Neti Neti and Rothko

I first sat in a room full of Rothkos at MoMA in late 2006 or early 2007. I had come to New York to visit my family that was residing there at the time and ended up in that room full of giant rectangles of color somehow. I had no idea what I was looking at or who Mark Rothko was at the time. I just sat there for what felt like eternity, staring at life-size fields of color that evoked a strong feeling, drawing me in for reasons I could not name. I just know it mattered because I have never stopped chasing that feeling since.

Rothko

About 20 years later I read Rothko’s biography and found a pattern I was not expecting. An immigrant arrives in America obsessed with knowledge. He studies philosophy and literature and mythology. He finds himself faced with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and it rewires him so completely that he stops painting temporarily to go deeper into mythology and psychoanalysis. He becomes consumed by Greek tragedy and the tension between barbaric violence and civilized passivity. He paints works named after mythological figures for a while and then stops naming them altogether, going with numbers only.

He starts calling himself a mythmaker. He accepts a commission to decorate the Four Seasons in New York for wealthy diners, then grows disgusted at the idea, refunds the money, and gives the paintings to museums instead. His health deteriorates and his marriage collapses. His last paintings are black rectangles over gray rectangles. The same day his murals arrive in London for display at the Tate, his assistant finds him dead on the kitchen floor. He was 66 and left no note.

The whole arc runs on a single thread. A restless mind chases knowledge, burns out into isolation and despair and tragedy, finds its way back through Greek mythology, and lands on an obsession with mortality that never lets go. And Nietzsche is there at every turn, the figure in the corner you cannot unsee once you have seen him.

Neti Neti

There is a phrase in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the earliest texts in Hindu philosophy. “Neti neti.” Not this, not this. It appears across multiple passages spoken by the sage Yajnavalkya and it is a method of describing ultimate reality by negation. Since Brahman transcends every category, the only accurate description is the denial of every finite attribute you might try to pin on it. You cannot say what it is. You can only say what it is not.

This was composed somewhere around the 7th or 6th century BCE in northern India. And within roughly a century, two other men were doing structurally identical things on opposite sides of the known world without any evidence of having heard of each other.

The Buddha refused to answer metaphysical questions outright. Is the universe eternal or not? Does the self exist after death or not? He called these the undeclared questions and simply would not engage, not because he did not care but because the questions themselves were the trap. Similarly, Socrates in Athens never positively defined justice or virtue or the good. His entire method consisted of demolishing every proposed definition until the student walked away knowing what justice was not. His famous claim to wisdom was that he knew nothing, which is basically Neti Neti repackaged for Athenian sensibilities.

Three men in three civilizations arriving at the same epistemic humility independently, at near identical times on a cosmic temporal scale.

The Axial Age

Karl Jaspers named this convergence the Axial Age in 1949. Somewhere between around 800 and 200 BCE, independent civilizations produced foundational philosophical breakthroughs at roughly the same time without coordinating it. Greece, India, China, Persia. All moved from mythological and ritualistic thinking toward abstract reasoning about ethics and the nature of the self. The best explanation anyone has is that similar material conditions — things like urbanization, literacy, trade networks, and a leisure class — generated the same philosophical move independently.

And the move is always the same. The Vedas were ritualistic and pragmatic, sacrifice in exchange for reward, and then the Upanishads ruptured that tradition from within by replacing ritual with abstraction. Greece had its Olympian religion with sacrifices and oracles and then Socrates showed up and burned the whole framework down with questions that had no answers. The Buddha rejected the Vedic priesthood entirely and built a path out of negation and direct practice.

Ritual to abstraction. Over and over and over.

The Ouroboros

The arc does not stop at the ancient world. Nietzsche walked it in the 19th century and it broke him. Camus walked it in the 20th and came out the other side with the absurd, the idea that the universe offers no meaning and you keep going anyway. Rothko walked it with paint instead of words and ended up in the same place, black rectangles over gray rectangles, then silence. The shape keeps repeating in individual lives over decades the same way it played out across civilizations over centuries.

Whether there is something that comes after the absurd, I do not know. Maybe the conditions for it have not matured yet. Maybe they are maturing now and someone will name it in hindsight the way Jaspers named the Axial Age.

Or maybe the ouroboros is the point. The snake does not arrive anywhere. It just keeps circling and it will never stop. Not this, not this. One must imagine the ride pleasant.