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Hermann Kuhn
we cannot possibly comprehend reality in its entirety57, makes us understand that others can also only see and interpret the world from their particular angle. They voice their views with exactly the same legitimacy we assume for ourselves.
This sovereignty and tolerance of the Jains make us realize how many other philosophies interpret the world from only one particular point of view while demanding an absolute and universal validity for their partial perspective.58
Tolerance towards the partial views of others allows us to accept that even contradictory perspectives might well be in harmony with each other if we only regard them as different aspects of one and the same reality.
Yet partial sight (naya) is far more than a precise analytical instrument. The seven steps do not only help us to examine and broaden new insights, or to arrange reality in such a systematic way that its infinite variety can be more easily understood. The seven steps stimulate us to search for ever more subtle and more fundamental levels of understanding and this inevitably opens our consciousness to broader and broader regions of reality.
Partial sights (naya) generate knowledge in seven steps: 1 - Outlining an experience (naigama)
By outlining an experience we describe a part of reality without clearly defining it. We do not bother about de
57 except in the state of omniscience 58 This ambition easily leads to the exclusion of extensive parts of
reality. The missing parts are usually either plainly ignored or substituted by dogmatic beliefs that do not permit questioning. Philosophies or belief-systems with this kind of ambition therefore hardly ever agree with the unrestricted development of our full potential.
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