The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
partially constituted through praxis, through participation in the social sphere
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The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) by Kalyan Sen Gupta (z-lib.org)
partially constituted through praxis, through participation in the social sphere. Hence it is through action, as much as through aesthetic perspective, that a person should confront evil. This is made clear in the poem ‘Romantic’, where he writes that the real world with all its poverty, disease, and ugliness is one that calls upon him to respond with the ‘weapon’ of ‘hard, uncompromising action’. 39 For the poet or artist who achieves appropriate aesthetic distance, harmony and beauty are discernible behind or beyond the jarring, ugly aspects of life. For the man of action, however, the immediate imperative is not one of aesthetic detachment from evils, but active involvement in confrontation with them. Harmony, for such a man, is not something given, but something to be achieved by combating these evils. What motivates him to fight against evil is faith in the ultimate triumph of good, the belief that what is good is achievable, and that, therefore, harmony may be established. He is confirmed in this belief by the recognition that everything in the world is forever changing and flowing forwards, so that evils are always and necessarily transitory. They pass on or pass by, or become, as it were, transmuted into good. As Tagore puts it: Could we collect the statistics of the immense amount of death and putrefaction happening every moment in this earth, they would appal us. But evil is ever moving; with all its incalculable immensity it does not effectively clog the current of our life; and we find that the earth, water, and air remain sweet and pure for living beings. 40 Rabindranath uses a number of analogies to help familiarize us with the point he is making here. A river, for example, has banks that prevent it flowing in certain directions, but they are not simply obstacles: on the contrary, it is 92 The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore the banks which make possible the onward flow of the river. Similarly a boat has its tow-rope which, while restraining its movement, also serves to draw the boat forwards. Again, the hard floor on which the child keeps falling when learning to walk is painful, but it is the very same floor that finally enables the child to walk ahead, and even the painful knocks it has received serve as an impetus to the goal of walking. Analogously, we meet with many obstacles and setbacks in our daily life: ‘the unyielding sureness of reality’ very often ‘crosses our will’, causing frustration and suffering. But these very obstacles enable us intelligently to direct our lives and move ahead, like the river. And just as those hard falls served to teach the child how to walk, so painful setbacks in life belong to our education as rational, self-directing beings. A more telling analogy, perhaps, that Tagore employs to show that, finally, good emerges from evil is with the growth of science. Evil in everyday life, he writes, corresponds to ‘error … in our intellectual life’. 41 If we look at the development of scientific thought, we find that it progresses through mistakes or errors. The history of science is in large part a catalogue of such errors, yet no one would conclude from this that science is the ‘one perfect mode of disseminating mistakes’. 42 For what that history also displays is a progressive approximation to truth. As Karl Popper has persuasively argued, later theories possessing greater ‘verisimilitude’ emerge on the basis of ‘falsifying’ earlier ones. 43 In the same general way, human history is full of evil episodes, but it is nevertheless a story of progress and growth that tells of increasing approximation to goodness. Through struggling against poverty, disease and premature death – but also by combating selfishness or confinement to the ‘narrow’ self – men and women have succeeded, albeit slowly and with difficulty, in enabling greater harmony, in society and in their individual lives, than existed in past centuries. Doubtless there will remain sceptics who reject this story of progress and maintain that evil and disharmony are always bound to be the prevailing features of life. For Tagore, in a striking metaphor, such scepticism or nihilism is ‘a form of mental dipsomania’ that ‘disdains healthy nourishment, [and] indulges in the strong drink of denunciation’. 44 Indeed to brood in this way on the negative aspect of life is utterly morbid. Obviously, there are evils and sufferings in our life, but how can we ignore the fact that there are also ‘law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love’? For Rabindranath: Man does not believe in evils, just as he cannot believe that violin strings have been purposely made to create the exquisite torture of discordant notes, though by the aid of statistics it can be mathematically proved that the probability of discord is far greater than that of harmony, and for one who can play the violin, there are thousands who cannot. Yet the potentiality of perfection outweighs actual contradictions. 45 Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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