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JA IN JOURNAL
But Radhakrishnan's attack does not stop at this point. He tries to assess the value of the Jaina view and assign it a place in the monistic view of things. In the latter view, during the course of the soul's progress toward the ultimate identification with the absolute, Radhakrishnan relegates the Jaina stand to the kindergarten stage. In his words, “The fact that we are conscious of our relativity means that we have to reach out to a fuller conception...... With continuous advance towards fuller and fuller truth, the object itself loses its apparently given character. When we reach absolute knowledge, the distinction between subject and object is overcome. Only in the light of such an absolute standard could we correct the abstractions of the lower. Then we shall see that the several relatives are only stages in a continuous process which has the realisation of the soul's freedom for its determining end. The recognition of every form of knowledge as relative, something bound to pass over into something else, requires us to assume a larger reality, an absolute, into which all the relatives fall...... The Jainas cannot logically support a theory of pluralism.” Obviously, the whole analysis is so much non-Jaina, an effort to fit in Jainism at some preliminary stage in the monistic view. Once again the assumption of a 'larger reality' looms large into which all subjects and objects merge. In Radhakrishnan's view as quoted above, the greater is the soul's distance from this larger reality, the greater is the dominance of a relativistic outlook. Then as in the course of the soul's progress towards this larger reality, the distance is steadily reduced, the relativistic outlook would gradually fade away until at last it becomes just superfluous totally yielding position to the larger reality. At this end if reality is absolute, transcendental, truth too is absolute, non-relativistic. In this way, the entire Jaina point of view is made to lose in a complicated and abstract maze of monism.
The above logic of the monists reminds me of the pre-relativity notion of contemporeneity in modern science. Let us suppose that two men belonging to a gang of robbers shoot the guard and the engine driver of a train under the cover of darkness. Now an old gentleman who is in a middle compartment hears the two shots simultaneously but the station master who is exactly halfway between the two robbers hears the shot which kills the guard first. Here a very important point of law may be involved provided the guard or the engine driver who dies first inherits a very large fortune. The lawyers on both side with pre-relativity sort of notion are agreed that either the old gentleman or the station master must be mistaken. No modern scientist would however support this view. The train (and likewise the universe) is not static but is moving away from the shot at the guard and towards the shot
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