New Dimensions in Jaina Logic

Author(s): Mahaprajna Acharya, Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Today and Tommorrow Printers and Publishers

Page 85

The pot certainly is in escribable in some respect. 3. The pot certainly is speakable in some respect.
The pot certainly is unspeakable in some respect. The pot certainly is indescribable in some respect.
Conditional Dialectics 77
Each attribute of an object can give rise to a system of sevenfold predication (saptabhangi). Permanence and impermanence being mutually contradictory attributes, how could they qualify the same pot. It is on the basis of relativism that a synthesis is established between these mutually opposed attributes.
The Greek poet-philosopher Heraclitus of the 6th - 5th century B.C. believed in the doctrine of the co-existence of contraries. His relativism is the spur which pricks the side of a sluggish conservatism in all departments of life-taste and morals, politics and society-and it is the absence of relativism that, according to Heraclitus, is responsible for absolutisms and stagnation in philosophical thinking. Heraclitus announced for the first time in Greek thought the principle of relativity of qualities which he pushed forthwith to its extreme consequences in the words 'good and bad are the same', 'we are and we are not'. The movement of life, according to him, is like the back-returning of the bow, to which he compares it,10 an energy of traction and tension restraining an energy of release, every force of action compensated by a corresponding force of reaction. By the resistance of one to the other all the harmonies of existence are created.*
Heraclitus was a fluxist and, therefore, a relativist. In point of fact his doctrine of flux and his doctrine of relativity lead to the same result; the successive states of an object as well as its simultaneous qualities frequently both bear the stamp of a far-reaching diversity which amounts at times to complete contradiction. In one aspect, according to him, X is 'good', in another aspect it is 'bad'. He believed in a fundamental law in the natural as well as the spiritual world that contraries were not mutually exclusive, but rather pre-supposed and conditioned, or were even identical with each other. His theory of relativity contained like a folded flower the correct doctrine of sense-perception with its recognition of the subjective factor, and it taught Greek thinkers the lesson they were bound to acquire if they were to be saved from a bottomless scepticism.**
*
Sri Aurobindo, Birth Centenary Library, Vol. XVI, page. 3521.
** T. Gomperz, op. cit. pages 66-70.