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124: śramaņa, Vol 64, No. III, July-Sept. 2013
It is here that I believe Levinas starts what I believe to be the most ethically compelling philosophical habit in all of western philosophy. He suggests that if violence can be performed both in the ways we exclude the Other--the ways we ignore, neglect and disenfranchise certain bodies--and in the ways that we misrepresent and understand the Other, our task is to refuse to cover over these other jīvas with our limited frameworks of knowledge, ethics, etc.28 One way we could conceive of Levinas's project is the instrumentalization of nayavāda. Levinas would agree with the Jains, who suggest that the doctrine of nayavāda is not only an epistemological principle but an inherently ethical one. Because the other has infinite attributes (anekāntavāda) and because it can only be seen from our subjective standpoint (nayavāda), each of us must act not according to what we think is best, in our partial perspective (syādvāda) but according to what the Other desires, thinks is best, etc. If all jīvas are equal in their pure, unhindered state, then in order to assign them to a more closed group, we have to impose our understanding of species, hierarchy, etc upon them. In order to capture an other in one reducible framekwork of knowledge (like species) rather than allowing them the irreducibility of their relations and existence, we have to impose knowledge on them. This, for Levinas, is what constitutes the limits of and violence of knowledge. If anekāntavāda, conceived as the expression of ahiṁsā in the intellectual realm,” than refusing to domesticate the other to our limited frameworks of knowledge is precisely what is meant by right knowledge; assuming that something about a creature is true when it is not true, or rather, only limited. 29 If the Jains suggest all jīvas are equal and also agree that we must be humble in our approach to each individual creature, given the impossibility of our knowing the whole truth, it seems troubling we would come then to the subjugation of certain perspectives over others. According to Mahāvīra, the movement of this soul from body to body is affected by karma it accrues according to its deeds and because karmic weight corresponds to a decrease in your social status, gender and species.32 By focusing on the senses of the beings and on their hierarchically organized location rather than their perspectives, Jaina activity in the world today is limited. They are not able to adequately address questions of euthanasia, domestication, co-habitation because the metaphysical paradigms delivered by the Omniscients--the same paradigm that offers all creatures the equality of jīva--strips them of their right knowledge of reality.
Finally, for Levinas as for the Jains, abstract philosophical pursuit of knowledge is secondary to a basic ethical duty to the other. Once we are more concerned about the Other than obeying our own frameworks of knowledge, we become open to acting according to the Other's perspective, ethical responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth.” Preferring to think of philosophy as the "wisdom of love" rather than the love of wisdom, Levinas states,"...this is my entire philosophy-- there is something more important than my life and that is the life of the Other."33 This seems to me very similar to the Jain mantra I have often heard, “ahiṁsā over truth.”
III. Derrida, Anekāntavāda and a Critique of the Omniscients If nayavāda is strongly advanced by Levinas as an ethical responsibility to refuse the domestication of the alterity of the face, it is in Jacques Derrida's concept of differand that we find both the
