________________
the structuralist idea of binary and meaning and his theory of 'margin'in meaning, give an intuition to understand what the Jains said long ago in their theory of anekāntavada and saptabhangī as a statement of it. Also I have found in saptabhangi a structure of what I call a polylogue with different cultures for understanding cultures, in social situations. I have coined the word as I am not satisfied with Habermas's dialogical idea of discourse. To collect this intuition to understand Anekānta from the modern developments in the history of thought, one need not subscribe to the Hegelian absolute idealism and his theory of history. Husserl's Phenomenology as theory and method and his idea of the epoche, Sartreâs Existentialism, and Derridaâs Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. Jainism as a school of thought does not go with any of these philosophical dogma. I have great adoration for the later Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations have helped me understand what the Jaina philosophers wanted to say in the nayavāda and enumerating types of naya on the questions of word, identity, meaning in a discourse. Here I give in bare outline the ideas and their working in my understanding when I faced those four problems in reading Jaina philosophy.
1. In the Phenomenology Hegel says that every assertion contains some truth however partial his perception of an object may be. A statement is not like a legal vedict that decides between conflicting claims. One is required to see how statements, even conflicting ones, are reconciled in our view of things, to see what is true in both without asserting what is false and one-sided in each. Thus being and Nothing are reconciled in Becoming, Being and Nothing are absorbed in Becoming.
Jains say that our perception of an object is perspectival. Each perspectival statement is a truth claim, even negative statements. An object is like a field where all sorts of statements about it are reconciled. Here both affirmations and negations are absorbed. In other words, from the (non-Hegelian) Jain point of view one can say that an object or vastu is defined by what is affirmed of it and what is denied of it. The first two statements in saptabhang state a real state of affairs in the vastujagat, and make meaningful the third statement. Also notice, in the first two statements there is an added emphasis by the word eva in Syādeva. Why? When one states the Anekānta we have so far two categories in the first three statements 'is' and 'is not'. Again the word eva occurs for the
IGRA 911 , 2001 C
131
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
