Was Nagarjuna a Well Poisoner?

In today’s New York Times, Alexander George writes in the periodic philosophy column, The Stone, about well poisoners. The essay was specifically directed at the current occupant of the White House, and questioned whether his continued denigration of scientific facts as “lies” and his accusations that the mainstream media promotes “fake news” will end up poisoning the public discourse so that people finally are unable to discuss serious issues based on facts. He cites the case of the Dutch art forger van Meegeren who successfully forged paintings by Vermeer. Van Meegeren was able to do so by managing to convince a prominent Vermeer collector, whose collection was used as the yardstick against which to compare questionable works, that a forgery was an authentic Vermeer. While today it’s completely obvious that van Meegeren’s work looks nothing like Vermeer’s, that move allowed him to pass off his forgeries as authentic. 

George states that this move in philosophy is called “poisoning the well”, and that behind every philosophical skeptic is a well poisoner. He cites the case of Descartes, who, in his work Meditations on First Philosophy completely deconstructs your everyday experience to show that none of your beliefs about the everyday world can be trusted. Descartes does this by raising arguments about the trustworthiness of your senses, and raises the possibility that you are dreaming. According to George, Descartes pulls himself out of his tailspin to his satisfaction, but not to many philosophers’. This kind of move is called “well poisoning” because, like an enemy army trying to cut off the water supply to a village, it is more efficient to poison the well (convince you that you cannot trust what you experience) than to turn off the water at the individual houses (argue each case individually).

Though I’ve never read Meditations on First Philosophy, George’s descriptions of how Descartes argued sounded an awful lot like Nagarjuna’s arguments in the Karikas. So the question arose for me: was Nagarjuna a well poisoner, like Descartes?

Overall, I think not, but with respect to metaphysics, most certainly. What Nagarjuna does is poison the well for those who try to argue philosophically about ultimate reality and metaphysics. He firmly establishes that reality is empty of any ultimate and self-existing objects, and only consists of ephemeral cause and effect events, which he says are “like a dream”. Not that they are a dream, he just uses dreaming as a metaphor. Nagarjuna’s tactics are rather the opposite of a well poisoner, to argue each individual case. Precisely because he wants to completely deconstruct the notion of an ultimate reality with self-existing objects, he cannot base his arguments on any assumed, overarching philosophical framework or view. Even emptiness isn’t such a framework, Nagarjuna says that people who believe emptiness is a view are “incurable”. So we can only talk about reality from a conventional, cause and effect standpoint, not from an ultimate standpoint. Curiously enough, that’s the conclusion I came to (before I even knew a whole lot about Nagarjuna’s thinking) in my practice memoir, Silicon Valley Monk. That’s why I subtitled it: From Metaphysics to Reality on the Buddhist Path.

Image source: http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Poison