Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture

Author(s): Shreechand Rampuriya, Ashwini Kumar, T M Dak, Anil Dutt Mishra
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 117

100 Anekāntavāda and Syādvāda
because they represent the tendency of all idealism towards subjectivism.51 As a critic observes : "the forms of idealism like objective idealism and absolute idealism are only attenuated forms of subjective idealism and the true subject transcends the subjectobject relation.''52 In his celebrated essay "The Reputation of Idealism", G.E. Moore also is in full accord with this criticism. He characterises the notion of esse is percipi-conceding generously to the idealist that percipi need not mean 'sensation' only but “thought' also, both of course being 'forms' of consciousness --as the “ultimate premise of Idealism' in general. ** Confirming his attitude to the same notion, he further observes : "I believe that Idealists all hold this important falsehood.':54 His choice of this notion as the most vulnerable point for attack in idealism has considerably strengthened the realistic stand for objectivity or independence in the analysis of the nature of reality.55
51. Cf Russell's observation that "...very many philosophers, perhaps a majority, have
held that there is nothing except minds and their ideas. Such philosophers are called
'idealists" etc. Problems, p. 14: see also p. 37. 52. Srinivasachari in Aspects of Advaita, pp. 14-15 (the italics are mine). L.T. Hobhouse
demonstrates this truth in a lucid and critical note wherein he analyses the positions of T.H. Green and B Bosanquet. See his The Theory of Knowledge (third ed. London,
1921), p. 537 f., f. n. 2. 53. Philosophical Studies (The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and
Scientific Method, 1951 (reprinted), London, pp. 7-8. 54. Ibid., p. 12. 55. The following witticisms make an interesting reading : It would be more
appropriate, in this context, to substitute 'percept' wherever the term 'idea' occurs. So Beattie told Hume that the idea (or image) of roaring lion is not a roaring idea, and that the image of an ass is not a long-eared sluggish idea, and he put some 'clownish questions' to Berkeley in the same spirit, "Where," he asked, “is the harm of my believing that if I were to fall down yonder precipice and break my neck, I should be no more a man of this world ? My neck, Sir, may be an idea to you, but to me it is a reality and an important one too. Where is the harm of my believing that if, in this severe weather, I were to neglect to throw (what you call) the idea of a coat over the ideas of my shoulders, the idea of cold would produce the idea of such pain and disorder that might possibly terminate in my real death ?''A Study in Realism (John Laird, C.U.P., 1920, Combridge), p. 63.
Repudiating the claim that the Modern Einsteinian Theory of Relativity supports idealism, Russell writes under the heading "Realism in Relativity'; 'It is a mistake to suppose that relativity adopts an idealistic picture of the world--using 'idealism' in the technical sense, in which it implies that there can be nothing which is not experience. The observer who is often mentioned in expositions of relativity need not be a mind, but may be a photographic plate or any kind of recording instrument. The fundamental assumption of relativity is realistic, namely, that these