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Rethinking Anekāntavāda and Animality... : 129
savior or Other who will eventually arrive). He refers to an openness towards an unknown futurity that is necessarily involved in what we take to be the present but a future that never delivers itself, therefore making perfection action and knowledge impossible.
But we do not wait for no reason and we do not wait passively. In the present, we are to act according to dictates of differand and alterity, of anekāntavāda on the one hand and nayavāda and syādvāda on the other. We are to act according to the perspective of the Other, to refuse the temptation to reduce the Other to ourself or our aims and to allow the Other to remain open, free. Because the Other lives and feels, do not harm it. Because the Other desires and wants, to not subjugate it. Because the other has beliefs and perspectives, do not insist it act according to your own. This is how you act in the here and now--combining the irreducibility of the Other (anekāntavāda) with an openness toward the privileging of its own viewpoint (syādvāda and nayavāda). It is, to put it another way, an ethical imperative to open oneself up to the arrival of the Other that is always to come'.49 Though this concept might seem at first foreign to a philosophical tradition based on the text of old, this is a concept that Jainism is actually quite familiar with. In the single rotation of the Jaina wheel of time, we are currently in the fifth phase of the descending cycle and no souls are able to be liberated. 50
However, we will not always be in this stage. After enduring a few deaths and doing the best we can, even while we can't attain (liberation) mokṣa , we will be reborn in a time cycle that allows liberation. For now, Jains are acting according to the principle of the 'to come'. Their lives as individual, embodied jīvas require openness to an unknown future that is, at the same time, intimately involved in what we understand to the present. Therefore, acting perfectly or with perfect knowledge in the present is, therefore, always already impossible, in this sense. Despite metaphysics, ethics and epistemology the three concepts of anekāntavāda, nayavāda and syādvāda possible, despite the possibility of appealing to the Other, to the ethical dimensions of the Other for your ethics, Jainism relies on doctrines of the Omniscients. In so doing, they make a theological appeal to doctrine that are unnecessary for deciding how to act in accordance with ahimsā. They have removed the productive and important uncertainty that comes when two perspectives, inaccessible to one another and different in their desires, come into conflict. For Kundakunda, in these moments, you are always supposed to respond to these difficult moments by focusing on and limiting your own karmas. S2
But this is only a half truth: what if there were a way to focus on yourself that also involved waiting for the irreducible Other and privileging her perspective? I think this is what we find in Spivak.
IV. Concluision: Spivak, Ahimsă and Non-attachment By putting Levinas in conversation with the concepts of jīva, ahiṁsā and nayavāda, I have tried to demonstrate that even from within Jainism, the elephant's perspective ought not be subjugated to that of the blind men. By putting Derrida in conversation with the concept of the living, embodied jīva and also with ahiṁsā and anekāntavāda, I have tried to demonstrate that Jainism
