Jainism and Relativity!!

Author : Chaturvedi Badrinath

Publication : The Times of India

Date : May 15, 1997





The Jaina perspectives of syadavada hold that a proposition is true only

conditionally and not absolutely. This is because it depends on the

particular standpoint, naya, from which it is being made; that logically a

thing can be perceived from at least seven different standpoints,

saptabhangi-naya; which lead us to the awareness of the many-sidedness of

reality, or truth, anekanta-vada.



Realist Ethics



At no time were these limited to epistemological questions, of concern

only to the philosophers.  Since human relationships, personal or social,

are determined by our perceptions of ourselves and of others, which we

mostly assume also to be true absolutely, giving rise to conflicts and

violence because the others believe the same about their judgments, the

very first step towards living creatively is to acknowledge the

relativistic nature of our judgments, and hence their limits. While being

a distinct contribution to the development of Indian logic, the Jaina

syada-vada has been, most of all, a realist ethics of not-violence,

ahimsa.  The two are inter-related intimately.



An article, 'Syada-vada, Relativity and Complementarity' by Prof.  Partha

Ghose, a theoretical physicist says that P C Mahalanobis was the first to

point out, in 1954, that "the Jaina Syada-vada provided the right logical

framework for modern statistical theory in a qualitative form, a framework

missing in classical western logic." J B S Haldane saw a wider relevance

of syada-vada to modern science.  And Prof. Ghose speaks of the "most

striking" similarity of syada-vada to Niels Bohr's Principle of

Complementarity, first noticed by D C Kothari.  Furthermore, he says: "The

logic of Einstein's special theory of relativity is also very similar to

syada-vada."



In Einstein's relativity theory, Prof. Ghose points out, "the conventional

attributes of mass, length, energy and time lose their absolute

significance"; whereas in Bohr's complementarity theory, "the conventional

attributes of waves and particles lose their absolute significance." As in

syadavada, what that means is that the physical value of the former is

only relative to the theoretical framework in which they are being viewed,

and to the position from which they are being viewed. None of them is a

fixed, absolute truth about the physical universe, as was assumed in the

Newtonian physics.  It would soon be discovered, too, that they are

relative also to the observer who observed them.



The upanishad-s and the Jaina syada-vada had argued that reality carries

within itself also opposites as its inherent attributes; and, therefore,

no absolute statements can be made about it. But no sooner was this said

than it was shown itself to be subject to the same limitation.



In the wake of the relativity theory, which had already shattered the

classical notions of physical order, de Broglie, a French prince,

demonstrated, in 1924, that an electron is both a particle and a wave,

whereas quantum mechanics had held the particle-wave duality. This

discovery was even more upsetting, but experimentally proved.



The most upsetting was the subsequent proof, provided by Werner Heisenberg

in 1927, that no events, not even atomic events, can be described with any

certainty; whereas the natural sciences were rooted until then, and are so

even now, in the mistaken notion that scientific rationality and its

method gave us exact and certain knowledge of the universe. Heisenberg

called it the 'Principle of Uncertainty'. Its substance was not only that

human knowledge is limited but also that it is uncertain. That is to say,

there are aspects of reality about which nothing definite can be said -

the avyaktam, or the 'indeterminate', of the Jaina syada-vada.



Subsequent Proof



In his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics,

published in 1979, Gary Zukay said: "The wave-particle duality marked the

end of the 'either-or' way of looking at the world.  Physicists no longer

could accept the preposition that light is either a particle or a wave

because they had "proved" to themselves that it was both, depending on how

they looked at it."



Syada-vada, and with it anekanta-vada, had held that there are several

different ways of perceiving reality, each valid in its place, and none of

them true absolutely. But how do we judge the validity of our perceptions,

by what criteria, by what method? These are the main questions of

epistemology.  Since modem science has been a method of perceiving

reality, even if only physical reality, it is epistemology with a certain

method.  Einstein had placed great emphasis upon that fact; and he was one

scientist of modern times who had placed also the greatest emphasis upon

the question of method in theoretical physics.  His writings in that

regard are to be found in his Ideas and Opinions, published in 1954. He

said: "Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme.

Science without epistemology is - insofar as it is thinkable at all -

primitive and muddled."



Limits of Logic



Concerning the method, as physics advanced, it became clear that the

theoretical element in scientific laws cannot be abstracted from empirical

data, nor can it be of pure logical induction. There is no bridge between

the two of a kind that one necessarily implied the other.  According to

Einstein, the "axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be abstracted

from experience but must be freely invented"; "experience may suggest the

appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be

deduced from it." Neither can pure logic give us knowledge of the physical

world.  On this point also, Einstein was unambiguous. "Pure logical

thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world", he says;

"all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as

regards reality." The passage from sense impressions to scientific theory,

Einstein says, is through "intuition and sympathetic understanding."



In brief, the two revolutions of relativity theory and quantum mechanics

and what followed, had rendered naive realism, pure empiricism, pure

logical thinking, and materialism, when each claimed to be the only way to

knowledge and its certainty, to be incompatible with scientific method.

What had hitherto been assumed to be the scientific method and, therefore,

also the only true rationality, and was sought to be imposed upon the rest

of the world was, in its absoluteness, discarded, And in all those

movements of the New Physics, the Jaina syada- -vada and anekanta-vada are

clearly manifest.