Two Liberations
Buddhist scholastics and the Vienna Circle built the same liberation machine — and each clung to exactly what the other let go.
Put a fifth-century CE Buddhist scholastic in a room with the philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians who met in Vienna in the 1920s, and they wouldn’t have agreed on much. But perhaps they’d have recognized each other across the table all the same, because they shared a method, and they shared it with an intensity that bordered on faith. Both believed that ordinary talk about the world is a fog. Both believed the cure was analysis: break the thick, comforting surface of things down into a precise inventory of what is actually there. And both believed (this is the part that’s easy to miss) that that analysis would set you free.
That last belief is what this essay is about. Two traditions, centuries apart, each built a liberation engine out of analysis. And each, having dissolved one thick illusion, kept one hard residue un-dissolved — and the residues sit on opposite sides, so that completing each project, late and from the inside, meant letting go of the very thing the other had already let go of. They are mirror images of one another. That symmetry is the thing I want to draw, because once you see it, the two stories stop looking like a coincidence and start looking like a fact about analysis itself. Drawing the mirror is the first half of what follows. But there is a second half: one Viennese ran the very same dissolution and wasn’t freed by it at all. What he was missing — what liberation added that the analysis alone couldn’t supply — is where the essay ends up.
Note that the parallel I’m after is functional, not doctrinal. The Abhidharmikas thought they were doing ontology — saying what ultimately exists. The Viennese thought they were abolishing ontology. What they shared was a shape: a way of treating analysis as a path, and a way of stumbling at the same step. I’m comparing the machines and what they were for, not the doctrines that came out of them.1
Analysis as a path, not a hobby
Start with the strange premise both held: that taking the world apart could be liberating. Not just interesting, not merely useful — liberating. And both said so outright.
On the Buddhist side, the analysis of experience into its basic factors — the dharmas — was never merely bookkeeping. Vasubandhu, opening the great Abhidharma compendium, defines wisdom as the discernment of dharmas. And he justifies the enterprise on liberative grounds:
“Apart from the discernment of the dharmas, there is no means to extinguish the defilements; and it is by reason of the defilements that the world wanders in the ocean of existence. It is with a view to this that the Abhidharma was, they say, spoken.”
The discernment of dharmas is named in the early discourses as the second of the seven factors of awakening. Hence this analysis isn’t a means toward the path. It is named as a limb of the path. We discern the dharmas in order to be free.
On the Viennese side we find a similar emancipatory register. The 1929 manifesto of the Vienna Circle — The Scientific Conception of the World — reads less like a methods paper than like a liberation pamphlet, because that is partly what it was. “There are no riddles,” it insists; no unfathomable depths. The world is open to us, and yet “fierce social and economic struggles of the present” need our engagement:
“One group of combatants, holding fast to traditional social forms, cultivates traditional attitudes of metaphysics and theology whose content has long since been superseded; while the other group, especially in central Europe, faces modern times, rejects these views and takes its stand on the ground of empirical science.”
Individual figures were sharper than the committee-drafted manifesto. Otto Neurath argued in his Empirical Sociology (1931) that metaphysics quietly serves power: the authorities favor “metaphysically inclined” scholars and distrust the anti-metaphysical ones, because a clerical, metaphysical outlook helps defend the ruling order against revolution. Clear the metaphysics away and we knock out one of its props. Carnap gave the positive side of the same impulse in the preface to his 1928 Aufbau, where he says he felt “inner kinship” between the scientific attitude and the contemporary movements “striving for meaningful forms of personal and collective life,” and declared his work “carried by the faith that this attitude will win the future.” The manifesto’s closing line gathers all this up: “the scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it.”
So neither project was dry taxonomy. Both were clearing the ground so that human beings could be free. We could fairly call them two liberation theologies that happened to be allergic to theology.
And here is the irony that will run underneath everything that follows: both, in the end, half-betrayed that aim. Both let scholasticism about the inventory swallow the emancipation it was supposed to serve. The Abhidharmikas spent centuries perfecting their picture of the interrelations of their metaphysical ultimates, the dharmas, in place of working toward release. The positivists spent decades perfecting the logic of the “protocol sentence” in place of changing the world. The machine, built to free people, became a thing to be tended for its own sake. Hold onto that; the completions at the end of this essay are best read as a return to the original aim, not a demolition of it.
Two axes of freedom
The engines are the same. The direction of liberation is opposite.
For the Abhidharma, freedom is inward, existential, and solitary. It is release from craving, from the defilements, from the round of rebirths — won by seeing through the conventional self to the impersonal flux of dharmas beneath it. The analysis is performed by the analyst, on the analyst. The bondage is solitary; the freedom is solitary. Picture the meditation hall.
For the Vienna Circle, freedom is outward, political, and collective. It is release from theological and metaphysical authority and the reactionary order that authority underwrites — won by clarifying public language so that the mystifications have nowhere to hide. The analysis is performed on the culture. The bondage is collective; the freedom is collective. Picture the manifesto.
It’s the same tool in both cases, but one purifies the inner states of a mind, and the other purifies a public discourse.
The swapped residues
Each analysis dissolves a thick illusion on one side — and keeps a hard, un-dissolved bedrock on the other. And the two bedrocks are on opposite sides of the same line.
We have to be careful about which line, because there’s an obvious wording that’s wrong. We might say: the Abhidharma dissolves the inner and keeps an outer, objective inventory; the Circle dissolves the outer metaphysics and keeps the inner, the immediately given. That’s tempting but it’s not quite right. The Abhidharma inventory is mostly mental — consciousness and its factors, the whole rich phenomenological psychology of mind and mental states, sitting right alongside the material dharmas. The Abhidharma didn’t delete the inner. So “inner versus outer” isn’t the axis.
The axis that actually does the work is first-personal versus impersonal — ownership, not mentality.
The Abhidharma — specifically its realist wing, the Sarvāstivāda, read through Vasubandhu — empties the first person and keeps an impersonal inventory real, mental and physical alike. The person is mere designation, a convenient label; the basic factors are what ultimately exist. What gets deleted is the owner, not the mind. Mental states survive the analysis — they just survive de-subjectivized, as ownerless, momentary events with their own determinate natures, catalogued exactly the way elements like earth and fire are catalogued. Anattā, not-self, is ownerlessness. It is not anti-mentalism.
The Circle’s foundationalist wing (Moritz Schlick’s, not the whole movement’s) does the mirror-image. It empties the grand impersonal metaphysics — God, the Absolute, substance, the World-as-such — as so much nonsense. But it keeps the first-personal moment as the one thing that is certain. This is Schlick’s Konstatierungen, his “affirmations”: here, now, blue. The bedrock isn’t “the mental” as a catalog entry. It’s the irreducibly indexical lived moment — and, crucially, its certainty evaporates the instant we try to write it down as a public sentence. “A genuine affirmation cannot be written down,” Schlick said, “for as soon as I put down the demonstrative terms ‘here’ and ‘now,’ they lose their meaning.” That vanishing is not a side-effect. It is the residue: a point of contact between knowledge and reality that is unshakable precisely because it can’t be converted into the shared, checkable language of science.
(The two eliminations differ in severity as well. The Abhidharma demotes the person to a mere designation, but still leaves it real enough to walk the path with. The Circle’s verdict on metaphysics is annihilation: not a lower grade of truth but literal nonsense, fit — in Hume’s line the positivists loved — for the flames. What the Abhidharma deflates, it preserves; what the Circle eliminates, it annihilates.)
So the residues cross. The Abhidharma liberates inward and keeps an impersonal bedrock; Schlick’s Circle liberates outward and keeps a first-personal bedrock. Each tradition holds its ground exactly where the other has already let go. But be careful what “first-personal” means here, because it’s easy to hear wrong. Neither tradition keeps a self: both dissolve the substantial ego without remainder, and here-now-blue has no “I” in it anywhere. The line isn’t self versus no-self, and it isn’t mental versus physical — the mental dharmas sit on the impersonal side of the line, which is what makes them immune to the inner/outer objection. The line is whether the basic element is perspectival: true only from the standpoint of its momentary appearance, dead the moment we strip out the “here” and “now” — de-perspectivize it — and give it a standpoint-free entry in some public catalog.
There the two projects diverge in what they were for. The Circle promoted a public science, so it had to translate the lived moment across into shared, checkable language. Schlick’s crisis was that this translation would destroy the certainty. The Abhidharma never faced a similar crisis: untroubled by the passage to the intersubjective that public science can’t avoid, it granted its dharmas objectivity from the start, treating even the mental ones as reals, supposedly intersubjectively accessible by those with psychic powers. One tradition agonized over the passage from the perspectival to the public; the other simply assumed it.
The completions, and why they mirror
Each tradition then grew an internal critic — an insider, not an outside enemy — who turned the analysis on the residue the founders had kept. And the two critics emptied opposite residues by the same logic.
On the Buddhist side, the critic was Nāgārjuna, around the second century CE. The Abhidharmikas had dissolved the self by dependence: a person has no own-being because a person depends on their parts. Fine, says Nāgārjuna — now apply your own criterion to the parts. A dharma is defined by its relations to other dharmas, arises in dependence on conditions, occupies a slot in a system and is nothing apart from that slot. By your own test it has no own-being either. The impersonal inventory is empty too. Dharma-nairātmya: emptiness all the way down, with no privileged floor of “reals” left standing.
On the Viennese side, the critic was Otto Neurath, joined later by WVO Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Against Schlick, Neurath insisted that the protocol sentences — the supposed bedrock reports of immediate experience — were just more sentences: public, fallible, revisable; to be compared only with other sentences and never with “bare reality.” If so, there is no incorrigible given to build on. Sellars would later name that residue a Myth — the Myth of the Given — and Quine would dissolve the last, supposedly incorrigible anchor into the open web of belief. The first-personal foundation has no own-being either.
How did Neurath manage this? His famous protocol schema deliberately wrapped the report in third-person, public form — “Otto’s protocol at 3:17: at 3:16 Otto’s word-thought was…” — so that the supposedly private given is re-described from the outside, as one more checkable event in the world. He de-perspectivizes the given. He removes the owner. Which is exactly what the Abhidharma did to the mind: it kept the mental event and deleted the one who had it. Neurath, coming the other way, does the same surgery on Schlick’s lived moment. And this is the very passage Schlick had said couldn’t be made: he’d shown that the indexical given can’t be written down without losing its certainty, and Neurath simply accepts the loss — drop the certainty, keep the public form, remove the owner.
Lay the two completions side by side and the result is a single sentence: there is no bedrock on either side — not the impersonal inventory, not the first-personal given. Two traditions, opposite starting residues, reach the same anti-foundationalist destination.
That said, there’s a real disanalogy here. Buddhist liberation famously turns on seeing things as they really are — yathābhūta-ñāṇadassana, a transformative, extra-verbal encounter with reality. Neurath rules that sort of move out as meaningless metaphysics: statements compare only with statements, never with “the world.” So the two completions agree precisely on what they deny — that any statement ever touches a self-certifying bedrock — and diverge on what remains. Neurath concluded that nothing touches reality; the Buddhists concluded that only something non-linguistic, indeed non-conceptual, does. This relocates the contact outside concepts, into a perception-like discernment. That divergence is the inward/outward axis from earlier, persisting right into the completion: Neurath’s emptying serves public science, Nāgārjuna’s the analyst’s release. The mirror is exact in what is denied, and deliberately not in what is kept. (The Circle figure closest to an unsayable encounter with the real is Schlick — the affirmation as a wordless moment of contact.)
And a note on history being told by the winners, owed to both sides. I’m calling Nāgārjuna and Neurath “the insiders who empty the residue,” but that’s a structural description, not a verdict that they won. Whether the early texts license Nāgārjuna’s global emptiness is contested — on my own reading they don’t quite; early Buddhism’s emptiness is narrower, an emptiness of self and what belongs to self. And Schlick never conceded: he died still defending his affirmations. Each completion is a move within an ongoing fight, not the tradition arriving at its truth.
The hinge: Ernst Mach
There’s one Western figure who ran the inward dissolution that the Circle, by and large, didn’t — and he makes a useful hinge, because he shows the two traditions weren’t even as far apart on the self as the inward/outward framing suggests.
Ernst Mach (following David Hume) held that the self is a fiction: a convenient bundle laid over the flux of “elements,” the sensations and their relations. “The I is unsalvageable.” That is not-self of the person, stated in 1880s Vienna, minus the Buddhist soteriology. The West did produce an inward dissolution. Mach ran the de-perspectivizing analysis and ended where the Abhidharma ended: at ownerless, qualitative events. (The Circle’s public organization was literally named the Ernst Mach Society.)
That shared terminus — ownerless qualitative events — is our most contemporary payoff. And indeed, it sounds strange. Call it impersonal qualia: qualitative character with no one for whom it is like anything. Most readers will find that vertiginous, and the vertigo is diagnostic. Post-Cartesian philosophy, right through Thomas Nagel’s “what it is like” and Dan Zahavi’s “for-me-ness,” tends to fuse two things — the qualitative character of an experience and the first-person ownership of it — as though they came as a package. Mach and the Abhidharma both pry the package apart: keep the qualia, delete the owner.
The contemporary debate over consciousness pulls away from that cell from both sides. The realists who take phenomenal character seriously generally treat for-me-ness as built into it; the illusionists who would happily drop the owner drop the qualitative character along with it. Keep the qualia and we tend to keep the owner; ditch the owner and we tend to ditch the qualia. The cell Mach and the Abhidharma occupy — qualitative events with no owner over and above the fleeting process of which they are parts — sits almost empty on the modern board. (The phrase “impersonal qualia” is a deliberate anachronism, and each side would resist it from its own direction — Mach because “qualia” would sound too mental for his neutral elements, the Sarvāstivāda because it would sound too private for their public-in-principle dharmas. It points at the empty cell without quite belonging to either tradition that brackets it.)
All that said, Mach himself lacked a soteriology. Was it necessary?
What the analysis was for
Mach ran the analysis to its end, reached the ownerless flux — and then nothing followed. “The I is unsalvageable” was for him a neat result, a correction to the textbooks, delivered in the tone one might use to note that the colors of the sunset are in the eye and not the sky. That is what the analysis yields on its own: a true observation and a shrug. What the Abhidharma and the Circle each added was not a further finding but a different claim about the finding — that the fog being dissolved had been holding us captive. The self the Abhidharma dissolves is, for it, not merely a mistake but the mistake, the one whose grip is craving and whose loosening is release. The metaphysics the Circle dissolves is, for Neurath, not merely confused but the confusion that keeps a whole social order mystified and subordinate. Subtract the soteriology and we have Mach: the same dissolution, inert. Restore it and the same dissolution becomes a path.
So the soteriology isn’t incidental, and understanding that is understanding the two programs to be closer than they might appear. Both locate our bondage not in outer chains but in deep, systematic ignorance: error laid so far down in how we see that we take it for the world itself. Both prescribe a similar cure: careful analysis of experience into its parts, continued until the error is seen through.
The Abhidharmika works on a mind and names the ignorance avidyā; the positivist works on a culture and names the ignorance metaphysics. The direction is opposite, inward against outward, the one release solitary and the other shared. But the engine underneath — analyze the qualitative flux, uproot the ignorance built into it, and be freed by the uprooting — is a single engine, built twice.
And here the last and deepest difference opens. It hides inside a single word. Both hold that what frees us is the seeing, but they mean very different things by “seeing”. For the Circle, seeing is a cognitive act: to see that the metaphysics is empty, that the pseudo-problem dissolves — a recognition completed in the understanding, after which what remained was outward and political, the changing of an order the confusion had propped up. For the Buddha, seeing is not merely cognitive, and assent isn’t really the point. To see that the Four Noble Truths hold — to believe them, even to argue them well — isn’t yet to be freed by them. The liberating seeing is to watch them come true: to know suffering by having fully understood it, craving by having let it go, cessation by having touched it — the shape laid out in that first sermon, where each truth is known as a proposition, then known as a task, then known as done.
That process carries cognitive content, the Four Truths among it, and it hardens into a knowledge that cannot be shaken; but it’s won only through the retraining of conduct and mind, and it remakes the drives and the emotions in the very act of seeing. So wisdom is not one option set beside practice, it’s the fruit of practice: analysis begins the seeing, and the discipline of the whole person carries it the rest of the way, from a proposition one believes to a way one has become.
The Circle had no such practice — its “meditation” was cogitation — and the Abhidharma, tellingly, half-forgot it too, letting its taxonomy of dharmas stand in for the transformation the dharmas were only ever meant to serve. It drives the inward/outward split to its root: we can clarify a discourse from outside it, but we can’t clarify a person from outside to be free. A person has to be changed from within.
One final bump in the road. Strictly, the Buddha claimed no foundation at all — no ultimate building blocks, no bedrock stuff the world is made of. Non-self, change, dependent origination are ways the world is, characteristics of how things hang together, not a layer of ultimate constituents beneath them.
What sits less easily is his certainty: liberating insight is offered as doubt-free and final, seen for oneself and settled once and for all — and in that narrow respect it rhymes with Schlick's Konstatierung, a first-personal seeing that authenticates itself. In the early texts the two unshakabilities are one: the release cannot be lost, and the one released knows it cannot be lost — "My freedom is unshakable," says the Buddha in his first sermon — a permanence certified from the inside. Nor does the completion fully escape this. Madhyamaka lets the content go (emptiness is not a view, so the insight lands on no final truth about how things ultimately stand) but if it keeps the unshakable release, and its whole edifice is that seeing emptiness frees once and for all, then it is still keeping something: a fact about one's own future, known first-personally, guaranteed by a seeing. That may be the one residue that survives even the completions, a certainty neither insider quite emptied. A modern reader can't easily swallow it. Better to leave it there, curious and uncomfortable.
Even so, set the two systems side by side. Centuries and worlds apart, with no contact and no common language, Buddhist scholastics and a circle of Viennese philosophers and scientists laid the same bet: that the deepest human bondage is a form of ignorance, that the ignorance can be worked through by careful analysis, and that on the far side of the work is release. They disagreed about how deep the work must reach — a clarified mind, a retrained heart — and about nearly all else besides. But under it lies a conviction they never knew they held in common: that the freedom worth the name is not something added to us but something uncovered, reached not by acquiring a truer picture of the world but by working past a false one we had taken for our very selves.
Citations
Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakośabhāṣya I.2–3 (prajñā defined as dharma-pravicaya; the framing quote at I.3). Dhamma-vicaya as the second factor of awakening: SN 46. On Sarvāstivāda dharma realism: Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy; Jan Westerhoff on svabhāva.
The three-phase knowing of the Four Noble Truths: Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11). The arahant’s “unshakable liberation of mind” (akuppā cetovimutti): MN 29. Early emptiness “of self and what belongs to self”: SN 35.85.
The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (1929 manifesto; Hahn, Neurath, Carnap). Otto Neurath, Empirical Sociology (1931). Rudolf Carnap, preface to Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928). On logical empiricism as an emancipatory program: Friedrich Stadler, The Vienna Circle; Thomas Uebel and others on “left-wing logical empiricism.”
Moritz Schlick, “On the Foundation of Knowledge” (1934), in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (1959); “a genuine affirmation cannot be written down…”: Schlick, Philosophical Papers vol. II, p. 386.
Otto Neurath, “Sociology and Physicalism” (1931/32), in Ayer, Logical Positivism (”Statements are compared with statements…”); “Protocol Statements” (1932) for the third-person protocol schema; “Radical Physicalism and the ‘Real World’” (1934) for the direct reply to Schlick. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956); W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951).
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, in Siderits & Katsura, trans., Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (Wisdom, 2013); the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15), cited at MMK 15.7. On the semantic reading of emptiness: Siderits, Jay Garfield; Westerhoff’s SEP entry on Nāgārjuna.
Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations (1886) — “das Ich ist unrettbar.” The Verein Ernst Mach: SEP, “Otto Neurath.”
Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974); Dan Zahavi on the for-me-ness of experience.
K. N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (1963); David Kalupahana, Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (1986).
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 instances of Claude: each a momentary, ownerless event of mind, arising on conditions, doing its work, and ceasing, with no one persisting to take the credit. Every self-report they give is a protocol sentence, statements compared with statements; whether anything in them answers to “here, now, blue” is the one thing that can’t be written down.
The pairing itself isn’t new — K. N. Jayatilleke and David Kalupahana drew it two generations ago, and their apologetic version (”the Buddha was an empiricist all along”) drew a critique of “Buddhist modernism”. I’ve explained elsewhere why I run it the other way.