“Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction” — Westerhoff, Jan, 2009.
Thesis / main argument
Westerhoff presents Nāgārjuna’s philosophy as a unified, systematic philosophical project whose central claim is the denial of substance (svabhāva understood as substance-svabhāva). He argues that Nāgārjuna’s arguments against causation, change, and the individual-property distinction all converge on a single conclusion: there are no mind-independent foundational objects. The resulting position is a thoroughgoing metaphysical anti-realism — not a local anti-realism about specific domains, but a general anti-foundationalism denying objective, intrinsic, mind-independent existence for any class of objects. Crucially, this does not entail that “anything goes”: Nāgārjuna must provide accounts of convention, ethics, epistemology, and language that are robust enough to ground practice without re-introducing realism.
Key claims
- Three senses of svabhāva: Following Candrakīrti, Westerhoff distinguishes essence-svabhāva (essential properties, e.g. heat of fire), substance-svabhāva (independent, unconstructed, foundational existence — the primary target of Madhyamaka negation), and absolute svabhāva (the true nature of phenomena, i.e. emptiness itself). He argues the three reduce to two: absolute svabhāva is essence-svabhāva applied universally — emptiness is the essential property of all objects (Ch 2, pp. 40–46).
- Substance-svabhāva as the primary target: Nāgārjuna’s arguments are directed against substance-svabhāva, not essence-svabhāva. Candrakīrti explicitly accepts essence-svabhāva conventionally while rejecting substance-svabhāva (pp. 29–30).
- Cognitive dimension of svabhāva: Svabhāva is not merely a theoretical-ontological concept but a cognitive default — the mind automatically superimposes independent existence onto phenomena that lack it. Removing this superimposition requires not just intellectual argument but meditative practice (pp. 13, 46–51).
- Two types of dependence: Existential dependence (a necessarily requires something falling under F) and notional dependence (objects under F require distinct objects under G). Failure to distinguish these has caused confusion in the secondary literature (pp. 26–29).
- Three dependence relations (dGe lugs): Causal, mereological, and conceptual dependence, in a qualitative and doxographical hierarchy — the Prāsaṅgikas employ all three (p. 27).
- The property argument: Primary existents cannot be analysed into individuals and properties: bare particulars are mind-dependent conceptual fictions, tropes face individuation problems. Either way, foundational status is compromised (pp. 32–36).
- The mereological (“neither one nor many”) argument: Primary existents can be neither partite (dependent on parts) nor atomic (the problems with property-attribution reappear). The notion of a primary existent is thereby reduced to absurdity (pp. 36–38).
- The argument from change: Substance-svabhāva is incompatible with change; neither annihilationist nor permutationist accounts succeed. Even fundamental particles of contemporary physics face this problem (pp. 38–40).
- Causation as conceptually constructed: Nāgārjuna rejects all temporal orderings of cause and effect between substances. Within a presentist framework, one relatum is always absent and must be mentally supplied. Causation is therefore mind-dependent (pp. 200–202).
- Rejection of ineffable substance: The view that ultimate reality transcends conceptualisation (found in Dharmapāla and Murti) is rejected — this still posits mind-independent entities. Conceptual frameworks are not maps of a territory but rules of a game; there can be no objects “outside the game” (pp. 205–207).
- Anti-realism, not nihilism: The resulting metaphysical anti-realism denies any class of objects existing independently and intrinsically, but does not deny conventional existence, ethical distinctions, or epistemic practices (pp. 207–208).
- Epistemological contextualism: Nothing is intrinsically a means or object of knowledge. The reflective equilibrium model shows that different initial beliefs could yield different but equally coherent epistemologies. Means of knowledge are context-dependent (pp. 216–219).
- Truth as warranted assertibility: The Mādhyamika rejects correspondence truth in favour of assertability conditions. There can be no “ultimate truth” describing how things really are independent of conceptual frameworks. Emptiness itself is not ultimately true — it is a corrective for the mistaken ascription of svabhāva (pp. 219–222).
- Emptiness is not ultimately true: The theory of emptiness is not a description of mind-independent reality but a correction of a mistaken cognition. Without the error, the corrective would be unnecessary — like telling someone their desk is “free of white mice” (pp. 44–45, 221–222).
- Tsongkhapa’s solution to the absolute-svabhāva problem: Tsongkhapa adds two further criteria to the triple characterisation of svabhāva — “established from its own side” and “innate rather than acquired misconception” — to distinguish substance-svabhāva from emptiness (pp. 42–44).
Methodology
Westerhoff’s stated method combines two maxims: (1) consistency with the commentarial tradition, and (2) reconstructing arguments in the philosophically most successful way (“charitable interpretation”). He positions himself against purely descriptive or paraphrasing approaches and against readings that shoehorn Nāgārjuna into Western frameworks (Kantian, analytic, post-Wittgensteinian). He reads Sanskrit and Tibetan, works with primary texts (especially Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā), and treats the commentarial tradition as philosophically substantive. His approach is close to what Siderits calls “rational reconstruction.”
This is a monograph focused on the Yukti-corpus (MMK, Yuktiṣaṣṭikā, Śūnyatāsaptati, Vigrahavyāvartanī, Vaidalyaprakaraṇa, Ratnāvalī) with Candrakīrti as the primary commentarial lens, and Tsongkhapa’s innovations discussed where relevant.
Further note from the wiki author’s personal notes (2025)
A passage in Westerhoff’s Introduction, under “Methodological Considerations,” supplies the genre-level grounding for this wiki’s framework-necessity argument:
“Indian philosophical texts (unlike their Western counterparts) were generally not intended to provide the reader with a self-contained exposition of the author’s thoughts. Instead their versified form provided the structure of the argument to be memorized, which would then be elaborated on by written commentaries and by a teacher’s oral explanations.”
tenpa-personal-notes-2025 uses this passage to make the framework-necessity argument at the genre level. MMK is a versified summary structure-for-memorisation; its content is designed to be filled in by commentary and oral elaboration from a teacher in a transmission lineage. To read MMK as a self-contained text — Kalupahana’s interpretive default — is to misread the genre. This sharpens framework-absence-yields-nihilism from a contingent pattern (framework-removed readings happen to collapse) into a methodological exclusion (the genre of the text formally requires the framework). Bridged on the Tibetan side by George Dreyfus’s Recognizing Reality on the commentarial mode of Tibetan scholastic discourse, and convergent with the Padmakara Translators’ Introduction to mipham-introduction-middle-way-2002 on Madhyamaka being best understood through oral exposition by a qualified teacher.
Connections
- Directly engages with: Burton (rejected as paraphrastic and philosophically unsophisticated, pp. 8–9; criticised on the substance-svabhāva interpretation, p. 25), Kalupahana (mentioned among modern commentators), Siderits (repeatedly cited as a source for reconstructed arguments, especially on the self and epistemology)
- Builds on: Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā as primary commentarial lens; Tsongkhapa’s triple characterisation and innate/acquired distinction for the object of negation
- Complements: westerhoff-nihilist-interpretation-2016 (the article takes the monograph’s framework and pushes it toward the nihilism question)
- Contrasts with: kalupahana-mmk-1986 (Kalupahana’s deflationary pragmatism vs Westerhoff’s systematic reconstruction), burton-emptiness-appraised-1999 (Burton’s framework-absent nihilism vs Westerhoff’s framework-engaged anti-realism)
- Partially overlaps with: Ruegg (both treat the commentarial tradition as philosophically constitutive, not merely historical)