| Any explanation of interpretation must reflect the prejudices and presuppositions of its author. Like a solution to a puzzle, an interpretation will reflect how the puzzle is constructed and on what counts as a successful solution in the eyes of the puzzle-solver. Consequently, as the assumptions, vocabularies, and conscious aims of scholars change, their readings of texts will change as well. To this extent, their readings are inherently, necessarily, "isogetical": they reveal far more about the views of the scholar than exegesis is said to do.;These phases represent more than ways of understanding another culture's thought; they are ways of defining scholarly boundaries and establishing explanatory goals. The Madhyamika materials under examination are not essential to this project, a study like this could have been carried out with any major area of scholarly enterprise. This study is an inquiry into the philosophy of scholarship.;There is a sequence of distinct philosophical fashions discernible among those Western or Western-trained scholars who, since the mid-nineteenth century, have dealt with Indian thought. This work traces the changes in trends in the modern, scholarly interpretations of a second-century Indian-Buddhist text and charts three distinct phases of differing interpretive styles and aims. Over a period of more than a hundred years, Nagarjuna's Madhyamikakarika has been read in ways that reflect the theoretical assumptions of modern scholars. Nineteenth-century idealists from Schopenhauer on viewed Indian thought as a response to the problem of the relation between appearance and reality and found their own concerns mirrored in Upanisadic, Vedantin, and Madhyamika writings. Accordingly, Nagarjuna was read as if he were a Kantian transcendentalist. In the first half of the twentieth century, analytic and positivist philosophers characterized the Indian philosophical spectrum as an assortment of rival claims about causal efficacy and logical accuracy. In this context, Nagarjuna was viewed as a logical analyst of competing metaphysical and epistemological propositions. Subsequently, post-Wittgensteinians have seen Nagarjuna as an anti-philosopher, primarily concerned with language-use, conceptual holism, and the limits of philosophical discourse. |
