Jaganmohanlal Pandita Sadhuwad Granth

Author(s): Sudarshanlal Jain
Publisher: Jaganmohanlal Shastri Sadhuwad Samiti Jabalpur

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Eastern and Western Philosophical Approaches Ye
The second assumption is that reality is knowable, that our minds are such that there is a direct or one-to-one correlation between the knowing mind and that which the mind knows. One may point out that man has always assumed this. A difference is the assertion today that everything is knowable. One hears scientists making that claim. Give us time, they say, and we can uncover any secret in the universe. Joining them is the technocrat who claims that, given time and resources, we can do or build anything we If one views the universe as a huge machine and man's mind as being able to know fully the workings of the machine, then one must admit that the claims of the scientist and technocrat do follow. How valid is the "if", is, of course, the basic question.
The third assumption is a correlate of the first two. If reality is knowable, it is categorizable. If it is knowable and categorizable, it is describable. Nothing exists which is not knowable, categorizable and describable. Thus modern man's confidence is in his language, or in the ability of words to describe whatever exists, and his belief that, if it cannot be described, it does not exist.
The arrogance of modern man which follows from these three assumptions is reinforced by a tenet of Western religion which long preceded the modern period. If we take the Bible and the Pentatuch as the central documents for Christianity and Judiasm, we find stated therein that in the beginning God made man as the highest form of creation and that God gave man dominion over all the earth. Such is the traditional Western homocentric view of the universe, a view susceptible to that which is universal in man, his selfcenteredness. And the heliocentric view of the universe established by Copernicus has had little impact on changing this egoistic view of man and his relationship to that little portion of the universe of which he is a part-the earth.
Before moving on to Eastern epistemologies and metaphysics, let me sum up what has been asserted regarding Western perspectives. While not the only, the dominant epistemology of the West is a combination of empiricism and rationalism which has been. attenuated in the Modern period. Coexisting with it is the mechanistic view of the universe as matter existing in time and space, operating on discernable and explicable laws, and subject to the will and dictates of man in its center.
In evaluating that worldview there are those who find that such an epistemology provides us no way of knowing reality in a profound sense. The Western metaphysics offers us only attributes and existence without essence. Western epistemology and metaphysics have provided us the tools, science, and technology, which have made us masters of the world which we assert exists and we know. But these have themselves brought us to a state in which man has lost his soul and his constructs have become a monster which could destroy him. We have become the victim of our homocentricity, the possible victims of our own creations.
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