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Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality... : 127
Now, aside from a study of pure logic and epistemology, why is this interesting for the elephants, dogs and cats about whom we've been speaking so far? It is interesting because, while on the one hand, Jainism continues to proclaim the equal value of non-humans as jīvas, on the other hand, the perspectives of particular jīvas--their ideas about reality and the possibility, their ideas about reality might conflict with Jain metaphysics--eventually get sublimated to hierarchicalization of bodies that places their perspectives always--already further from the truth than the humans. Despite the fact that all the angles we look at are all true and correct in some sense (nayavāda), Jains choose to focus on the static, speciesed, existent nature of a creature--the one it may share with others--over its transformation in the world, its radically irreducible nature. Jains affirm what appears essential and unchanging about a creature (their body-species), then construct and regulate ontological categories and identities based on the (culturally authorized) appearance of that abiding substance. They appeal to the senses of a being, on its supposed access to omniscient truth, instead of its pure soul.
So why do the Jains privilege certain aspects of the living jiva over others? Here I turn from a philosophical analysis of the possibility of taking up the subject perspective of each creature, to interrogating the particular doctrines of the Omniscients that domesticate these perspectives to what amounts to a humanocentric account of sensed beings. That is, leaving aside any problems the poststructural thinkers might have with the idea of omniscience as such--and there are problems aplenty-I confine my criticism here to that of the Omnicients themselves and to the pragmatic implications of confining our knowledge to humanocentric doctrines explicated those who have thus far reached it.
The singular differences between all infinitely different jīvas and the perspective these jīvas might take on the world and themselves, get domesticated to speciesed categories of sensedbeings. But because we have already seen that this need not follow, given the ability to view creatures not from senses but from their irreducibility, we know that this is a culturally imposed category. Prominent poststructural philosopher, Judith Butler, also an advocate of non-violence and a proponent equanimity among different identities, might claim that this is an example of confusing the cause for the affect: it is only by first assuming that non-humans have karmically imposed limits on their access to the truth of reality that they can then be silently classified as ‘lower'. The political philosopher Georgio Agamben makes a similarly circular argument when he attempts to place both humans and animals on the same plane via their equal possession of what he calls, a-political bare life. By assuming that 'bare-life' is without its own politics, ethics, metaphysics, etc,45 he relies on the same human/non-human binary (mind vs. mute matter) he attempted to deconstruct.
Despite the limits of knowledge in the here and now, there exists “an absolute notion of truth which lies in the total integration of all particulars or conditionally arrived at truths.” When the Jains priviledge substance or form over the internal irreducible jīva, Spivak would call this act of reduction transcendentalization" (MD 125): the process through which particular attributes or aspects of the subject or Other become marked off as real and then deployed to envelope other forms, constructing a category or collective. So while the Jaina doctrine of anekantavāda
