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Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality... : 123
the jīva is an Other we can karmically interact with, even as her radical alterity and singular karmic pathways exceed us. Additionally, since for the face is always--already a face-to-face relation--since individuals are never individuals as such but always--already in instantiating relation to one another-the face also always implies the relational bonds which constitute the vulnerability and prohibition Jainism wishes to highlight.
This bears great similarity to the Jaina concept of the jīva and the multiple perspectives it is possible to take on them, especially when they are found together with ajīva.21 Even as we can encounter bodies, dynamically interacting with them in karmically crucial ways, we can never access the pure jīva-ness of any other living being, nor fully comprehend its path to liberation.22
Interestingly and to clarify further, if Levinas is responding in part to the philosophy of Emmanuel . Kant when he locates the limits to knowledge of the other within the other itself--as though their alterity or unkowability prevents us, like a screen or wall, from seeing them in their entirety-and if Kant locates the limits in the knower--or in the Numena that humans lack access to-Jainism appears to support both. On the one hand, similar to Kant, the emphasis on the limits of knowledge in Jainism focuses on the conditionality and limitedness of the human power and human vision."23 But on the other hand, similar to Levinas, the jīva cannot be totally captured, as singular agency and creaturely creativity is located within "every existent entity in the form of immanent power and not in multiple devas or a single Ultimate Reality outside. The jīva describes a continuous, creative power within each entity, while maintaining a karmic connection to the rest of the living universe."24 I know of no research to which I could appeal that discusses this triad relation and the implications such Jain logic might have on resolving long--held divisions based on these two figures. While outside the scope of the present paper, I hope something might yet come from a Jain synthesis of these two traditions.
Importantly, one of Jainism's most compelling concepts is that each jivais numerically distinct but equal to every other.2 In contrast to the Vedantic Brahmanic traditions, where all individual souls are part of a supreme universal soul. For Jainism, "the unity of all souls is a unity of nature or essence."26 This seems to parallel both the Levinasian concept of the alterity of the face, and the concept of singularity I'll address in Derrida and Spivak in the following sections. What I wish to highlight here is that the quality of being a jīva, the quality of alterity, characterizes all equally. If every creature is irreducible, equally jīva, we see clearly that what defines the subsequent breakdown or speciation of jīvas is nothing more than our feeble, limited attempts to work out of a knowledge--a knowledge we know, per anekāntavāda and syādvāda, is imperfect anyway
Now, that we've discussed the limits of knowledge, we know we can never truly know the Other, never really have access to who they are, how they function, when we know that all of our knowledge is, at best, speculation. But what does this mean for the three Jain jewels of right knowledge, right faith, right action?27 What does this mean ahiṁsā and the Jain project of nonviolence?
