Anekantavada

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Atmanand Jain Sabha

Page 96

categories of understanding were purely subjective contributions and objects in themselves were utterly unconnected with the knowing selves; and it was accordingly unintelligible how any ideas about outside objects or any understanding of relations between them could be possible through the applications of those subjective intuitions and categories of understanding. It was difficult to continue in this impossible position and Kant himself in his Practical Reason admitted intimate real relations subsisting between the subjective and the objective realities. It was Hegel who finally pulled down and removed the Kantian barrier between the self and the not-self. He held that the so-called objects outside were also of the nature of ideas, so that the laws of the dialectic of ideas were also the laws of the being and becoming of the objects. A section of the Post-Hegelian thinkers of the realist school retained to some extent the Kantian doctrine of the independent realities of the subject and the object but removed the absolute barrier between them, According to these realists, although the objects are not self-estranged subjects, as Hegel contended, the former have among them real relationships of space and time and it is possible for the subjects to have ideas of those objects and