Bhagavana Mahavira and his Relevance in Modern Times

Author(s): Narendra Bhanavat, Prem Suman Jain, V P Bhatt
Publisher: Akhil Bharat Varshiya Sadhumargi Jain Sangh

Page 57

JAINA DIELECTIC AND
MODERN THOUGHT
T. G. Kalghatgi
Our age is an age of uncertainty. There is social and political instability and intellectual commitments to ideologies. There is distrust and dogmatism. It is a decadent society. Each insists upon his views as right and is unable to understand others points of view. And in this welter of confusion we have to find a way for a stable and harmonious social structure and a coherent thought structure. We are witnessing 'an armed conflict of ideologies. Strife and misery have been rampant.
Advancement in science and technology have added to the instability of the fast-moving society. We have secured confident control over nature. But we have lost the man. But we realise that methodological enquiry of science shows that the concepts of science are more descriptions and its laws are hypothetical and contingent. Its findings are true in a limited sense of being convenient. Scientific laws are only conceptual shorthands. Such conceptions may furnish admirable descriptions of the phenomena of nature, but they explain nothing'.1
Scientific laws are more ‘Pale reflexions of the concrete world' ignoring personal, ethical and spiritual valuation.2
But to understand life and nature we have to transcend the category of casual connection and to get a synoptic view of life.
If we survey the philosophic development in the West, we find that by pursuing the apriori and the empiricist ways, phylosophers reached different the empiricist ways, philosophers reached different directions, sometimes irreconcilable.