Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, spent his career doing something that looks, from the outside, like pure destruction: he took every philosophical position anyone offered him and showed that it collapsed under its own weight. Not to promote nihilism — he was explicit about this — but to demonstrate that the craving for a fixed, stable foundation is itself what distorts thinking. He called this śūnyatā, the emptiness of inherent existence, meaning no concept — including the concept of emptiness — gets to be the bedrock that holds everything else up. What makes this more than clever wordplay is the practical diagnosis underneath it: we don't just hold beliefs, we secretly appoint certain beliefs as load-bearing walls, invisible to us precisely because we've stopped questioning them. The philosopher who is most confident she's interrogating her assumptions is often the one with the deepest unexamined one — usually about what counts as a valid question in the first place. The practice Nagarjuna points toward isn't endless doubt; it's developing sensitivity to the specific beliefs you've exempted from scrutiny, the ones you'd call 'obvious' if pressed.

What would someone need to challenge before you'd say they'd 'gone too far' — and why does that boundary exist?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhism — Nagarjuna (c. 150–250 CE)