Unity and Predication in Plato’s Parmenides and Nāgārjuna’s Root Verses

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers in parallel some main argumentative strategies of Nāgārjuna’s Root Verses and the “dialectical exercise” of Plato’s Parmenides. It argues that both can be seen as critically targeting the unity that is attributed to entities as coherent and individual subjects of predication. In particular, both show that it is incoherent to suppose any such subject either has the relevant kind of unity or (lacking such a unity) does not exist at all. This suggests that we may reject familiar analyses of the contradictory or paradoxical conclusions of both arguments as pointing either toward a superior and consistent structure of logical categories or toward a transcendent insight into the ineffable. Instead, we may see both as pointing, rather, to a possible overcoming of the “habit” of reifying conceptualization that is deep-seated in ordinary language and practice, and thereby to the potential soteriological benefits of such an overcoming.