Jaina Philosophy

Author(s): Mohanlal Mehta
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

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JAINA PHILOSOPHY : AN INTRODUCTION
that knowledge or intelligible experience is a complex product of the elements of sensibility and understanding. Pure knowledge, i.e., a priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. But our judgments are always a posteriori because they are derived from experience. Sensations originate from an unknown world of things-in-themselves but must be organized into a systematic whole by the forms of intuition, i.e., space and time and by the categories or the fundamental
cepts of understanding such as substance, causality and the like. The forms and categories are a priori, because our judgments presuppose the existence of these forms and categories. Experience is never possible without the existence of these transcendental laws of judgment. Thus, it is our understanding that makes nature, according to Kant. The Idealism of Kant, therefore, consists in this that the world of our knowledge is an ideal construction out of sense-manifold to which alone the forms and categories of understanding are confined and, therefore, is commonly known as Objective Idealism. It is subjective in the sense that knowledge does not reach out to the world of things-in-themselves : ding an sich. He argues that reality cannot be grasped by our knowledge because our judgment is conditional, relative and partial. We cannot know a thing as it is but we know it as our experience reveals. Hence, the Kantian ding an sich is unknowable by our experience. His view of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception is more important as regards the unity of knowledge. All knowledge presupposes the Synthetic Unity of Pure Apperception, because unless there is a Synthetic Unity no knowledge is possible. This idea of Synthetic Unity of Pure Apperception leads Kant quite near the conception of soul which is not accepted by him outwardly. Absolute Idealism of Hegel :
The fundamental question before Hegel was : What must be the nature and characteristic of the ultimate principle of the universe in order to explain by it the origin, growth and