Book Blogs Back!: Responses to Malcolm Keating – Chapters 2-5, Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi

This post continues from my previous post responding to some blog posts from Malcolm Keating that he wrote in preparation for a recent event on my book, Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa.  More details here.

As I wrote before, this post won't make much sense unless you've read Malcolm's posts on his excellent blog.  In this post I'll be responding to two of his posts: one on chapters 2-3 on Nāgārjuna and another on chapters 4-5 on Jayarāśi.  In the previous post I edited my original comments (written as my notes for the event on March 7) to avoid referring to Malcolm in the second person, but I decided it seemed odd to continue doing so, especially as this is genuinely a response to him (admittedly in a public forum). So, when I say "you" I generally mean Malcolm.  Enjoy!



Chapters two and three

• My “positive thesis”! Nice.

• Very helpful way to schematize my arguments against other interpretations! Thanks!

• I may not be understanding the point about mysticism, but the point in bringing up the Māṇdukya was more to show that there are explicit statements of mysticism in the Upaniṣads more generally (in fact, that text probably is later than Nāgārjuna, but he would have been familiar with earlier Upaniṣads like the Chāndogya). Anyway, I could have been a lot clearer about this. The point about prapañca was that it has a specific Buddhist history going back to early Buddhism. It also makes a lot more sense of the text than a more metaphysical reading as you get in later Vedānta texts. But really the reason Nāgārjuna probably isn’t a mystic is that he never says anything about the positive side of mysticism (what James would call noetic quality). He of course could be a mystic who is simply never says anything about that, but part of what I’m trying to do is to see if we can take him at his word in points 1-4 as you put it. And I think my skeptical interpretation can make sense of the text. And that’s all I’m trying to do when it comes to Nāgārjuna interpretation.

• You did a great job summarizing my argument in Ch. 3.

• I’m not sure what more textual evidence or spade-work you want. Texts beyond MMK and VV? I focused on MMK and VV, as you point out, because they are the only texts uncontroversially assigned to Nāgārjuna, but someday maybe I’ll branch out (I could do a lot more, it seems, with conventional truth and skepticism). But maybe a deeper point is that once you get the two-phase interpretation going, the rest of the text kind of falls into place: if Nāgārjuna seems to be making a positive claim, then it’s provisional; also, he’s serious when he denies having a view, thesis, etc.

• Nāgārjuna has been confusing people for 1,800 years. To be honest, as much as I like Nāgārjuna, I think he gets far more than his share of attention these days (as Richard Hayes has argued, he probably gets more attention today than in classical India!). I suppose at some point I may return to Nāgārjuna, but for now I think lesser studied figures like Jayarāśi and Śrī Harṣa are where my heart is. I would be happy if someone else took up my ideas on Nāgārjuna and ran with them, but I may need a few years off myself, certainly before writing this philosophical trilogy!

Chapter four and five

• Great summary of Ch. 4!

• Of course, most of Jayarāśi’s opponents think pramāṇas are required for everyday life (especially Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā), but he simply does not accept this, which is part of what puts him in good company with other Cārvākas.

• On the conventional nature of the perception-inference distinction, Jayarāśi actually does raise something like this right after he presents the Impossibility of Considering Duality Argument (see p. 107-108 of my book). Once you admit that all our talk of perception-inference dualism is conceptual (which is what it would have to be if it were conventional, right?), it makes no sense to talk about perception at all, if perception just is “free from conceptualization (kalpanā).” If you move everything to the inference side, you get a straightforward contraction from defining perception in the way that Dignāga does: it both has to be but cannot be free from conceptualization. I think I say something like this in my 2015 Asian Philosophy article on this argument and its Candrakīrtian counter-part. It could also be, of course, that Jayarāśi has misunderstood Dharmakīrti, but I see it as a pretty good critique of Dignāga, even if later Dignāgans could respond to it by tweaking the theory (as some did, like Dharmottara and others).

• I find this to be an odd reading Franco, who says quite a bit about what he thinks Jayarāśi’s skepticism amounts to. Maybe I’ve been misreading Franco for years!

• Nice point on the “performative tension!” Written like a true Jayarāśian! But more seriously, if we only stuck with what the text says I think we’d have very little to say about any text. Think of it like a Quinean underdetermination argument, or like my guiding metaphor in the book of archaeology as going from fossils to educated conjectures about living organisms. (Perhaps this is my subtle critique of a lot of modern philology? Sometimes sticking too close to the text and popular contemporary scholarship causes you to miss the forest for the trees, or to miss new and interesting possibilities.) As you correctly identify at the end, all I’m trying to do is offer a coherent interpretation of the text, one that is also charitable to Jayarāśi in showing how he is not necessarily just straightforwardly contradicting himself. If you’re not convinced, astu yathā tathā!

Stay tuned for my thoughts on Malcolm's thoughts on chapters 6-7 and the conclusion!  You can find Malcolm's posts here and here.