Abstract

Among the many questions raised by Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi, the most fundamental concerns the type of objects to which its negative statements apply. These statements deny the reality of conditioned Being, which can be understood in two ways: as a negation of our concept or knowledge of conditioned Being, or as a negation of conditioned Being as such. The first interpretation can be called “epistemological” and the second “metaphysical.” Scholarship has almost unanimously accepted the epistemological approach. In this paper I object to this approach and propose to reinterpret the catuṣkoṭi metaphysically, as a description of Being and its inherent principles. I ground my objection in Hegel’s “Doctrine of Being” and argue that the catuṣkoṭi exhibits similar features to the Hegelian concept of substantial negativity. In the end, I draw some conclusions for the study of Nāgārjuna in general and highlight the limits of the parallelism.