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)
Communion with Nature
63 This observation is important as a prelude to substantiating the claim of Tagore that identifying laws at work in nature is an important step towards an aesthetic and joyful relation with nature, and to a sense of being at home there. The point remains, nevertheless, that, however significant may be the discovery of laws in the rhythm of nature, ‘it is like a railway station; but the station platform is not home’. 27 Science is but one stage on the journey from law to love, from necessity to freedom and expansion. Nature, then, has two aspects. ‘In nature we find the presence of law in truth, and the presence of joy in beauty.’ 28 The former aspect of nature is outward or physical, under which nature is viewed as a causal mechanism to be investigated by science and harnessed by technology to meet our needs. From the technological perspective, nature is viewed through the lens of utility. Under the latter and deeper aspect, however, nature is viewed as a symbol of leisure and repose, as the perfect expression of beauty and peace. Its importance resides, not in our commercial, but in our spiritual kinship with it. Beauty, not utility, is its essential quality. The colours and sounds of nature enter into our hearts as a harmony of beauty. Nature, as Tagore poetically puts it, brings ‘a love letter to the heart written in many-coloured inks’. At one level, then, nature is a slave to serve us, while at another level, it is the arena in which our being finds its expansion. From one perspective, it is only a mechanical system; while, from another, it is a harmony that ‘seems to sound, as it were, like the golden strings of a harp’ over the ‘iron chain of cause and effect’. We ourselves, then, may relate to nature in two very distinct ways. We may try to discover the rigid physical mechanism of nature, and use it for our practical gain, in which case our relation to it is ‘external’. For something becomes our own, becomes ‘internalized’, only when it is a thing of joy, and not of use. It is essential, then, not to see nature as alien to us and to hear, instead, ‘the welcome music of the home’, to feel our place in the harmony of nature. Yet, Tagore sadly reflects, our ordinary relationship to nature is one of estrangement: we are motivated only by considerations of worldly loss and gain and fail, thereby, to realize the identity of our being with nature in the relation of joy and love. The contrast between these two ways of experiencing our relationship to nature is nicely made in the following recollection by Tagore: One day I was out in a boat on the Ganges. It was a beautiful evening in autumn. The sun had just set: the silence of the sky was full to the brim with ineffable peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Miles and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to the surface of the water and then disappeared, displaying on its 64 The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore vanishing figure all the colours of the evening sky. It drew aside for a moment the many-coloured screen behind which there was silent world full of the joy of life. It came up from the depth of its mysterious dwelling with a beautiful dancing motion and added its own music to the silent symphony of the dying day. I felt as if I had a friendly greeting from an alien world in its own language, and it touched my heart with a flash of gladness. Then suddenly the man at the helm exclaimed with a distinct note of regret, ‘Ah, what a big fish!’ It at once brought before his vision the picture of the fish caught and made ready for his supper. He could only look at the fish through his desire, and thus missed the whole truth. 29 This passage also underlines that we experience two kinds of dissatisfaction. One of them is that of not having. We are dissatisfied when we are immersed in the whirlpool of desires and do not get enough of what we desire. But we have also another kind of dissatisfaction, which is that of not being. This is the pain due, not to what we have not, but to what we are not. It is a disquiet that arises from our feeling that our life should ‘measure up’ to something beyond it and from, correspondingly, a sense of ‘the hollow eminence of [merely human] convention’. 30 When this disquiet haunts us, it is something we can seek to overcome by entering into a relation with nature not as exploiters, but as communers. For the voice of nature refers to something beyond ourselves, to what underlies both nature and ourselves. Nature reveals to us a realm of value beyond that determined by ‘hollow’ human convention. The antidote to the pain of non-being, then, is that intimate relation to nature that yields ‘the highest delight, because it reveals to [a person] the deepest harmony that exists between him and his surroundings’. 31 There are striking affinities between Rabindranath’s reflections on nature and technology and those of Martin Heidegger, who equally directs our attention to the homelessness which is ‘coming to be destiny of the world’. This homelessness, says Heidegger, is the product of a science and technology which reveals nature as, simply, ‘a standing reserve’ to be utilized by human beings. The technological ‘way of revealing’, as Heidegger calls it, is that of a ‘setting upon’ or ‘challenging forth’ of nature, the making of the imperialistic demand that nature should yield itself up in order to satisfy human needs. Thus, ‘the earth now reveals itself as a mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit’. For Heidegger, as for Tagore, it is not that this technological way of revealing is false. But it is nonetheless ‘monstrous’. For it ‘ drives out every other possibility of revealing’: it does not, that is, allow nature to speak to us in its rich variety of aspects, and thereby precludes any realization of our deeper alliance with it. Instead we are constantly set over against nature, as it were in a master–slave relation, as we force it to our advantage. For example, ‘the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command … a water power supplier’, and no longer the river which once gave to the peoples living on its banks a sense of their community. 32 Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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