http://www.mahavir.com/jainism&relativity.htmlARTICLE : Jainism & relativity
Posted By Ashok V Chowgule (ashokvc@giasbm01.vsnl.net.in)
Sat, 24 May 97 16:39:57 EDT
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.
