Neti Neti and Barrett

A continuation of the thread that began with Neti Neti and Rothko.

That post ended on a question I could not answer. Whether anything comes after the negation and the absurd, or whether the ouroboros is the point and the snake just keeps circling. I have been flirting with existentialism again, though in less continuous bursts this time. That is for the better, since the gaps force second-order thinking. The flirtation has been more meaningful, pun unintended, than it was before. For what good is reading about Camus and revolt when you have had nothing in life to reckon with as an adolescent. Right? Right.

What has changed is the lens. I am not examining the question academically this time, and I could not even if I wanted to. That is worth stating plainly once, for this post and the ones before it. I am not a DPhil, and none of this is scholarship. Sanskrit is also inaccessible to me, so everything I knew about neti neti comes through other people’s accounts. This risks my accuracy but is one worth taking anyway. Pondering, on the other hand, requires no license. So I pondered away, and learned that I had been carrying an incomplete understanding that flattened the nuances.

The consequence of that flattening carries weight. Out of the several endings this idea can have, I latched onto the one I either met first. That when you negate everything away, you are left with absolute nothingness. Which goes on to mean that everything is nothing, and by the transitive property, nothing is everything.

The source text does not end there. The phrase comes from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, spoken by the sage Yajnavalkya, and the same passage that delivers the negation immediately hands over a positive name, the real of the real (satyasya satyam). The negation was never final. There are at least three other endings, documented across the traditions that grew out of these texts, and I learned about them only recently.

The Negator

The first ending belongs to Advaita Vedanta, the school Shankara systematized somewhere around the 8th century CE. The negation only ever takes objects as input. Body, breath, mood, thought, the sense of being someone. Anything you can hold at a distance and inspect. It cannot take the one doing the inspecting, because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The same Upanishad says so flatly. When everything has been negated away, one thing survives by construction. The negator.

The tradition compresses this into two of the most famous sentences in Indian philosophy. You are that (tat tvam asi). I am that (aham brahmasmi). And this is where it started rhyming with things I knew. It is Camus and his grounds for revolt. But it is really Descartes and his cogito before that. Doubt everything, and the doubter remains. When everything is negated away, the residual is the negator, and the individual takes birth for the first time.

The Return

The second ending comes from Kashmir Shaivism and its philosopher Abhinavagupta. Run the negation to the end, then reverse the current. This too, this too (iti iti). Everything you negated comes back, identical in content, reversed in ownership. Zen keeps a shorter version of the same move. Mountains are mountains, then mountains are not mountains, then mountains are mountains again.

What returns is not just the world but the ownership of it. Surviving the negation does not automatically imply the agency to create meaning. To create anything. But if that opportunity is granted, then we are back at Camus. The ground we stand on is absurd and meaningless, and that verdict does not have to be relitigated every morning. Which is what frees you to choose, and to be at peace with your choice, all in one breath.

No Residue

The third ending refuses the whole shape. Nagarjuna, the Buddhist philosopher behind the Madhyamaka school, does not let anything survive. On this reading, the claim that the negator remains is just the self dodging the purge in better clothes. Turn anything into your floor and you have stopped negating and started grasping. Even emptiness gets emptied. And this is not the nothingness I had originally latched onto either. Nothingness would be one more thing to negate. This negation leaves no residue, no floor, and no one left standing to miss it.

This is the ending that lands closest to home, which surprised me. I have spent the better part of a year tearing down stories I had told about myself, and the tearing down kept threatening to become the new story. The demolition wants a trophy. Nagarjuna’s warning is aimed exactly there. Convert the emptiness into one more view and you are, on his account, beyond curing. The negation is medicine, not a keepsake. Take the cure, but do not forget the bottle does not exist.

Barrett

This is where things gets incredibly complex, and where I stop pretending any of it reconciles, and for the foreseeable future at that. The three endings do not agree with each other. They sit even less comfortably next to existentialism, which by definition needs a someone. A rebel, a chooser, a self to push the boulder. One of the traditions above says there is no one home to do the pushing.

The people who walked this arc in modern times did not resolve it either. There is a line questionably attributed to Kafka that sums it up well. “The meaning of life is that it stops.” Nietzsche too preached hardness for a lifetime. And we know how it ended in Turin, his arms around a beaten horse, the hardening failing in favor of compassion at the end. My man Syd Barrett founded Pink Floyd, gave it its name, and made one album with his band before walking out in 1968, at the height of both the band and the rock god persona. He went back to his mother’s house in Cambridge and chose gardening over rock and roll immortality. One must imagine Barrett’s ride pleasant nonetheless.

It would seem that the only things that remain certain are these. There is a questioner. The question cannot be legitimately articulated, nor answered by him. And the cosmic strife of it all is a real one. Because neither the question nor the answer, hurts, in a tangibly somatic way that the body feels, whether it exists or not.

The end?