Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka Reconsidered: Neopragmatist Reflections on Language

This paper provides a novel interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka. I highlight what I take to be an unexamined presupposition shared by contemporary Madhyamaka scholars, i.e., representationalism, in order to show how this assumption underpins ongoing debates over whether Nāgārjuna’s thought is primarily “reason-driven” or principally “soteriologically-animated”. Using a neopragmatist account of language, I trace scholarly debates over the metalinguistic function of Nāgārjuna’s assertions and demonstrate representationalism’s role in contemporary constructions of a Madhyamaka-friendly semantic theory. I argue that by explicitly rejecting representationalism, we can sidestep scholarly debates about truth and utility, as well as lay to rest concerns with the order of value between zetetic and protreptic techniques. Finally, through a comparison with Richard Rorty, I show that an anti-representationalist framework is implicit in Nāgārjuna’s arguments. This, in turn, allows the problem of hypostatization to take center stage in the Madhyamaka message.