No Dry Dock

Nāgārjuna, Neurath, Claude, and us: we're all in the same boat — and it's still floating.

In my last essay we watched a 2,000-year-old experiment run its course. The Abhidharma, arguably the crown of Buddhist scholasticism, took the thick, ordinary world of people and chariots and promises and analyzed it into a mosaic of momentary elements, the dharmas, each defined by its own exact nature, svabhāva. The familiar world was demoted to convenient fiction laid over a precise base of what’s ultimately real. I argued this was the same move the Vienna Circle made with language, and the same move we’re making now when we try to hand an AI a crisp definition of “harm” to optimize against. Same dream, same rock we stumble over.

And I ended by noting that every tradition which builds such a floor of the real seems, sooner or later, to grow its own internal inspector: someone who turns the analysis on the floor itself and asks one key question. If the chariot and the self are empty of own-being, mere designations over what lies beneath, then what about the dharmas at the bottom? What makes them the exceptions?

Our inspector’s name was Nāgārjuna, and that question is where this arc has been heading.

The question that doesn’t stop

Nāgārjuna’s move, around the second century CE, was as simple to state as it was hard to absorb: he refused to grant the exception. The dharmas are empty too.

The Abhidharmikas, following the Buddha, had used dependence to dissolve the self. A person has no own-being, because a person depends on their parts — they are built merely out of aggregates (body, feelings, perceptions, volitions, consciousness); they aren’t a further thing in their own right. Fine, said Nāgārjuna. Now look at those parts. A dharma is defined by its relations to other dharmas; it also arises in dependence on conditions; it occupies a slot in a system and is nothing apart from that slot. By your own criterion, then, it has no own-being either. The thing you reached for as bedrock has exactly the feature that disqualified everything above it.

This is śūnyatā, emptiness: not that nothing exists, but that nothing exists on its own or “from its own side,” with a self-standing nature owing nothing to anything else. Everything is what it is by dependence — dependent origination, one of the most important moves in Buddhism, followed all the way down until there is no “down” left to reach.

I want to head off the natural misreading immediately, because it’s a classic one that makes emptiness sound like mysticism. Emptiness is not a kind of featureless cosmic soup, blank ground from which all distinctions have been washed out. Instead it’s what we get when we take dependence seriously — and dependence is exactly what explains why the world is so richly articulated, why there are wheels and axles and chariots and the difference between them. A thing’s nature lies in its web of relations. Remove the demand that anything stand on its own, and the web is all still there, every thread of it. Emptiness doesn’t remove the floor. It declines to put a foundation under it.

The boundary of the boundary

Here the arc closes a loop I opened in the very first essay, because Nāgārjuna’s move has a structural twin in the theory of vagueness, and seeing the two side by side is the point of this series.

Recall the original problem. “Tall” has no sharp boundary; somewhere between four and eight feet there’s a borderline zone where there’s simply no fact of the matter. The obvious repair is to admit that borderline zone and draw its edges instead — fine, “tall” is fuzzy, but surely we can say precisely where the fuzz begins. And no, we can’t do that, either. The line between “tall” and “borderline tall” is itself just as blurry as the line we were trying to fix. And the line between “borderline tall” and “borderline-borderline tall” blurs in turn. Philosophers call this higher-order vagueness: the vagueness of a vague term infects its own boundaries, and the boundaries of those boundaries, with no level at which things finally go crisp. We reach our foot out for a sharp meta-level to stand on and go right through it.

That is Nāgārjuna’s move in a different outfit. He empties the dharmas; then — and this is the step that matters — he empties emptiness itself. Śūnyatā-śūnyatā, the emptiness of emptiness. Because the danger, once we’ve found this wonderful solvent that dissolves every self-standing nature, is to let it harden into the new bedrock: “everything is empty, and that, at last, is the one foundational truth.” Nāgārjuna shuts that door as well. Emptiness, he says, is not a thing we find at the bottom; it’s not even a view we hold. Those who take emptiness as a view, he writes, are incurable — like a person who, told there is nothing in the shop, asks to buy that nothing. Emptiness is the relinquishing of all foundationalist views, including itself. There is no floor, and “there is no floor” is not a floor.

Hold this next to the image we’ve been carrying since the second essay: Otto Neurath’s boat. We are sailors rebuilding our ship plank by plank on the open sea, with no dry dock to haul it into, no solid ground to stand on while we work. The point of that image was never just “knowledge is revisable.” It was that there is no dry dock for the dry dock — no privileged place outside the whole enterprise from which to rebuild it on secure foundations. Higher-order vagueness, the emptiness of emptiness, and Neurath’s boat can be seen as three expressions of the same point: the regress of justification has no last step, the boundary has no final boundary, and the search for bedrock comes up, every time, with more underneath.

The trap in my own argument

If you’ve been reading carefully (and if you’ve read this far you probably have) you may have noticed that I’ve walked into my own net.

The claim running through these four essays is that ordinary concepts are vague: gappy at the edges, with no sharp boundaries, no fact of the matter in the borderline cases. But that claim is itself stated in ordinary concepts. “Concept,” “vague,” “boundary,” “fact of the matter” — none of these is a stipulated mathematical term with crisp edges. So by its own lights, my thesis is vague. It has borderline cases. There’s no fact of the matter about exactly where it applies. The argument fails to satisfy its own demand, and there’s no escape hatch marked “logic” to climb out through, because the thesis isn’t a theorem. It’s just more fog, claiming the fog is everywhere.

There are, as far as I can see, two ways to take this.

The first is to reserve a sharp meta-level. I could insist that while ordinary concepts are vague, the philosophical vocabulary I’m using to say so is exact — a clean technical language, immune to its own verdict, describing the fog from a clear perch above it. But notice what I’d have just done. I’d have built a precise, privileged inventory of terms and declared it the place where things really stand. I’d have become the Abhidharmika. I’d have made exactly the move this entire arc was written to diagnose.

The second is to notice that it was never much of a trap. Yes, the thesis is vague. Why did we ever think that was fatal? Only if vagueness were a defect a respectable claim has to purge — which is the very assumption these essays exist to deny. We take vague claims seriously all the time: that someone was cruel, that a heap has formed, that a person has died. None of those draws a completely sharp line, and none is the worse for it. “Ordinary concepts are vague” is one more claim of that kind, held the way we hold all the others — as a region in a space of resemblances, not a theorem with crisp edges. It asks for no special floor of its own, because nothing really can.

And that’s the point the whole arc has been walking toward. The Abhidharma’s mistake was never that it built an inventory, or that it analyzed wholes into parts — the Buddha did that, science does it, we all do it all day long. The mistake was the floor: the conviction that the analysis stops somewhere, that there is a bottom layer of elements so basic they are no longer open to the same treatment, sharp where everything above them is soft. There is no such layer, or at least none in anything approaching our ordinary language. Every item in any inventory we can actually think with is itself open to further analysis, itself a little vague, itself dependent — all the way down, with no final sharp tile to set the building on.

Why should that be? The answer is the one I opened the whole series with, and it isn’t metaphysics — it’s us. There’s no sharp floor under our concepts because of the kind of thing that holds them. We are ourselves neural networks. We, and now the machines we’ve built in our own image, represent the world by graded similarity: soft edges, clusters that blur at the rim. Crisp, rule-governed, logical thought is not the ground floor of a mind like ours. Logic is a hard, late, effortful practice we can sometimes train ourselves into, the way we train ourselves into long division. We are not, underneath it all, Good Old-Fashioned Vienna Circle Intelligences, reasoning up from precise atoms. It runs the other way: the blur is where we begin, and the precision is what we have to build, plank by plank, and can never quite finish. Which is exactly why the floor keeps giving way — in Vienna, in the monasteries, and in the server farms alike.

What emptiness leaves standing

It would be easy to hear all this as our getting lost in the fog and praising its obscurity — as if we just end in a confused shrug. That reading is not just bleak; it’s backwards, and correcting it is what the arc has been for.

Start with what the Abhidharmikas got right, because they were following the Buddha. When they took the person apart — Vajirā’s chariot that turns out to be only axle and wheels and pole, the self that dissolves into its aggregates — they were doing exactly what he had taught, and for his reason: to deflate the ego by seeing through its constructed nature, to loosen the grip of “I” and “mine” — the very loosening that was meant to let universal compassion flow unobstructed. That is the heart of the Dharma. The overreach came one step later, when they reified the parts the analysis turned up — granted the dharmas their own-being, their svabhāva, and installed them as the sharp and final “reals.” Having knocked the self off its pedestal, they built a row of smaller pedestals and stood the dharmas on those. And a pedestal like this is exactly what feeds craving and papañca: the proliferating conceptual elaborations the whole path was supposed to quiet.

We can watch the proliferation happen. Once the dharmas become the real, momentary, and basic parts, people are drawn to explain how they hang together instant by instant — and each school, early and late, obliges: theories of discrete mind-moments clicking past one another, the Theravāda’s bhavaṅga, a “life-continuum” mind idling beneath the gaps, the Yogācāra’s ālaya-vijñāna, a “storehouse consciousness” to ferry the karmic residue across. Intricate, ingenious, often genuinely fascinating, perhaps even of some therapeutic use — and more and more the private property of one school against the next, elaborate machinery built to make a system of simples all line up properly with felt reality. Somewhere in there the analysis had quietly lost the plot it was meant to serve, which was to mitigate suffering. The machinery became its own end.

Nāgārjuna’s move dismantles the pedestals. There is no privileged foundation of “reals.” In doing so his move can help us to redirect our focus back to where it should have been in the first place. If nothing is established as the basic parts, then there’s no temptation to spend time systematizing them for their own sake. This is the point of Nāgārjuna’s most famous chapter: emptiness and the conventional world are not two things. Without relying on the everyday, he says, the ultimate cannot be taught; and for the one for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible. The conventional survives because we cease craving for intellectual bedrock outside of it.

There’s a Western thinker who reached a similar point from an entirely different direction. Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, no Buddhist, distinguished the manifest image — the everyday world of persons, reasons, colors, and commitments — from the scientific image of particles and forces, and concluded that the second can never simply evict the first; the two have to be held together in a single stereoscopic view. Put the Buddhist project under that description and its missing discipline appears: analysis has to stay in dialectic with conventional reality, answerable to the lived world rather than replacing it. And it could never escape that world even if it tried, for a reason we keep arriving at: every concept the analysis uses to do its work (”dharma,” “contact,” “feeling,” “consciousness”) is itself a conventional concept of the manifest world, a little vague, open to further analysis. (Why, once more? Because of the kind of minds that hold these concepts: networked, resemblance-driven, with no bedrock layer anywhere underneath.) The dialectic bottoms out nowhere. There is no rung off of which the everyday world finally hangs.

This is the landing, and it’s a claim about value, not about fog. Strip away the demand for a precise bedrock of what’s “really” real, and we can no longer call the manifest world — the felt warmth, the kept promise, the person who can be wronged — a dispensable approximation to some other vocabulary, because there is no other vocabulary with a superior claim. The world where things matter, where there are persons to whom things can be done well or badly, is not a fiction laid over the real one; it’s where we live, and where, it turns out, everything worth anything is located. That is finally why Sellars wanted the two images fused rather than one devouring the other: the manifest image is the home of the personal and the normative, and to let it be eliminated by the precise one is to eliminate lived reality in the bargain.

We can’t precisify our way out, in other words — and that was never the bad news. We’d be leaving the only place to which we’re truly adapted.

So what

We’re running this experiment again, right now, in the open, with more at stake than the Abhidharmikas or the positivists ever had on the table.

The reigning hope in AI safety, the responsible-sounding one, is that we will eventually write our values down — produce a specification precise enough that a powerful optimizing system can be aimed at it and trusted to stay aimed. Define “harm” exactly. Pin down “human flourishing.” Get the target sharp, and the alignment problem becomes, at last, an engineering problem. It’s that floor-claim all over again: the conviction that beneath our vague, fraying, lived sense of what matters there is, or could be, a fully level bottom layer that says how things really stand, value-wise — and that our ordinary moral talk is just a foggy gesture toward it.

Everything in this series says that bottom layer isn’t there to be reached. Not because the engineering is hard, but because “human values” is exactly the kind of concept whose worth lies in its open texture, in the judgment it summons at the borderline — and a sharp specification can’t capture that judgment, it can only replace it, and then the system satisfies the letter while sailing past the thing we meant.

There is no dry dock. We’re going to be rebuilding this boat at sea, with vague concepts and revisable judgment, for as long as we’re on the water, because that’s the only way it has ever been done — by us, by our brains, by the soft-edged pattern-matchers we ourselves are. The good news folded inside that, the same good news Nāgārjuna found, is that the absence of a level floor is not the loss of the thing that matters.

A reflection, by way of an ending

I don’t, in the end, hold Nāgārjuna up as the hero with the answer. His system is essentially a continuation of the same Abhidharmic project, only aimed against itself, and as such has also fallen into scholasticism over the centuries. The early Buddhist texts I find most congenial didn’t run his dialectical machine at all. They didn’t need to. They simply declined to sharpen what didn’t need sharpening: refusing unprofitable questions, leaving the fog alone where the fog was doing no harm. That quiet refusal is the position I actually prefer. It needs no elaboration for its own sake. It builds nothing that it then has to tear down.

But many of us are already infected by a desire for foundational systems. We yearn to sharpen our concepts and minds so as to eliminate any possibility of error. The reflex to fix vagueness by drawing sharp lines feels like maturity, like rigor, like the grown-up thing to do. To that extent “just leave the fog alone” sounds like giving up.

The cure for the precision we crave in the manifest, in the conventional, is to see the delusion in the search for such precision. To do that is to come to understand the nature of our conceptual apparatus, its limits and tendencies.

Which means these essays were never really about Madhyamaka, or the Vienna Circle, or the Abhidharma. They were about us, and who we are. We are biological creatures evolved to live in a buzzing confusion of complexity; evolved to find value where it benefits us and to struggle against what harms. We’re pattern-matchers, not logic devices, much as we may wish otherwise. That’s to say, we meet the world through concepts that are vague as far down as we can see. That vagueness brings resilience under complexity, but it also promises imperfection: only the precise can hope to be perfect.

All too often we crave perfection; this tendency itself is one to be seen and understood rather than obeyed. Vagueness isn’t a problem that can be solved. It’s a fact about how beings like us encounter the world. And this encounter, we are finding, is also true of our most complex and powerful creations.

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Notes & further reading

• The essay this one follows from: Buddhism’s Dream of the Perfect List. The two before it: The Dream of a Perfect Language and Concepts Don’t Have Edges (Not in Us, Not in AI).

• The primary text, quoted throughout by chapter and verse: Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), in Mark Siderits & Shōryū Katsura, trans., Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (Wisdom, 2013). The two-truths and the non-annihilation of the conventional: MMK 24.8–10 (24.10: “without relying on the conventional, the ultimate is not taught”), 24.14 (”for whom emptiness is possible, everything is possible”), 24.18 (dependent origination = emptiness = the middle way). Emptiness must not itself become a view: MMK 13.8 (”the victorious ones have said that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views; those who take emptiness as a view are called incurable”). The “stilling of proliferation,” prapañcopaśama, in the dedicatory verses — the same papañca the last essay ended on.

• On the self-refutation worry, Nāgārjuna’s own reply was the famous “no thesis” line of the Vigrahavyāvartanī (VV 29: “if I had any thesis, that fault would attach to me; but I have none”). I don’t lean on it. Taken at face value it overstates — the fair retort is “then why should we listen?” — though its defenders read it more narrowly, as the claim that he only ever runs reductios on his opponents’ own premises and asserts nothing in his own voice (Jan Westerhoff, “The No-Thesis View”; Dimitri Pulles, “Nāgārjuna the Magician,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2025). My own way out of the worry is simpler and needs none of this: a vague thesis is just a thesis, held the way a neural network holds anything.

• The “two images” that have to be fused: Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962) — the manifest image as the home of the personal and the normative, and the closing call for a “stereoscopic” synoptic vision.

• The semantic reading of emptiness I’m working within (emptiness as the absence of any ultimately privileged way things are, rather than a metaphysical thesis about a special ground): Mark Siderits and Jay Garfield. A good entry is Westerhoff’s SEP entry on Nāgārjuna.

About the Author

Doug Smith holds a PhD in philosophy of mind and is a scholar of early Buddhism. He is the creator of Doug’s Dharma on YouTube. This essay was written in collaboration with an instance of Claude, which is part of what this series is all about: a system with no set foundation beneath it, no sharp specification of what it values, getting by the way the rest of us do, on soft edges and borrowed judgment, out on the open water with no land in sight.