refers to is known as the Trilaksana, the ‘Three Characteristics’. It is worth noticing that Beckwith reverses the order of correspondence between the three adjectives on the nature of things in the Aristocles’ passage on Pyrrho and those in the Trilaksana. According to Beckwith, the list of pairing adjectives are the following ones: anitya with anepíkrita; duhkha with astáthmēta; anātman with adiáphora.
36 As Tola and Dragonetti put it: “Even if the Mādhyamika does not affirm nothingness, anyhow its conception of reality as ‘void’, the emphasis it lays on universal contingency, the affirmation of the unreality of all and the analytical-abolishing method in order to reach truth, have led us to the conclusion that the Mādhyamika philosophy represents the most radical degree of philosophical nihilism” (Tola and Dragonetti, Voidness, Preface).