Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, spent his career dismantling fixed positions — not to leave readers in confusion, but to free them from the grip of conclusions they'd stopped examining. His method, called prasanga, worked by following an argument to its furthest logical edge until it collapsed under its own weight. Writers do something structurally similar when they're at their best: they argue a position hard enough to discover where it breaks. The problem is that most of us stop one step before the collapse, polishing the paragraph that almost works rather than pushing the claim until it either holds or falls apart completely. Nagarjuna's insight, applied here, is that the sentence you're most attached to is probably the one that needs the most pressure. Not more clarity. More pressure. Take your strongest claim today and try to prove it wrong — not to abandon it, but to find out what's actually load-bearing.

What argument in your current work have you been refining rather than stress-testing?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhism — Nagarjuna