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
others. Freedom, so understood, is linked with obligation. Obligation relates us to others, not as a burden they impose upon us, but as one of the forms of interpersonal relations through which we and they belong to a single human community. Our obligations to one another are not, moreover, discovered through moral reason or divine revelation. Ultimately, our sense of true freedom and obligation is founded on the experience of love. This is why Rabindranath is able to speak of ‘freedom as we feel [it] in the love of our friend’ and of the duties that loving friendship entails. Freedom, one might say, lies in removing all limits to love. So far in this discussion of Tagore’s ideal of harmony, I have focused on his call for human solidarity and community. But no account of that ideal, or of the spirituality of his thought, would be complete unless we consider, as well, his insistence on the essential kinship of man with nature. A sense of such kinship remained with Tagore from his childhood. ‘From my infancy,’ he says, ‘I had a keen sensitiveness which kept my mind tingling with consciousness of the world around me – nature and human.’ 37 When referring to this kinship, he often invokes his analogy between spiritual harmony and music. The grand orchestra of the universe has filled my heart In many a quiet moment in my imagination. The inaccessible snow-clad mountain peaks in their Infinite solitude of blue Have sent to my heart many an invitation. 38 Nature, a harmony of lines, colours, life and movement, is itself compared to a work of art: it is a song, an expression of beauty. ‘We find,’ the poet writes, ‘that the endless rhymes of the world … strike our heart strings and produce music.’ 39 And in this music of nature one finds another extension of one’s being. The beauty of nature provides us with an eternal assurance of our spiritual relation to it, thereby widening our individual parameters. It seems, in fact, that it was his experience of nature that originally inspired in Tagore his ideal of harmony. During the discussion of my own religious experience I express my belief that the first stage of my realization was through my feeling of intimacy with Nature – not that Nature which has its channels of information for our mind and physical relationship with our living body, but that which satisfies our personality with manifestations that make our life rich and stimulate our imagination in their harmony of forms, colours, sounds and movement. 40 The happiness, love and freedom we experience in intimate relationships with other people have their analogues in the experience of nature. The person open to the beauty of nature will establish with it bonds of love that, like those with a friend, also liberate. Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Thought 15 There is a further aspect of Tagore’s notions of harmony and spirituality that any full account of them must mention. While he never denies the importance of social concerns and relations, he also emphasizes a mode of one’s relationship to oneself. This takes the form of a constant striving for realization of an inner harmony. A human being, Tagore says, ‘is aware that he is not imperfect but incomplete. He knows that in himself some meaning has yet to be realized … The call is deep in his mind – the call of his inner truth which is beyond … analytic logic.’ 41 The primary form that this quest for ‘inner truth’ takes is engagement, not in social institutions, but in art. It is only in and through the kind of creativity that is most salient in artistic production – through fashioning and refashioning his life – that a person’s life comes truly to reflect what he or she is. For to be a human being is, in important part, to be an individual that is never finally ‘defined’ or ‘completed’, but always, one might say, ‘on the way’ to becoming someone new. In art, more than anywhere else, a person exercises a uniquely human freedom and hence, in the language of existentialist thinkers, lives ‘authentically’. ‘[One’s] true life is in [one’s] creation, which represents the infinity of man.’ 42 We have identified three dimensions to Tagore’s conception or ideal of spiritual harmony: interpersonal human solidarity, kinship with nature, and self-integrity through artistic creativity. These three dimensions are the themes of the following four chapters. In Chapters 2 and 3, we are mainly concerned, therefore, with Tagore’s social and political philosophy, including its relationship to that of his great contemporary and friend, Gandhi. In Chapter 4, we examine Tagore’s account of the relationship between human beings and the natural world, while in the first half of the final chapter we are occupied with his discussion of selfhood, ‘innerness’ and art. That chapter closes with a discussion of a question that often occupied Tagore himself: that of the feasibility in the modern world of the ideal that he urges upon us. Notes 1 The Upanishads (circa 6th–3rd century bce) are the speculative, philosophical portions of the orally transmitted Vedic corpus. The Upanishads are presented in the forms of dialogue, anecdote, parable and allegory. The main theme of these writings is that of a Supreme Spirit or Brahman which pervades the world. 2 Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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