The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath and His Spirituality
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The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) by Kalyan Sen Gupta (z-lib.org)
Rabindranath and His Spirituality
Rabindranath Tagore is basically a poet. This is how he is widely acknowledged and there has been much less focus on his standing as a philosopher. Tagore had no professional training, nor any academic degree, in philosophy. He did not construct any philosophical system, nor did he think of himself as a philosopher. When Ajit Chakraborty, a celebrated thinker and close associate of Rabindranath, described Tagore as a philosopher in his book, Rabindranath (1910), Tagore did not take the description very seriously. He was not persuaded that he was doing philosophy, or that his thought was really philosophical. This was despite Radhakrishnan’s book, The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1919), and the invitations he received to give the presidential address to the Indian Philosophical Association (1926) and the Hibbert Lectures on The Religion of Man at Oxford (1931), and to contribute a paper to Radhakrishnan’s edited volume, Contemporary Indian 6 The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore Philosophy (1936). (This paper later appeared as a separate monograph, The Religion of an Artist.) In a letter to Radhakrishnan, he wrote: ‘… about my philosophy, I am like M. Jourdain who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it.’ 11 His point here is that while others, like Radhakrishnan, might well discover philosophy in his writings, this was not something he himself consciously intended to produce. Was Tagore right? Is it true that he was no philosopher? That he was not a philosopher in the professional or academic sense of the term hardly settles the matter. We need to reflect on the character of philosophy. These days, we are apt to set poets and philosophers apart. The familiar view of the distinction is nicely captured by Richard Rorty: ‘The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that her unmediated woodnotes might please.’ 12 Philosophy, on the view Rorty describes, uses cold reason and sophisticated technique of logic, and speaks a ‘transparent’ language uncontaminated by any emotional tone. A poet, on the other hand, is intent on expressing emotion and conveying it, not transparently, but through suggestion and metaphor. A philosopher endeavours to impress us through the power of reason, while a poet aims only to satisfy our aesthetic sense, to inspire an emotional response. In studying philosophy, we hope to obtain objective understanding; in reading poetry, we seek attunement to the feelings of the poet. What a poet writes, on this view, cannot be translated into the sparse language of reason, so that the philosopher accordingly finds his words expressive only of subjective, even ‘private’, moods. Consequently it has come to be a mark of derogation to refer to a philosopher as, ‘really’, only being a poet. ‘Philosophers would claim to write,’ as Rorty once more puts it, ‘in a clear, transparent way, priding themselves on manly straightforwardness, on abjuring “literary” devices.’ 13 If we are convinced by this poet–philosopher polarity, then we shall indeed suspect that Rabindranath the poet is no philosopher. And certainly we do not find him employing any of the ‘philosophical methods’ that have found favour in modern Anglo-American academic circles. Nor does he have any great respect for or confidence in the notion of ‘rigorous argumentation’. As he once put it, ‘The spring of our ideas is dried up when we keep company with our argumentative friends.’ 14 Or again, he warns us to ‘keep off your reason or argument when I am imagining my infinite life by looking at stars at night, when I am roaming across the universe, when I am enjoying my intimacy with new lives of innumerable planets’. 15 In a short play, Subtle Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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