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Absolute Negativism and Absolute Particularism
emergence of perceptual intuition. The Jaina maintains that there is no logical cogency in the contention of the Buddhist that perceptual judgments are not founded upon reality. It is admitted that consciousness, as influenced by a sense-organ, is capable of cognizing a real. This truth is certainly not discovered by pure logic. It is only a deduction from sense-experience itself. Parity of reasoning requires that we should maintain that consciousness, with the aid of sense-organs and concepts, can give us the full knowledge of reality as it is. The Jaina does not impugn the existence of concepts in their latent form as the Buddhist asserts and Kant maintains, but he differs from both the Buddhist and Kant in this that he does not regard the concepts as antagonistic to reality. The concepts are as much the means as the sense-organs and consciousness are of gaining an insight into the nature of reality. The necessary result of such an epistemological evaluation is his metaphysical doctrine that a real is not a particular alone, but particular-cum-universal, the universal as embodied in the particular. The real is, thus, amenable to verbal communication and to judgment alike.
The Jaina philosophers do not rest satisfied with the suggestion of the possibility of conceptual thought being directly occasioned by the objective datum. The Jaina of course believes that all valid knowledge is of the nature of certitude and, hence, conceptual. But he justifies his belief by proving the impossibility of indeterminate simple intuition, which is held to be the only authentic knowledge by the Buddhist. The Buddhist believes that the primal sense-intuition directly envisages the real and is free from verbal association, since it is non-conceptual. If it be so, the original intuition cannot enable a percipient to recollect a similar object previously perceived. The recollection of a similar object is possible only through recollection of the name of the thing. But the thing perceived in the first intuition is held to be felt without a name and this want of perception of the name would make recollection impossible. If there be no recollection of the name there would be no conception and, hence, no certitude. Certitude is possible only if the intuition is felt as intuition of some object, which is possible only through the use of a name or concept. The point at issue can be made clear by
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