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Jaina View of Life
for science is being questioned. Man and his values are primary, their primacy has to be acknowledged by any philosophy."
214
But with all these philosophical interests, the real nature of man has been eluding us. Attempts have been made to know him. But there has not been an agreed conception of man easily to be understood and accepted by the common man.
There were philosophers like Protagoras who reduced man to mere sensations. The Theaetetus describes the Sophist conception of the individual as a complex of changes interacting with other forces, and seeking to satisfy the desires.1 In English empiricism, Hume denied everything including the human soul, except impressions and ideas. The Human tendency was recently revived by the Cambridge philosophers who brought philosophy to the brink of extinction. Perennial problems of philosophy including the conceptions of soul were dismissed as non-sense. Like the men chained against the walls of the cave in The Republic the empiricists refused to see beyond what they would like to affirm. In ancient Indian thought, Cārvākas led us to similar conclusions. It is said that the Buddhists denied a permanent soul. The Buddha was silent about the metaphysical problems. His disciples analysed soul as an aggregate of matter, feelings and sensations. Man is a psychological personality, and when it is analysed away Sunya is realised.
However, soul of man has emerged as a permanent and eternal principle imperishable in nature. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle accepted soul as a pure eternal and imperishable principle. Plato talked of the immortality of the soul. In India, the outlook in the Ṛgveda is empirical. The gods were invoked to give cows and prosperity in this world. The idea of a permanent soul has yet to be evolved. In the Upanisads the conception of a permanent soul gained predominance. In the
14. Radhakrishnan and Eaju: The Concept of Man. Introduction. p. 18.
15. Plato Theaetetus, p. 152.
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