Tagore’s Concept of Beauty

By Prabas Jiban Chaudhury
(Visva-Bharati)

BEAUTY, according to Tagore, is born of man’s desire to fraternize with the outer world of life and nature. Through this fraternising activity man enlarges his soul and knows himself better. This activity is nothing but love which is a law of nature. “In the universe whereever we see the law of the heart, our heart also surrenders itself to it in love and does not ask a word. This region of thriftless spending in the world is Beauty.” (1) “The function of our soul is to fraternise with others. (2) “Beauty is but a bridge between the self and matter.” (3) This desire in man for establishing kinship with others is disinterested in the sense that it is not done for any worldly gain. It is a kind of self-expression which is freely exercised and which is never hypocrisy or self-deception. We see that where there is not the slightest practical gain to be expected from fraternising, man still does it out of some inner urge for sympathy and love. For example, where we are the stronger party and have the power to exploit the other party mercilessly, we, however, feel like regarding them as our own. Thus it is that a Hindu calls a cow ‘mother.’ The reason behind this desire to make all nature our kin is that we see but our soul in all, and all seems dear. This is a metaphysical principle of the Upanishads (5) and Tagore has quoted it at several places in his writings. (6) Thus the aesthetic contemplation is not disinterested in an absolute sense; it is in the interest of our true self that we go out of our narrow individuality and love all things outside us. By appropriating the world into our consciousness we enlarge the latter. This is a kind of spiritual self-aggrandisement. Naturally it must be accompanied by a deep delight. This is the secret of aesthetic delight and Tagore has been the first to make it clear to us after deriving it from the Upanishads.

Besides the concept of the soul’s fraternising with the universe without, Tagore has introduced another to explain the principle of beauty. This is the concept of abundance or the soul’s rising above all worldly thought of profit and loss. He holds that beauty is born of rich profusion of the human spirit. (7) “Art and literature belong to that revolutionary region of freedom where need is reduced to unimportance, material is shown to be unsubstantial, and the ideal alone is revealed as the truth.” (8) This principle of spiritual abundance or overflowing of the personality of a human being is intimately related to his self-enlargement and self-knowledge through appropriating by love the universe about him. One who finds all things his near and dear, in fact, finds them but ‘failings from him, vanishings,’ feels a fulness of spirit; the extent of his personality knows no bounds. So that this state of plenitude must be creative of beauty just as the state of kinship with the universe is. These two metaphysical (more appropriately, metapsychological) principles are involved in the experience of beauty which is a psychological process.

Thus Tagore’s theory of beauty is one of significance. Some character or the other, some value, is the content of beauty which is, thus, not a matter of form only. But Tagore has not overlooked the formal side of beauty. “The size and the shape of a rose, its charm and the harmony of its parts, point to some unity pervading its entire body; for this reason a rose is not a mere fact to us, it is a thing of beauty.” (9) We are reminded of Aristotle who said, “Beauty is a matter of size and proportion.” But Tagore is not a formalist who reduces beauty to arithmetic. Though he did not elucidate his formalistic way of conceiving beauty, we feel that he saw in the principle of unity in diversity the method of our soul’s approach to the universe without and of appropriating it into a unity. In the process of our assimilating the universe through imaginative insight and love, we reduce its diversity into unity; otherwise there would be chaos and no harmonious intuition of the outer world.

Now Tagore, like the spiritual aestheticians of the East and the West, distinguishes beauty from mere charm, and aesthetic delight from ordinary sensuous pleasure. He associated spiritual discipline and tranquillity of the mind with the realisation of beauty. (10) We can understand this. For he regards beauty as a tie between man and his universe, and this tie is best established when the objects of the universe are loved for their own sakes and not for any selfish ends. Some Western thinkers, e.g., Kant, Bradley (A. C.) and Bosanquet, have made this principle of disinterested enjoyment central in aesthetic experience. But they have not explained why and how this disinterested enjoyment is possible. On the face of it the phrase is a contradiction in terms. But Tagore, with the help of the Upanishadic maxim, “That thou art,” has offered us a metaphysical explanation of the aesthetic principle involved in the phrase. The Upanishad says. “Verily, it is not that thou lovest everything because thou desirest everything, but thou lovest everything because thou desirest thine own ‘Self.’” So that love of beautiful objects is not essentially disinterested, rather it is interested in a deeper sense. This resolves the seeming contradiction in the phrase “disinterested enjoyment” used to describe aesthetic experience. It is now seen that aesthetic attitude is disinterested in the sense that it is not associated with any satisfaction of our practical, intellectual or affective self. But it is interested in the sense that it is associated with our true self, the higher or the contemplative self. Because of this association it is accompanied by delight.

NOTES

1. ‘Sahitya,’ p. 60.
2. ‘Panchabhut,’ p. 32.
3. ‘Ibid,’ p. 31.
4 ‘Ibid,’ p. 30.
5. See Brahadarnayaka Upahasihap. II. 4.
6. See of ‘Sadhana,’ p.29.
7. ‘Sahitya,’ p. 29.
8. ‘Sahityer Pathe,’ p. 45.
9. ‘Ibid,’ p. 43.
10. See ‘Ibid,’ p. 59; also ‘Sahitya,’ p. 29. and p. 34.