Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture

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

Page 76

Theory of Anekāntavāda 59
When two objects other than knowing are known together, they are ordinarily taken to be in some kind of whole, specific relation or unity. This cannot be said of object and its cognition as together. Objects also may however be barely together : the relation of a whole to its elements, of a relation to its terms or of a unity to its factors is nothing more specific than togetherness. This then is the fundamental category of realism and whole, relation or unity would be understood as particular cases of it. We propose to show on the lines of the Jaina theory that this category is itself manifold, being only a name for fundamentally different aspects of truth which cannot be subsumed under a universal and do not make a unity in any sense. Togetherness, as ordinarily understood by the realist, means distinction of determinate positive truths. The Jaina category might be formulated as distinction from distinction which as will be shown has a definite range of alternative values, only one of which answers to the distinction or togetherness of the modern realist.
Prima facie there is a difference between the relation of a composite fact with its components and the relation of the components themselves. We may overlook for the present the different forms of the composite--whole, relation or unity—which imply varying relations to the components and provisionally admit composite truth as a single entity. Now there is no difference between the togetherness of any one component with the rest and that of any other with the rest : the components in their various combinations are together in exactly the same sense. Taking however the composite on the one hand with the components on the other, we find that the two sides can be only thought alternately: while one side is thought by itself, the other can be thought
in reference to it. If the components are taken to be given, the composite can be understood as only their plurality; and if the composite is given as one, the components are known as only its analysis. Each side can be given by itself as objective and so it is not a case of mere correlative thoughts. Neither side need be thought in reference to the other ; but while one is thought as distinct by itself, the other has to be thought as only together with or distinct from it. We have in fact a correlation here between distinct in itself' and 'distinct from the other,' between given position and what is sometimes called the negation of negation.
Is the necessity of thinking something as other than its other