Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (story read aloud txt) 📕

themselves, they are empty entities, they do not exist. So far, so easy. But Nāgārjuna also suggests that the clouds, the sky, sensations, thoughts and my own head are equally things that arise from the encounter with other things: they are empty entities.

And myself, looking at a star, do I exist? No, not even I. So who is observing the star? No one, says Nāgārjuna. To see a star is a component of that set of interactions that I conventionally call my “self.” “What articulates language does not exist. The circle of thoughts does not exist.”119 There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand—that is the true essence of our being. “I” is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else. Centuries of Western speculation on the subject, and on the nature of consciousness, vanish like morning mist.

Like much philosophy and much science, Nāgārjuna distinguishes between two levels: conventional, apparent reality with its illusory and perspectival aspects, and ultimate reality. But in this case the distinction takes us in an unexpected direction: the ultimate reality, the essence, is absence, is vacuity. It does not exist.

If every metaphysics seeks a primary substance, an essence on which everything may depend, the point of departure from which everything follows, Nāgārjuna suggests that the ultimate substance, the point of departure . . . does not exist.

There are timid intuitions in a similar direction in Western philosophy. But Nāgārjuna’s perspective is radical. Conventional, everyday existence is not negated; on the contrary, it is taken into account in all of its complexity, with its levels and facets. It can be studied, explored, analyzed, reduced to more elementary terms. But there is no sense, Nāgārjuna argues, in looking for an ultimate substratum.

The difference from contemporary structural realism, for instance, seems clear: I can imagine Nāgārjuna adding a short chapter to a contemporary edition of his book entitled “All Structures are Empty.” They exist only when you are thinking about organizing something else. In his terms: “They are neither precedent to objects; nor not precedent to objects; neither are they both things; nor, ultimately, neither one nor the other thing.”*

The illusoriness of the world, its samsāra, is a general theme of Buddhism; to recognize this is to reach nirvāna, liberation and beatitude. For Nāgārjuna, samsāra and nirvāna are the same thing: both empty of their own existence. Nonexistent.

So is emptiness the only reality? Is this, after all, the ultimate reality? No, writes Nāgārjuna, in the most vertiginous chapter of his book: every perspective exists only in interdependence with something else, there is never an ultimate reality—and this is the case for his own perspective as well. Even emptiness is devoid of essence: it is conventional. No metaphysics survives. Emptiness is empty.

Nāgārjuna has given us a formidable conceptual tool for thinking about the relationality of quanta: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence entering the equation. In fact, interdependence—and this is the key argument made by Nāgārjuna—requires us to forget all about autonomous essences.

The long search for the “ultimate substance” in physics has passed through matter, molecules, atoms, fields, elementary particles . . . and has been shipwrecked in the relational complexity of quantum field theory and general relativity. Is it possible that a philosopher from ancient India can provide us with a conceptual tool with which to extricate ourselves?

It is always from others that we learn, from those different from ourselves. Despite millennia of uninterrupted dialogue, the East and the West still have something to say to each other. As in the best marriages.

The fascination of Nāgārjuna’s thought goes beyond questions raised by contemporary physics. His perspective has something dizzying about it. It resonates with the best of much Western philosophy, both classical and recent. With the radical skepticism of Hume, with the unmasking of badly posed questions in Wittgenstein. But it seems to me that Nāgārjuna does not fall into the trap in which so much philosophy is caught, by postulating starting points that invariably turn out to be unconvincing in the long run. He speaks about reality, about its complexity and comprehensibility, but he defends us from the conceptual trap of wanting to find it an ultimate foundation.

His is not metaphysical extravagance: it is sobriety. It recognizes the fact that to inquire about the ultimate foundation of everything is to ask a question that perhaps simply does not make sense.

This does not shut down investigation. On the contrary, it liberates it. Nāgārjuna is not a nihilist negating the reality of the world, and neither is he a skeptic denying that we can know anything about that reality. The world of phenomena is one that we can investigate, gradually improving our understanding of it. We may find general characteristics. But it is a world of interdependence and contingencies, not a world we should trouble ourselves attempting to derive from an Absolute.

I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change. There is no cardinal or final fixed point, philosophical or methodological, with which to anchor the adventure of knowledge.

There are many different interpretations of Nāgārjuna’s text. The multiplicity of potential readings is testimony to its vitality and to the capacity of ancient texts to continue to speak to us. What interests us, anew, is not what the prior of a monastery in India was actually thinking nearly two thousand years ago—that is his business (or the business of historians). What interests us is the power of the ideas that emanate today from the lines he left; how these, enriched by generations of commentary, may open