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.
posted by Jinal Jhaveri at 4:40 PM
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