This scintillating conversation between the physicist and the mystic in 1930 germinated a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.
Indian renaissance man Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win a Noble Prize, visited Albert Einstein’s house on the outskirts of Berlin in Germany, on July 14, 1930. The intellectually stimulating and riveting conversation between the two greats was recorded.
Tagore, then 69, and Einstein, a much younger 51, delve deep into the concepts of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a quest to find answers to the most fundamental questions of human existence.
Their historic encounter was recounted by David Gosling in his 2007 book, ‘Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore’. The book is a broader study of an important process in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when India experienced an intellectual renaissance, which owed as much to the influx of new ideas from the West as to traditional religious and cultural insights.
Rabindranath Tagore: You have been busy, hunting down with mathematics, the two ancient entities, time and space, while I have been lecturing in this country on the eternal world of man, the universe of reality.
Albert Einstein: Do you believe in the Divine isolated from the world?
Tagore: Not isolated. The infinite personality of man comprehends the universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the truth of the universe is human truth.
Einstein: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe — the world as a unity dependent on humanity, and the world as a reality independent of the human factor.
Tagore: When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.
TAGORE: According to the Indian philosophy, there is Brahman, the absolute truth, which can be realized only by merging the individual in its infinity.
Einstein: This is a purely human conception of the universe.
Tagore: The world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. Therefore, the world apart from us does not exist; it is a relative world, depending for its reality upon our consciousness. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it truth, the standard of the eternal man whose experiences are made possible through our experiences.
Einstein: This is a realization of the human entity.
Tagore: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realize the supreme man, who has no individual limitations, through our limitations.
Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of truths. Religion realizes these truths and links them up with our deeper needs. Our individual consciousness of truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to truth, and we know truth as good through our own harmony with it.
Einstein: Truth, then, or beauty, is not independent of man?
Tagore: No, I do not say so.
Einstein: If there were no human beings anymore, the Apollo Belvedere no longer would be beautiful?
Tagore: No!
Einstein: I agree with this conception of beauty, but not with regards to truth.
Tagore: Why not? Truth is realized through men.
Einstein: I cannot prove my conception is right, but that is my religion.
Tagore: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony, which is in the universal being; truth is the perfect comprehension of the universal mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experience, through our illumined consciousness. How otherwise can we know truth?
Einstein: I cannot prove, but I believe in the Pythagorean argument, that the truth is independent of human beings. It is the problem of the logic of continuity.
Tagore: Truth, which is one with the universal being, must be essentially human; otherwise, whatever we individuals realize as true, never can be called truth. At least, the truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic— in other words, by an organ of thought which is human. According to the Indian philosophy, there is Brahman, the absolute truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words, but can be realized only by merging the individual in its infinity. But such a truth cannot belong to science. The nature of truth which we are discussing is an appearance; that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind, and therefore is human, and may be called maya, or illusion.
Einstein: It is no illusion of the individual, but of the species.
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove, but I believe in the Pythagorean argument, that the truth is independent of human beings. It is the problem of the logic of continuity.
Tagore: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore, the entire human mind realizes truth; the Indian and the European mind meet in a common realization.
Einstein: The word species is used in German for all human beings; as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it. The problem is whether truth is independent of our consciousness.
Tagore: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the superpersonal man.
Einstein: We do things with our mind, even in our everyday life, for which we are not responsible. The mind acknowledges realities outside of it, independent of it. For instance, nobody may be in this house, yet that table remains where it is.
Tagore: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table is that which is perceptible by some kind of consciousness we possess.
Einstein: If nobody were in the house the table would exist all the same, but this is already illegitimate from your point of view, because we cannot explain what it means, that the table is there, independently of us. Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack—not even primitive beings. We attribute to truth a superhuman objectivity. It is indispensable for us—this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind—though we cannot say what it means.
Tagore: In any case, if there be any truth absolutely unrelated to humanity, then for us it is absolutely non-existing.
Einstein: Then I am more religious than you are!
Tagore: My religion is in the reconciliation of the superpersonal man, the universal spirit, in my own individual being.
1 comment
Anything which is brought to us thru our senses is a construct of the brain. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around there will be vibrations but there will be no sound. It is the apparatus called ears and brain that converts vibrations into sounds. Tagore is talking here of the latter kind of truth and Einstein the former. Einstein is talking of a higher unperceived or unperceivable truth …pure consciousness that transcends our senses and brains. This is a common problem in discussions…people are talking of two different things that have the same name. Once Carl Sagan was asked if he believed in God and he replied by asking back a question: what do you mean by the word God? Different people infer different things from the same word – God. Unless we defne the words being discussed, it may look like we are having a discussion but it is actually an illusion.