The Conventional Emptiness of Human Beings: Reviewing Archer’s Theory of Agency through Nagarjuna’s Looking Glass

Margaret Archer is probably the critical realist who has most significantly affected the debate around the relationship between social structure and agency. In the volume, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, she aims to better define what is meant by the properties and causal powers of agency itself, i.e., self-consciousness and reflexivity. In this paper, this theoretical attempt is reviewed through the critical standpoint of Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna’s philosophy appears to be a particularly compelling tool for criticizing Archer’s theory. Claiming the emptiness of everything, the founder of the Buddhist Madhyamaka school provides a critical perspective for revising the distinctiveness of human properties and causal powers. Specifically, Nagarjuna’s rejection of the intrinsic nature of all entities reveals that Archer’s attempt to discern something as inherently human is questionable. If our sense of self emerges from embodied practice in the natural world, it may be that it cannot be demolished by social and linguistic forces. However, this does not mean that it can be regarded as a sui generis human property and power. That same embodied practice in the world makes human beings empty of inherent nature. Nevertheless, since emptiness itself is empty, we cannot conclude that human beings are inherently empty, but merely conventionally empty.