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Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality... : 119
However, this story is more complex than it first appears, hiding within its folds some troubling violences. For despite its advocacy of pluralism--a concept which has made no small impact on the world via its influence on Gandhi, Martin Luther King, etc.--it also demonstrates Jainism's dramatic privileging of omniscience over anekāntavāda, nayavāda and syādväda, of the real over the perspectives that compose it and of absolute knowledge over experience. In our story, the perspective of the omniscient, Mahāvīra--like king, freed from his karmic bondage, is able to know the elephant perfectly, even as each of his blind men can only know part and even as the elephant--simultaneously the most central and most spectral figure in the narrative--isn't given a voice at all. According to poststructural thinkers like Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak--whose criticism of the philosophical priviledging of the knower over the perspectives of those known leads them to vigorously defend the irreducible Other against a reduction to my knowledge or aims--this story might be a perfect example of the power of abstract, heteronormative power over the perspectives of disenfranchised. If the irreducible Other--represented here by the elephant-signifies the unrepeatable, historically specific, contingent other whose existence is marked outside of knowledge and language--a social being that nevertheless is not intelligible to us--the responsibility to this other is the impossible challenge of encountering the other without reducing her through structures of similarity and difference to the same as myself or my aims. Similar to the Jain commitment to non-absolutism over exclusivist positions, the poststructural tradition has long been critical of any trump card that submits the immanent, irreducibly valuable realities of creaturely life to spectral formations of omniscience and transcendence. Firmly rooted in that tradition, I too take up the project of critically dismantling any hierarchicalization of beings or truths according to a singular, universal narrative. So while Jainism accords the elephant a perspective, as it does all other jīvas (living beings), their perspectives are ultimately subjugated to that of the Omniscients, who determine that the correctness and enlightenment of any given creature's perspective on truth is valued and evaluated only within a hierarchy of sensed beings that culminates in the (male) homo--sapien. While Jainism is unparalleld in its according of perspective to elephants and all other jīvas; while their system remains the first and most influential to offer radical equality to each living being;' while they unquestionably offer more sanctuary and care to other bodies than other religious or philosophical group in documented history and even as every aspect of their daily lives is infused with compassionate principles designed to prevent harm to non--human animals and other creaturely jīvas most others don't even realize exist. Jain scriptures maintain a humanocentrisim that subjugates the culturally specific, evolving, shifting perspectives of these same jīvas to those of the human.
Of course, this is just a parable and all parables have limits. So why obsess about the perspective-less elephant? Because, according to the aforementioned poststructural thinkers and even according to Jainism's own doctrines of anekāntavāda-the limits of this parable are precisely where we should begin our ethical inquiry: not with the perspective and speech of the enlightened
