Jaina View of Life

SR No.: 001622
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: Jain Sanskruti Samrakshak Sangh Solapur
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 260
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Philosophy, & Discourse
File Size: 14 MB

Page 21

Jaina view of Life
7
In ancient Indian thought the Carvākas led us to a similar conclusion. For them, Lokayata is the only Sastra, and perceptual evidence the only authority. This would logically lead to scepticism and nihilism; but they did not go to the whole length, because their immediate aim was to break down the ecclesiastical monopoly and still assert the spiritual independence of the individual. The Buddhist empiricism was to have gone the way of Gorgias in the Madhyamika School, but for the predominance of the ethical ideal and the goal of nirvaṇa. Nāgārjuna's philosophy is 'now nearer to scepticism and now the mysticism'. The rigour of logic would have led him to nihilism, but for his spiritual fervour and thirst for nirvāṇa.
6
English empiricism repeats this logical movement but does not save itself from its own conclusions. We can see the empiricist method steadily marching from Locke to Berkeley to Hume. Berkeley denied matter, and Hume denied everything except impressions and ideas. Reid, summing up the English empiricist movement, states that ideas, first introduced for explaining the operations of the human understanding, undermined everything but themselves, pitifully naked and destitute, "set adrift without a rag to cover them." Knowledge became impossible and philosophy could go on further without a radical reconsideration of its fundamental position.
But the Humean tendency has been recently revived, by the Cambridge philosophers who brought philosophy to the brink of extinction. Wittgenstein's Tractatus discusses problems of meaning, the nature of logic, facts and propositions and the task of philosophy. It states: What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent'. The world is the totality of facts not of things'. There must be simple entities called objects because there are names, and there must be names because propositions have a definite
/
7. Prabodhacandrodaya, Act II.
8. Radhakrishnan (S): Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 644.
9. Reid Works, p. 109.