Karl Jaspers lettore di Nagarjuna

Karl Jaspers analysed the figure and the thought of Buddhist monk Nagarjuna, who lived between the 2nd and 3rd century AD, in the first volume of The Great Philosophers of 1957. This work constitutes the most significant part of a project of “universal history of philosophy” profoundly different from the traditional ones, to the extent that it abandons chronology as its authoritative principle and first of all looks to that super-historical reality (the Transcendence) which has always inspired the thought and existence of the great philosophers, who are simultaneously within and beyond history, forming together a “realm of reason” from which they talk to us as if they were our contemporaries, so that we can always communicate with them. Jaspers, in his analysis of Nagarjuna’s thinking, emphasises the different ways that Eastern man and Western man live their inner freedom towards reality and self. Nagarjuna’s logical-dialectic thinking, however, also has a deep affinity with the Jaspersian “formal transcending”, leading the thought up to the extreme limit where it changes into a sort of “non-thought”, “more than thought”, “other thought”, making it paradoxically possible to think the unthinkable, i.e., to grasp the Omni-embracing Being (the Transcendence), giving meaning and liberty to existence