Anekantavad | The Conditional Asymmetry @Anekantavad | Uploaded December 2015 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
Paradigm shifts may not be avoidable, but it's a good idea to be conscious of them.
"Not to perpetrate cowardice against one's own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent."
-Friedrich Nietzsche "Twilight of the Idols"
Wiki on Syadvada:
Syādvāda
Syādvāda (Sanskrit: स्याद्वाद) is the theory of conditioned predication, which provides an expression to anekānta by recommending that every phrase or statement be expressed in the optative mood (the equivalent of the subjunctive mood in Latin and other Indo-European languages), i.e. generally by prefacing each sentence with the verb syāt, the third person singular optative of the Sanskrit verb as, "to be". (In Sanskrit, syāt becomes syān when followed by an "n", and syād when followed by a non-nasal voiced consonant or vowel.)
The subjunctive mood is rare in almost all modern dialects of English, which can make translation awkward and imprecise. In general, the subjunctive mood implies uncertainty, ambiguity, fluidity, or conditionality in a statement, and it appears in constructions such as "I wish I were going," and "Should he be the winner...." A simple translation to English can be made by inserting into the phrase "maybe," "in some ways," or "from a perspective," which is what is meant in the context of syādvāda, as illustrated in the simple Hindi construction in the song "kaho, na kaho (yeh ankhen boltiin hein...").
Syādvāda is not only an extension of anekānta ontology, but a separate system of logic capable of standing on its own. As reality is complex, no single proposition can express the nature of reality fully. Thus "syāt" should be prefixed before each proposition giving it a conditional point of view and thus removing any dogmatism in the statement. Since it ensures that each statement is expressed from seven different conditional and relative viewpoints or propositions, syādvāda is known as saptibhaṅgīnāya or "the theory of seven conditioned predications". These saptibhaṅgī are:
syād-asti—in some ways, it is,
syān-nāsti—in some ways, it is not,
syād-asti-nāsti—in some ways, it is, and it is not,
syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is, and it is indescribable,
syān-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is not, and it is indescribable,
syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable,
syād-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is indescribable.
Each of these seven propositions examines the complex and multifaceted nature of reality from a relative point of view of time, space, substance and mode. To ignore the complexity of reality is to commit the fallacy of dogmatism.
Paradigm shifts may not be avoidable, but it's a good idea to be conscious of them.
"Not to perpetrate cowardice against one's own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent."
-Friedrich Nietzsche "Twilight of the Idols"
Wiki on Syadvada:
Syādvāda
Syādvāda (Sanskrit: स्याद्वाद) is the theory of conditioned predication, which provides an expression to anekānta by recommending that every phrase or statement be expressed in the optative mood (the equivalent of the subjunctive mood in Latin and other Indo-European languages), i.e. generally by prefacing each sentence with the verb syāt, the third person singular optative of the Sanskrit verb as, "to be". (In Sanskrit, syāt becomes syān when followed by an "n", and syād when followed by a non-nasal voiced consonant or vowel.)
The subjunctive mood is rare in almost all modern dialects of English, which can make translation awkward and imprecise. In general, the subjunctive mood implies uncertainty, ambiguity, fluidity, or conditionality in a statement, and it appears in constructions such as "I wish I were going," and "Should he be the winner...." A simple translation to English can be made by inserting into the phrase "maybe," "in some ways," or "from a perspective," which is what is meant in the context of syādvāda, as illustrated in the simple Hindi construction in the song "kaho, na kaho (yeh ankhen boltiin hein...").
Syādvāda is not only an extension of anekānta ontology, but a separate system of logic capable of standing on its own. As reality is complex, no single proposition can express the nature of reality fully. Thus "syāt" should be prefixed before each proposition giving it a conditional point of view and thus removing any dogmatism in the statement. Since it ensures that each statement is expressed from seven different conditional and relative viewpoints or propositions, syādvāda is known as saptibhaṅgīnāya or "the theory of seven conditioned predications". These saptibhaṅgī are:
syād-asti—in some ways, it is,
syān-nāsti—in some ways, it is not,
syād-asti-nāsti—in some ways, it is, and it is not,
syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is, and it is indescribable,
syān-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is not, and it is indescribable,
syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable,
syād-avaktavyaḥ—in some ways, it is indescribable.
Each of these seven propositions examines the complex and multifaceted nature of reality from a relative point of view of time, space, substance and mode. To ignore the complexity of reality is to commit the fallacy of dogmatism.
