[Redacted] “My minimal suggestion is this: insofar as the contingency or emptiness or worldlessness is itself a consistent fact (that it describes what is always already the case), then contingency is itself not contingent, not empty, i.e., absolute or the form of all content.
If the universe were truly and completely contingent, then the possibility of non-contingency becomes a logical possibility.
I think Nagarjuna is not affirming meta-contingency but at some point thinks there is an absolute that = contingency (nirvana = samsara).”
{AK}: A ‘fact’, is a ‘thing made’, a fashioning.
That the collection of supervenient ‘facts’ are seemingly supervenient on a ‘systematics of manufacture’, merely displaces the essentiality of origination, the integrity of classical entity or ‘ens’, to that ‘systematics of manufacture’. Reifying such a ‘systematics of manufacture’ as a ‘form’ governing ‘content’ misses or elides the conventional, empty, & perspectival nature of ‘facts’.
If no ‘fact’ has ‘own-being’, why should an infinite quantity of them suddenly start to have ‘own-being’?
This is a confusion of the reifying intuitions of socio-perceptual convention with the logic of metaphysical category? It’s an ‘idealism’ no less speculative or mystifying than Hegel; but it’s allegedly hallucinatory nature, in the Hegelian case; is masked by consensual practice, in the case of socio-perceptual convention.
Its origin, & the origin of the faith in it, is based on a notion of increasing & graduated coherence with a veridical structure of ontological essence, scientifically sifting out a correspondence to a fixed truth. That’s the model, & it’s a model, itself based on the very essence, or ‘own-being’, that it presupposes as its horizon. That model is a perspective, of probabilistic fixations. This is not to say that such a model is without utility; it is the ‘ground’ of utility, & conversely, utility is its ground.
But if the becomings of utilisation are governed by a journey of increasing coherence, along a sequence of probabilistic fixations, towards an unknown figure of ‘fixed truth’; is this not all too easy & contrived a perspective? A complacent idealisation? An open adventure of a ‘theology’, collapsed into the stagnant closure of a habitual ‘religion’?
This is why Nagarjuna would reject the figure of ‘Consciousness’, as an Absolute.
Schopenhauer, in the quote, understood this, but broke off to do a phenomenology of the ‘motivic’ (force-‘Will’) & recurrent imaging (form-‘Representation), ‘consensual concept chatter’, that can be written about.
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[Redacted] “insofar as the contingency or emptiness or worldlessness is itself a consistent fact (that it describes what is always already the case),”
{AK}: Okay, consistency of ‘fact’, “describes what is always already the case”, & suggests the invariance of abstract law, which suggests Platonised idealism & fixation; hence, non-contingency.
[Redacted] “then contingency is itself not contingent, not empty, i.e., absolute or the form of all content.”
{AK}: But ‘contingency’ is not an independent ‘fact’, ‘quality’, or ‘thing’. Contingency requires things that are, or seem to be, ‘contingent’. But those ‘facts’, are not truly ‘things’ or ‘entities’, in an absolute sense, their entityhood is alleged. Conversely, in the classical sense, no entity is ever contingent, if it is truly an entity.
Thus, factual contingency is not classical contingency, in the sense of an actual entity that could be said to be truly contingent, absolutely. The fact of Contingency vitiates the very classical objectivity that could support its own absoluteness. No absolute ideality of the Contingent can be achieved, because of the contingency of supporting evidence.
[Redacted] “If the universe were truly and completely contingent, then the possibility of non-contingency becomes a logical possibility.”
{AK}: Both contingency & non-contingency are supervenient operations of the metaphysics of Identity. Without identities, there is nothing to ascribe ‘contingency’ or ‘non-contingency’ to.
[Redacted] “I think Nagarjuna is not affirming meta-contingency but at some point thinks there is an absolute that = contingency (nirvana = samsara).”
{AK}: My suggestion, is that Nagarjuna is engaged in the radical critique of Identity, of its metaphysics, & of its conventions. Such a critique transcends the traditional binary discursivities & conventions of contingency & non-contingency, before they can even arise, as supervenient fixations of a (de)limited logical hallucination. This, I feel, is in line with the ‘Two Truths’ doctrine of the Mahayana.