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The Logical Background of Jaina Philosophy
maintains its identity throughout its career until it is supplanted by something different. To be explicit, the position, we maintain, may be stated as follows. The pen is a pen so long as it exists as a pen; it was not a pen when it was a piece of raw material: it will not be a pen when it will cease to exist as a pen and become something else. Again, a pen is existent in its own place and time, in its own nature as a pen, and not in another place and time and in a different nature. The Vedāntist draws a distinction between essential and non-essential characteristics of reality. The characteristic, which continues unmodified, is believed to constitute the essential nature of the real, and the changing attributes, which occur and disappear in time, represent the contingent and unessential appendage, which according to the Vedāntist, obscures its true nature from our view. The Jaina does not subscribe to this position, as it amounts to denial of the reality of change. When as a matter of fact we are to depend upon experience to make us aware of the very existence of a real and a priori reasoning is absolutely of no avail in this respect, why should we distrust its testimony with regard to other attributes, which are equally intuited along with the attribute of existence? As to the problem of a priori knowledge of the behaviour of things unobserved on the basis of the observation of a particular instance, the faina does not see any difficulty in it, which makes appeal to an a priori source of knowledge inevitable or imperative. Observation of one instance, say a pen, is not confined to that individual alone, but extends to other individuals in virtue of the possession of the universal, which makes a pen what it is. So it does not require any transcendental source of knowledge to meet the situation. The Jaina thus concludes that the formula of identity has to be hedged round by so many qualifications that in its abstract, symbolic form it turns out to be absolutely vague, useless and misleading.
What is true of the Law of Identity will be found to be true with equal force of the Law of Contradiction also. A cannot both be and not be — is the formula of the Law of Contradiction The proposition seems to be self-evident in its abstract orm. But as soon as it is converted into a concrete fact, it is found to require so many provisos and restrictive qualifications
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