Thesis / main argument
Garfield reads Nāgārjuna’s analysis of causation (chiefly MMK chapters I and VII) as the deflation of causal power in favour of a conventionalist regularism: there are no powers inhering in things by virtue of their nature; there are only conditions — explanatorily useful regularities embedded in ever-wider regularities. He then argues that this account is not merely historically interesting but correct, and applies it in two radically different domains — the “profane” (philosophy of science) and the “sacred” (Buddhist ethics, specifically the cultivation of bodhicitta).
The unifying move in both applications is the refusal of a “cement of the universe”: any substantial substratum posited to hold causes to their effects (in science) or the self together across time (in ethics). Garfield’s central claim is that the instinct to posit such glue is exactly the reificatory tendency Nāgārjuna diagnoses, and that yielding to it sets one on “the royal road to nihilism about the world… and to untenable realism about the transcendent” (p. 520). The emptiness of causation, properly understood, is the middle way between reified causal power and a random, inexplicable universe.
Two framing features matter for this wiki. First, Garfield is emphatic that the nihilist reading of Nāgārjuna is a misreading — “nobody who reads the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā through to the end could seriously defend the nihilistic reading” (p. 508). Second, he self-describes his ethics application as heterodox within the dGe lugs pa tradition yet “absolutely orthodox Madhyamaka” (p. 507) — that is, he positions himself as a framework-internal critic of Geluk doxography, not as a framework-external reconstructor.
Key claims
On causation (MMK I and VII)
- hetu vs pratyaya. Nāgārjuna distinguishes hetu (cause, རྒྱུ་) — “the cause of the metaphysicians, an event capable of bringing about another by virtue of a power that is part of its nature” — from pratyaya (condition, རྐྱེན་), “an event or phenomenon whose occurrence or existence is correlated with that of another” (p. 509, on MMK I:5). He rejects the former and accepts the latter, in harmony with the standard fourfold Buddhist taxonomy of conditions (efficient/causal, objective/supporting, immediately preceding, dominant).
- The middle between reification and nihilism. The midpoint between a realism about causal powers and “the view of a random and inexplicable universe of independent events” is “the acceptance of the reality of conditions, and a regularist account of explanation” (p. 509). Garfield reads Hume in roughly this way and treats the position as moderate, not nihilistic.
- Why reject causal powers — anticipating Hume and Wittgenstein (p. 509): powers are never observed; they cannot inhere in isolated events (which always need cooperating conditions); positing them generates an explanatory regress; and they impose implausible uniformity on the explanatory landscape.
- No explanation of the totality (MMK VII). Each regularity is explicable — that is the content of pratītyasamutpāda — but only by further regularities; “deeper understanding consists of the increasingly richer embedding of interdependence into larger… patterns of interdependence” (p. 510). There is no well-defined totality (the universe-as-a-whole) to explain, and the demand for a transcendental explanation of why explanation is possible is not merely fruitless but meaningless (MMK VII:14, 19; the limit that leads to the unanswerable questions).
- Emptiness as the co-relativity of emptiness and dependent arising (MMK XXIV:18–19, p. 508): to be empty just is to be dependently arisen. Garfield’s “favourite Tibetan Prāsaṅgika saw”: “we do not say that because things are empty that they do not exist; we say that because things exist they are empty” (p. 509).
On philosophy of science (the “profane” application)
- Catholic realism / “let a thousand entities bloom.” To the ontological question (which entities to admit), Madhyamaka answers with a generous realism across all explanatory levels — exchange rates and neutrinos, kinship relations and quarks (p. 511). Garfield’s Quinean formula: “to exist is to exist conventionally, dependently” (p. 511) — the relevant conventions being those of scientific theory, the relevant dependencies the laws science discovers.
- No privileged level. The urge to privilege one level (physics over psychology, observables over unobservables) always derives from a prior claim about where genuine causal power is located — Churchland’s eliminativism and van Fraassen’s anti-realism both rest on it. Drop the search for causal power and the motivation for the privileging “crumbles” (p. 512); he reaches this via negativa, which he glosses, in the present context, as a prasaṅga (p. 511).
- Theory choice by regularity. Where competing explanations are genuinely equal, “take ‘em all”; the standard desiderata (economy, elegance, predictive power, confirmation, coherence) are all that matter, because “beyond pratītya-samutpāda there are no occult causal powers lurking as the unique and genuine targets of our theoretical activity” (p. 512). Robust realism about each level, with only “global supervenience” between mutually irreducible theories (cognitive science as the test case).
On bodhicitta and rebirth (the “sacred” application — heterodox)
- The target thesis. The dGe lugs pa tradition (via rGyal tshab’s commentary on the pramāṇasiddhi chapter of Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika) holds that belief in rebirth is a necessary condition for cultivating bodhicitta. Garfield argues this is (a) inconsistent with Nāgārjuna’s account of causation and (b) implicated in “the very subtlest form of self-grasping (བདག་འཛིན་, ātmagrāha)” (p. 508).
- “Farabi’s fallacy.” Garfield names the hermeneutic error of assuming two great philosophers must be consistent and welding them together. His “gold medal” example is Tsongkhapa, who devoted much of his life to demonstrating the consistency of śūnyavāda (Nāgārjuna) and pramāṇavāda (Dharmakīrti). Garfield admires Tsongkhapa as “the titan of the Tibetan philosophical tradition” but finds this particular influence “less than salutary” (p. 513), and cautions against “a doxography that takes as axiomatic the consistency of Dharmakīrti’s pramāṇavāda and Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka” (p. 508).
- Intrapersonal vs transpersonal causation. rGyal tshab needs a single mental continuum across rebirths to mediate the causal link between the accumulating causes of buddhahood and the effect — but only because he assumes causation requires a substantial basis in which powers inhere (the subtle consciousness continuing across lives). Garfield offers a transpersonal model: causes accumulate across persons and generations (as a teacher’s words and a book give rise to understanding in a student; as Kant’s or Einstein’s predecessors made their work possible), so the buddha one strives to bring about “need not be mine” (pp. 516–519).
- The “I” doing metaphysical work. The “I myself” (bdag ni) of Śāntideva’s bodhisattva vow, when made the substratum of a real causal process across lives, is doing genuine metaphysical work “well above and beyond what any ‘mere,’ nominally posited ‘I’ (nga tsam) could ever do” (p. 518) — and so collapses back into a barely disguised substantialism about the self. Only an impersonal bodhicitta keeps the Mahāyāna “consistently Madhyamaka.”
- Rebirth as dispensable Hindu import. If the argument holds, the doctrine of rebirth is “of considerably less importance to Buddhism — especially to Mahāyāna Buddhism — than it is generally taken to be” (p. 519): an import from ambient Hindu culture, jettisonable like the ātman it accompanies. (Objections from John Powers, Mark Siderits, and Geshe Ngawang Samten are rehearsed and answered, pp. 519–522.)
The concluding diagnosis
- The two applications are the selflessness of phenomena (science) and the selflessness of persons (ethics). In both, the seductive error is to “posit some hidden glue — some cement of the universe” (p. 520), which under the Madhyamaka dialectic mutates into “even if everything we encounter is empty, that emptiness must be truly existent” — the road to nihilism about the empirical plus untenable realism about the transcendent. Citing Dōgen, Garfield insists the leap is “into emptiness, and not into nihilism”: “the mere interdependence provides all the coherence one could coherently desire” (p. 520).
Methodology
Comparative-philosophical reconstruction in the analytic register. Garfield argues that Nāgārjuna is not only historically important but right, and deploys his account as a live philosophical instrument in contemporary debates (philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics). His interlocutors on the “profane” side are Western (Hume, Wittgenstein, Quine, Churchland, van Fraassen, Fodor, Kitcher, Smart); on the “sacred” side they are traditional (Dharmakīrti, rGyal tshab, Tsongkhapa, Candrakīrti, Śāntideva). Notably, he does not bracket the commentarial tradition: he reads the rebirth argument from rGyal tshab’s Tibetan text, invokes Candrakīrti and Tsongkhapa on the “mere I,” uses the prasajya/paryudāsa vocabulary, and frames his own conclusion as internally Madhyamaka. This is closer to framework-engagement than this wiki’s placement (“primarily Western method”) implies — see the wiki author’s note below.
Notable quotes
- “we do not say that because things are empty that they do not exist; we say that because things exist they are empty” (p. 509 — Garfield’s “favourite Tibetan Prāsaṅgika saw”).
- “to exist is to exist conventionally, dependently” (p. 511 — his Quinean restatement of the ontological criterion).
- His heterodox-but-orthodox positioning: heterodox “within at least one major living tradition… the dGe lugs pa school,” yet “absolutely orthodox Madhyamaka” (p. 507).
Connections
- Supports / corroborates: nihilism-charge-refuted (modern anti-nihilist voice; the glue/cement = foundationalist premise), madhyamaka-is-method-not-standalone-system (regularism, catholic realism, no positive ontology), framework-absence-yields-nihilism (the glue-instinct as the reificatory engine), atisha-tsongkhapa-pramana-divide (Farabi’s fallacy questions the pramāṇavāda/Madhyamaka consistency axiom).
- Engages / critiques: Tsongkhapa (admiringly, but charges him with Farabi’s fallacy on the śūnyavāda/pramāṇavāda welding); rGyal tshab and Dharmakīrti (on the rebirth argument); Siderits (cited as interlocutor on the disunity-of-science and on the causation-presupposition objection); Candrakīrti (invoked on the “mere I”).
- Sits beside (same author, not yet added): Garfield 1995, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (his MMK translation and commentary, the standard reference for his reading); Garfield 1994, “Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness”; Garfield 1990, “Epoche and Śūnyatā.” His co-translation (with Geshe Ngawang Samten) of Tsongkhapa’s Ocean of Reasoning is already in the wiki at tsongkhapa-ocean-of-reasoning-1408 — so Garfield appears in the wiki both as translator-of-Tsongkhapa and (now) as interpreter in his own right.