Rabindranath Tagore (Man Individual and Universal)

RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Man, Individual and Universal

Dr D.P. CHATTOPADHYAYA, P.R.S., Ph.D. (London)
Professor of Philosophy, Jadavpur University

MAN HAS a feeling that he is truly represented in something which exceeds himself...The call is deep in his mind–the call of his own inner truth, which is beyond his direct knowledge and analytical logic. And individuals are born who have no doubt of the truth of this transcendental Man. As our consciousness more and more comprehends it, new valuations are developed in us, new depths and delicacies of delight, a sober dignity of expression through elimination of tawdriness, of frenzied emotions, of all violence in shape, colour, words, or behaviour, of the dark mentality of Ku-Klux-Klanism.–Rabindranath, The Religion of Man.

Man is a wonderful creature. In thousand and one ways he can be, in fact, has been, described. Yet one feels many other true descriptions of him are possible. Naturally the question arises: Why is it so? One may say: Man is the most elusive creature. In Rabindranath’s words, ‘...he is not imperfect, but incomplete.’ In the process of solving this seeming paradox we may hope to disclose our elusive identity.

In a sense man is. In a sense man is not. Simultaneously man is both is and is not. Biologically speaking, his structural features are identifiable and reidentifiable. But his body-cells are continuously perishing. And new ones are being reborn. Psychologically speaking, his experience, memories, hopes are undergoing continuous change. The ways our mental phenomena are stored and sorted, are never permanent in character. The impermanence is evident in our pro­jective phenomena like intention, need, hope, aspiration. The most transparent proof of our incompleteness is quest for new meanings of life, new values of life.

The elusiveness of human nature is both historical and futural. The whole of his past is never completely available to him. Nor at any particular point of time can he be conscious of all that he wants, wants to be, and is seeking for, Even of the so-called solid present man cannot be sure, it is flowing and gliding, never steady and stable, providing a firm footing to stand upon.

These peculiarities of individual man have been understood by Rabindranath in two different but intimately related ways. One: man is literally a phenomenon like an ever-blossoming flower with endless petals enclosed within it. Two: he is essentially rooted in and perpetually drawing upon the boundless resources of a transcendental Person, God, or Absolute, whatever name we give to it. Analogous to these aspects of human nature one finds two other aspects, namely, conservative and creative. The past is conserved in him. The past that is conserved in him is not embalmed dead past but living and throbbing one. This past is like an uncut umbilical cord which ties him to his mother culture. In fact, this cord con­nects him and enables him to draw nourishment not only from the mother culture but also from the mother earth.

Man is sustained by society and history. This is necessary but not sufficient for full blossoming of human nature. Man is rooted in nature and emerges out of the geological and the palaeon­tological past. His evolutionary ancestry, though extremely signi­ficant, does not bring forth the full dignity of his human nature. Foot-firm on the earth, coming out of the womb of the mother earth, man, the homo erectus, gazes distant horizons and far distant stars and galaxies. This description of man, so dear to Rabindranath, highlights his conception of man as both socially situated and transcendentally projected. The poet has likened man to music. Grounded in words or fastened to strings music as music, is free from them both.

Extending this insightful metaphor we understand man both as individual and as universal. His individuality is affiliated to and animated by his universality. His universality is more an aspiration than a fulfilment of his individuality. The universal man is God in the making.

Man cannot understand the world without understanding himself. He is an inseparable part of it. In it his self is structured. He cannot abstract himself from it and then know it in isolation from the world. His self-knowledge is a part of his world-knowledge. His world-knowledge is self-knowledge in it as a part of it.

In his aspiration man wants to get beyond himself. In his inspiration he succeeds in lifting himself from the rule of his daily life. In his mechanical moulds and habitual modes of life man is almost reduced to materiality, uprooted from his own humanity. In and through inspiration and aspiration jada-purusabecomes prana-purusaon his way to being mano-maya-purusa. To the dis­cerning reader of Tagore’s writings it is clear that he has drawn heavily on the seminal ideas of the Upanisads. Equally clear it is that he has succeeded in imparting a new life to those ideas. In their higher reaches the ideas are not merely cognitive. They are literally aesthetic, i.e. visualizable as beautiful images and audible as musical poesy. Concomitantly, the favourite contents of Tagore’s poetry and writings on religion, without ceasing to be cognitive, prove to be evocative, emotive, and transparently communicative. Transparency, like the immediacy of experience, is the gift of the poetic mind. It is not without significance that the root meaning of kavi(poet) in Sanskrit means thinker, wise man, sage, seer, singer, a man gifted with insight, enlightened person.

A thinker of purely intellectual cast of mind is basically in­terested in establishing his point. He has some theorem or other to prove. Unlike him, but not quite unlike him, the poet has a point of his own to communicate to and share with his reader or listener. In communication he excels and enriches himself. By com­munication he enlarges himself. It is in and through these various ways the poet not only transforms himself but also trans­forms his own milieu, the world which sustains him. The poet is a potent transformer of forms. He is a transvaluer of values. He creates forms. He creates values. Out of his creative joy are born new forms and new values. His transformation and transvaluation start with his own being. His charity begins at home. His consci­ousness is not primarily other-oriented.

The expression ‘transvaluation of values’ is borrowed from Nietzsche. It is a luminous idea but not a, new one. What it connotes is well known. So well known that it often gets sunk and almost lost in our consciousness of daily life and its habituality. Both as an individual and as a part of the world at large, man’s appearance is neither an accident nor ad hoc. In Rabindramith’s language, the appearance of man on the world-scene is an outcome of a benign conspiracy or gracious design. In his language, man is like a music. The enabling conditions of music are so diverse and seemingly so disparate that the enjoyer hardly cares to know their original sources and resources. To the uninitiated, music is like a sonic burst of bliss. It is like a news of joy from nowhere. But the world as the mother earth knows what has gone into the making of man and music possible.

Every part of our body, every chamber of our soul, owes its origin to the elements of nature. What makes nature possible also makes man and music possible. One single music holds man and nature together. Time and again Rabindranath has spoken of this cosmic music. The key word of all his works-literary, musical, pedagagical, social, and political–is harmony. He harps on the theme in innumerable ways. Conflict, strife and struggle, discordance-nothing can conceal harmony from his view. Beneath the froth and forum of the endless forms of conflict he sees harmony ­local, global, and cosmic.

When he takes a historical view of India, he reiterates the same key concept, harmony. He finds no conflict, no discontinuity, no quantum jump, between the past and the present. No doubt, colonially oppressed India saddens him. But his is not a depressed Nietzschean soul. He has in him a lot of bright perceptions to gladden him. Even personal tragedies and national calamities are transformed in him as an input of his ceaseless creative works. What happens to his microcosm he wants to get re-enacted in the macrocosm of his motherland, India. He wanted to transform not only his own self but also the self of this ancient nation. His contribution to the world of values was intended to transvalue the unlived values of the people. By his words and works he changed India in a very significant way.

There are different ways of changing the country, transvaluation of its values. Some people change the world by knowing it, by discovering its secret. The scientist is one of them. Some people change the world by some external and marketable means and mechanism. The techonologist is one of them. Some people change the world by living it and expressing it. The artist belongs to the third category. From this one must not believe in the trichotomy of science/art/technology. Science requires us to direct our mind to the structured immensity of the knowable world. Here world com­prises both things and living, beings, including the human ones. The technologist is engaged in transforming the world by transferable aids and adjuncts. The artist, like the spiritual seer, comprehends all-pervading Spirit in the depth of moving things and beings of the worlds. The nature of the artist seeks to articulate itself in the world of colours, shapes, and sounds. By using language and other media of self-expression he changes them, gives them new form, new life.

‘The fundamental desire of life’, to Rabindrarrath, ‘is the desire to exist.’ (The Religion of Man).Human existence is an excerpt of the existence of the world at large. Human personality and cosmic universality are bound freely together in an ever-expressive harmony. If man is said to be an artist by nature, it is because of this persistent presence of expressive urge in him. He cannot stop only with the living world. He yearns to express it, to communicate it to others, and share it with the latter. Man must know the world where he lives. To exist creatively he is obliged to change it either by imagi­nation or by technology. By imagination he wants to make good what is notthere in the world-view he cherishes. By technology he wants to change the world unto his own preferred image of it. Without science, technology, and art as spiritual probings, man cannot get to the depth of the harmony between the existence of his self and that of the universe as a whole. Conscious of this harmony but unable to live it, man is like a separated lover or, to use the poet’s own words, ‘perpetually homesick’. This is an existential, not pathological, sickness. It is not a sickening sickness. It is a creative pain, pangs for giving birth to a poetry or a picture. The creative consciousness has always in it an element of alienation or separation, viraha.

Perpetually distanced as man is from his ideal goal, the lived harmony of the individual and the universal, he always yearns for it, consciously or unconsciously. Our historical consciousness is an important expression of this yearning. The past of our country is not an embalmed dead past. It is a living past. Often it is even a moving past. The great historical figures are, in our mind, not as static facts but as living historical images. It is by living and reliving our past that we can enliven our present and look forward to a creative future. To get out of the ossified institutions of the past we must draw upon our inner resources, forces and joy of consciousness, authenticity and existence. Partly in jest but mainly in earnest Rabindranath refers critically to two of our many unlived institutions, namely, daroga(police chief) and guru (spiritual guide). He sarca­stically observes that we cannot do without guru because we are not spiritually gifted. We need darogabecause we have no discipline within our own selves. Whenever man is obliged to lean heavily on external institutions, he is alienated from himself, gets spiritually impoverished within.

It is for this reason Rabindranath in his concept of swaraj has emphasized the imperatives of both renewed historical con­sciousness and extended universal consciousness. Even during the days of strong nationalist movement, he kept on emphasizing the importance of internationalism or universalism. Hisperception of the past and that of the world at large are all deeply rooted in his inner self.

Rabindranath describes man as both individual and universal. This description is very insightful. It provides the, key to our under­standing of the human rootedness not only of nationalism and internationalism but also of the human character of Truth and Beauty.

To speak of Beauty as human is not very surpisising. Though it begs elucidation. it is at least understandable. Perhaps the same cannot be said of the claim of Truth as human. On this issue Rabindranath has written a lot. His most interesting view on it seems to have been expressed in his exchange with Einstein. Like Rabindranath, Einstein was against the thesis of two cultures ­dichotomy between arts and science. In arts man primarily expresses himself. But in the process also does he express the world. In science his prime concern is the knowledge of the world, especially its struc­tures and substructures, expressible in the laws of nature. Here, too, world finds its expression in and through human understanding. What is understood, the world itself, is not man-made. But the scientific expression of its objects, understood and interpreted by man, cannot be free from human touch, colouration, and formulation.

Somewhat like Rabindranath, Einstein is prepared to concede the essential human character of Beauty. When Rabindranath affirms that the Apollo of Belvedere would not be beautiful if there would be no human being any more, Einstein agrees with him. But his agreement is confined to the conception of Beauty only, and not extendable to that of Truth. When the poet points out that Truth, like Beauty, is also realized through man, the unconvinced scientist reiterates his position, namely, the human rootedness of Truth is not provable. By implication what he submits is this. The question of provability does not arise in the case of Beauty. So there the scientist agrees with the poet in his humanistic characterization of Beauty. But in the case of scientific characterization of Truth prov­ability is claimed to an absolute imperative. And it is not satisfiable. This argument of the scientist leaves the poet unmoved. On his part he tries to show that Truth, like Beauty, is realized, rather realizable in and through ‘our own mistakes and blunders...accu­mulated experience... [and] illumined consciousness’. The poet’s realization is: Proof and Truth are admittedly not identical. Proof is ofTruth, and Truth does not hang unsupported in the air. Einstein’s reference to the objective truth of the Pythagorean theorem as an example is not particularly very helpful in this context. There are non-Euclidean systems of geometry in which the Pythagorean theorem is not at all a theorem, still less a provable one. The poet might have pointed out that the Einsteinean space is not Euclidean. But that does not mean that the relativistic world-picture drawn by the scientist based on that notion has proved false. Laws of Relativity have become true in and through Einstein. But the fact that they have not become false after the scientist’s death does not disprove the human origin and the acceptability of the Truth of his laws. In this context, Rabindranath’s use of the expressions ‘our mistakes’, ‘our experience’, ‘our consciousness’ are noteworthy. One particular scientist’s appearance or disappearance from the scene does not make any difference to the public or the intersubjective, i.e. universal, character of scientific Truth discovered by him.

It is interesting to recall that the same point, the human cha­racter of Truth, has been asserted, a la Tagore, by Heidegger. ‘Before there was any Dasein [Man], there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more...Through Newton the [Newtonian] laws became true; and with them, entities [of which the laws prove true] became accessible ... to Dasein.’ (Being and Time. trans. John Maequarrie & Edward Robinson). The existential philosopher’s and the poet’s realization of Truth are out and out human. At the same time, it remains interhuman or universal. Rightly understood, it is not likely to offend one’s scientific sense. Science after all is not dehumanized. Like artistic Beauty, scientific Truth, born out of human consciousness, is found to be humanly acceptable in terms of ourexperience and our consciousness.

Rabindranath’s transparent perception of Truth and Beauty adds a new chapter to India’s history of culture. After a long time and with a renewed vigour people found in his creative works an arresting presence of man, transparency of Truth and joyous Beauty. This potent impetus to our national process of acculturation is extremely significant. The full import of the Indian Renaissance of the nineteenth century cannot be grasped unless we go deep into the poet’s perception of Beauty and Truth and their universal human rootedness.