The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
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The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) by Kalyan Sen Gupta (z-lib.org)
The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
philosophers will demur if this spiritual aspect is taken, as sometimes by Rabindranath, as a yearning to listen to ‘God’s love call’. 49 But his notion of ‘surplus’ and his understanding of human spirituality can be understood and appreciated without taking them to require such controversial postulates as God or Atman. Without having to commit ourselves to disputed metaphysical doctrines, we can well concede that we have a need which is something entirely different from our everyday practical needs, one which aims at fulfilment of our creative urge, of our capacity to reflect or appreciate. It is this need that prompts us to compose poems, music and paintings, to enjoy or appreciate, in the words of Tagore, ‘a beautiful face, a poem, a song, a character, a harmony of interrelated ideas’. 50 It is in these terms, and not specifically theological ones, that Tagore’s idea of ‘surplus’ may be taken. When so taken, the idea helps to explain why Tagore is so anxious that the natural environment be defended against unnecessary tampering and intrusion. He is drawn towards nature because its harmony evokes our aesthetic appreciation, because it gives us spiritual joy, and thus fulfils the demand of the ‘surplus’ or spiritual component in us. Here, then, is the main reason why we should care for nature, why it should be preserved. For, if one is sensitive to the touch of nature and finds delight in it; if one is intent on a non-technological way of relating to it – on what Heidegger terms ‘dwelling’ and Tagore ‘home coming’; if one discovers one’s being ‘outside’ in companionship with nature; and if one experiences love and sympathy for, and confidence in, the natural world, then one cannot but be eager to protect it against onslaught. To be sure, this defence of the environment on broadly aesthetic grounds will not enjoy the approval of all ecologists and environmental ethicists. Some will see in it a ‘speciesist’ denial of the objective value of nature. For, they argue, aesthetic values are ‘subjective’, ‘humanist’ or ‘anthropocentric’ in character, and hence inimical to the urgent requirement of concentration on the intrinsic value of nature. Their complaint, in the words of one commentator, is that ‘aesthetics … cannot form the basis of an adequate environmental philosophy without presupposing that natural processes and their products have no role to play independent of human evaluation of them in terms of their beauty’. 51 An aesthetically grounded defence of nature, as they see it, rests upon viewing nature as something that is important only because it serves to provide human beings with pleasures. How fair is this charge of ‘anthropocentrism’ against Rabindranath’s position? To answer this question, it is important to note that the terms ‘intrinsic’ and ‘anthropocentric’ are both ambiguous. ‘An object X has intrinsic value’ may be taken in at least two senses. ‘X has intrinsic value’ may be understood to mean that X has non-instrumental value; that, in other words, the value of X does not (wholly) consist in its being a means to something further. So ‘X has intrinsic value’ will then mean, roughly, that X Communion with Nature 71 is an end in itself. This is clearly the sense in which many environmentalists consider the value of nature to be intrinsic. Failure to recognize nature’s intrinsic value, as they see it, is to view nature only as instrument for serving certain human ends. Viewing it instrumentally is ‘anthropocentric’ in a first sense of that term. But ‘X has intrinsic value’ might be understood very differently: as a claim to the effect that X has ‘absolute’ value, where an absolute value is that which X possesses quite independently of any relation to human ends and evaluations. The denial of objective or absolute value will amount to anthropocentrism in a second sense, different from that of evaluating the world in purely instrumental terms. Tagore’s view may be regarded as an anthropocentric one in the second sense, since he thinks that no account of the value of nature, or indeed of nature itself, can be isolated from all relations to human being. Hence he observes that ‘what we call nature is what is revealed to man as nature’, and that ‘Reality is … [that] by which we are affected, that which we express’. 52 For Tagore, to say that nature has value must involve some reference to human beings, to how they are affected by it. Mountains and lakes may be described as beautiful or graceful only in virtue of their capacity to affect us. What Tagore would deny is that there is anything pernicious in conceding this human reference. It will only seem pernicious if this human reference is wrongly taken to mean that nature, since it has no absolute or independent value, matters only for its instrumental contribution to our pleasures. In other words, Tagore’s anthropocentrism will only seem pernicious if confused with anthropocentrism in a quite different sense, that of instrumentalism. It is important as well to distinguish Tagore’s anthropocentrism from the much stronger claim, made by Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, that values, aesthetic or otherwise, are ‘inventions’ or ‘creations’ of human beings. Tagore can agree with Sartre that values do not belong to the world as it is ‘en-soi’, that it is ‘human reality … by which value appears in the world’, 53 but without thereby agreeing that these values are ‘chosen’ or ‘imposed’ on the world by human beings. After all, he might point out, one would hardly infer from the fact that things only count as loud or soft in relation to creatures who are auditorily affected by them that sounds are therefore ‘imposed’ or ‘conferred’ on the world by these creatures. In the cases of both sound and value, the innocuous thesis that these are dependent, in some sense, on human receptivity should not be conflated with the more radical and clearly questionable thesis that they are ‘man-made’. Put differently, the point we are emphasizing is that Tagore’s anthropocentrism does not entail any kind of human-centred ‘imperialism’ or speciesist ‘chauvinism’. It is not the claim that values are human artefacts or constructs, or that our evaluations always and instrumentally serve some human end. Tagore’s position concerns, as it were, the conceptual analysis of value: value is an essentially relational concept, since value belongs to things 72 Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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