Rabindranath Tagore: 7 Timeless Ideas about Love, Morality, Art and Meaning
The Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, author, painter, musician, and mystic had many profound ideas about philosophy and literature — on what it truly means to love, what does morality mean, what purpose art serves for humans, and how power works in personal and political settings. Almost 80 years after his death, his ideas are as timeless as life itself.
In his autobiography, Rabindranath Tagore recalls the time when his teacher, Gyan Babu read him Kalidas’ Birth of War God, followed by Macbeth in Bengali. He was just a little kid then, and he writes about how his eyes begun to weep when he read those verses for the first time.
Who knew that the kid who wept after reading the beautiful and poetic verses of the other’s great works, will himself go on to write one of the greatest epic, Gitanjali in Bengali along with hundreds of plays, short stories, novels, essays, paintings and music.
Tagore was largely unknown to the non-Bengali world until W.B Yeats discovered him at the age Tagore was fifty and helped publish his manuscript, Gitanjali in English which earned him immense fame in the West almost overnight.
Today, however as much as Tagore is talked about or celebrated, his Nobel Prize and awards in literature flaunted and paraded, his thoughts and ideas are seldom understood or as a friend remarked, ‘appreciated from the heart.’
Mark Twain once wrote that a ‘classic’ is a book that people praise and don’t read. While it is true for many books, it is particularly true for the works of Tagore.
Tagore’s writings are laden with profound observations about the human condition, the strong emotional force that Tagore himself felt as a little boy while reading other’s great works of literature, which he carried to his own legacy. To use Martha Nussbaum’s words, his literature offers, “a sense of life, and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not . . . of life’s relations and connections.”
And not just his literature, aside from a poet and an artist, Tagore was also a profound thinker, a political and cultural critic, a religious humanist, and a lifelong teacher. He dealt with complex philosophical questions — questions about the nature of reality, about the origins of religion, morality and art, and about the nature of power and nationalism. As a fan of science, he greatly admired Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. As a critic, he wrote extensively about the dangers of nationalism, about the sectarian divide caused by religions, and about the corruption of unchecked power.
His vision of good education led him to found Visva-Bharati University in India that has produced great minds since then like Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize winner for economics in 1998, and Indira Gandhi, the first and up to this date the only woman Prime Minister of India. According to him, a good education was not about facts and dates, but about enlightenment of the mind.
He wrote:
“Education means enabling the mind to find out that ultimate truth which emancipates us from the bondage of dust and gives us wealth not of things but of inner light, not of power but of love. It is a process of enlightenment. It is divine wealth. It helps in the realization of truth.”
In this post, we are going to talk about some of Tagore’s most interesting observations in philosophy and literature, his views on love, meaning and life and especially his philosophical opinions about morality, art, power and governments.
On the Question of Love
What is love? Or to put it in another way, what does it truly mean to love someone? This is an important question which is often found in literature more often than it is found in philosophy, and in Tagore’s works both fiction and nonfiction we find an attempt to wrangle with the nature and meaning of love.
For example, there are many instances in Tagore’s fictional world where his characters fall in love with the ‘idea’ of someone rather than the actual someone. Of course, an idea is just an illusion, and illusions vanish as soon as they are created.
In one of his most famous play Chitra, a lady warrior pleads to the gods to make her into a feminine, beautiful woman so that she can make Arjuna fall in love with her. When her plead is fulfilled, she later regrets it because she knows that Arjuna had fallen in love with a false image of herself.
She asks Arjuna if he would still love her if she was not what she appeared to be. Arjuna replies what probably is the most epic line in the play, that since she has always kept her true self a secret, he has never truly grown to love her as much as he could and that his love is ‘incomplete’. The play ends with Chitra finally admitting to Arjuna that she is a warrior and not the perfect beauty that she claims. Arjuna then displays what is often described as the ‘higher kind of love’ where he accepts her with joy and states that his life has truly become complete.
However, not all characters are like Arjuna. Most of them are incapable of displaying the kind of love that Arjuna did. In the novel, Choker Bali for example, when the character Mahendra leaves his simplistic wife for Binodini, who he thinks is more cultured and refined in tastes, he meets a fate of endless disappointment and guilt. He thought he loved Binodini but as he later recalls, he did not even know her, and therefore, feels that he had merely fallen for her initial charm and lustful desire.
Perhaps no one puts it better than Fyodor Dostoyevsky who writes, ‘But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love but still, hate’ adding that, ‘….To love someone means to see them the way God intended them.’
For Tagore the essence of love is to give, never take. It’s not ‘give and take’ as many people believe, but it is ‘give and give.’
He writes:
“Power said to the world, “You are mine.” The world kept it prisoner on her throne. Love said to the world, “I am yours.” The world gave it the freedom of her house.”
The Problem of Evil
Tagore describes evil as a person playing the violin. Most people, when they are starting out on the violin can only afford to produce discord and noise. In fact, the probability that someone is going to produce discord and noise whenever they hold a violin is far greater than someone who can end up producing a symphony.
The discord and noise is the evil according to Tagore, it is inevitable, and all people produce them. But life is not bleak and pessimistic, sometimes, you learn to make a symphony out of it, sometimes you discover good.
Tagore disagrees with philosophers who believe that life is inherently evil and full of suffering and pain. He would certainly argue against someone like Peter Zapffe who wrote The Last Messiah that describes consciousness as a blunder, an abomination, an absurdity. Tagore believes that yes, most of existence is full of suffering and pain, and yes, most of the violin attempts will be discord and noise, but he is full of optimism, he believes that there is some inherent worth in our conscious experience. More like saying that, waiting to listen to a great violin’s symphony still makes existence worthwhile in some sense.
The Question of Meaning
On the question of meaning, Tagore once said,
“The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.”
According to him, the antidote to ‘absurdity’ and ‘futility’ of life, is in the humble realization that you have to rise above yourself and do good for the sake of others rather than yourself.
He writes, ‘When a man does not realize his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison-house whose walls are alien to him. When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects, for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he was born, then he finds himself in perfect truth, and his harmony with all is established.’
Beyond Good and Evil
In Tagore’s fictional world, even a saint can be a sinner, and even a sinner can be a saint. He writes:
“even a band of robbers must be moral in order to hold together as a band; they may rob the whole world but not each other. To make an immoral intention successful, some of its weapons must be moral. In fact, very often, it is our very moral strength which gives us most effectively the power to do evil, to exploit other individuals for our own benefit, to rob other people of their just rights.”
This complex view of morality comes from Tagore’s close relationship with a tradition, mainly the Mahabhartian tradition, which is quite different from Judeo-Christian morality. In such a tradition even an evil person, someone like Shakuni for example, who goes out to do many wicked things in life actually turns out to have a lot of pain and trauma hiding beneath him. And even a good person, let’s say someone like Nakula who considers himself quite righteous and high-minded, can end up being sent to hell because of his arrogance. The basic assumption being that trauma and circumstance can sometimes make people do bad things, and that righteousness can sometimes lead to arrogance and even to morally deplorable things.
This view warrants our special attention because it teaches us that morality is not as black and white as we often assume, that good people are capable of evil, and that evil people are capable of good, which ideally should make us more forgiving, compassionate and less judgmental even for those who are not their best selves.
Power Tends to Get Abused No Matter Who Has It
In a short story called The Ghost of the Leader, Tagore depicts a wise and highly respected leader who receives unquestioned admiration from his community. That person, in effect, realizes that he could exploit his power without bearing any consequences, and therefore, becomes a kind of tyrant.
Often in literature, we see examples where power displays the quality of being abused. It is one of those grand truths in literature that reveal how flawed and vulnerable humans are when it comes to power, and why sometimes even nice ordinary people can end up doing horrible things when left with unchecked power.
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey is just another example, where Dorian, the handsome and wealthy protagonist, receives unquestioned idolization from his peers Basil Hallward and Lord Henry that play a vital role in Dorian’s development. Dorian soon realizes that he can get away with a life of pleasure with no moral responsibility whatsoever. His life reaches its pinnacle when he ends up murdering his very own friend Basil Hallward.
As Lord Acton puts it, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’
It’s important to note that in literature it does not matter whether you are a liberal, or a conservative, a communist or a capitalist when it comes to the taste of power, everyone tends to slip because everyone is a human.
According to Tagore:
“Power in all its forms is irrational; it is like the horse that drags the carriage blindfolded.”
There is a nice story called Nastanirh in which Tagore builds a character called Bhupati who holds many liberal ideas and principles especially about women but he still fails to understand and care for his miserable wife. According to Tagore, one’s political ideas or principles do not necessarily define one’s personal or moral conduct.
Nationalism is Just like Religion
Many philosophers have left no stone unturned when it comes to pointing out the dogmas and superficialities of religion. But that same level of scrutiny has often not been lent to nationalism, which in Tagore’s eyes is no less than a menace for the modern world.
He writes:
“But when this idea of the Nation, which has met with universal acceptance in the present day, tries to pass off the cult of collective selfishness as a moral duty, simply because that selfishness is gigantic in stature, it not only commits depredation but attacks the very vitals of humanity.”
A good portion of Tagore’s political thought consists of his bold criticism of the idea of nationhood, where he spares no one whether it is America, China, Japan or India.
In his letters to Gandhi, Tagore warns about the ‘collectivist’ mentality of people which he believed to be the root of many evils. He disagreed with Gandhi on many aspects, and he feared that Gandhi’s following might soon turn into a herd of sheep flocking behind a charismatic leader, a sentiment that was no different than fanatic nationalism.
In his book, Nationalism, Tagore takes a blow on patriotism, which according to him amounts to nothing but a shallow feeling of pride that makes people feel as if they are part of something big. But which just feeds their ego and makes them feel delusionally self-important.
He writes:
Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.
On the Universality of Art and Truth
What is art? How is art different from science? And most importantly, what does good art mean?
To understand this, Tagore asks you to imagine a man from the moon who comes to earth and tries to study music that humans love to listen. Now, that man can look at the music notes, he can study the instruments to see how exactly the sound of the music was produced, he can do all the calculations in the world, but he is never going to have any idea about how the music actually feels when he listens to it. In other words, he is not going to know how the music sounds like unless he actually listens to it.
And that’s what according to Tagore, is the fundamental difference between art and science. Tagore explains that using reason or logic can perhaps make you understand how a stage room looks like, but it cannot make you see or appreciate the drama that goes on the stage.
He writes:
“The function of poetry and the arts is to remind us that the [stage] room is the greyest of illusions, and the reality is the drama presented before us.”
In his conversation with Einstein during his 1930 visit to Germany, which is to-date one of the most remarkable conversations about the difference between art and science in intellectual history, Tagore further explains his view of art,
‘It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper, literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.’
Regarding the question of what makes art good or great, Tagore wrote an essay titled On Art and Aesthetics in which he writes that the purpose of good art is to capture the truth about the condition of humans and this world.
He writes,
“What are literature, music or fine arts? They are all media of artistic self-expression through the language of the word, the sound, the line and the colour. And all of them seem to record but one thing — the wonder and joy of man’s discovery of the True.”
In the essay, Tagore also briefly touches upon the philosophical question about the purpose of art. Is Art for Art’s sake only? Or does Art serve some higher social or political purpose?
For him, the more important question is ‘where does art come from?’ In other words, why do we have art in the first place?
Tagore takes delight in the mystery of this question. According to him, art is derived from a universe of emotions, mysticism, religion and even God. He argues that the reason it comes from our internal universe shows why there is so much similarity in the themes, and expressions discussed and explored through art throughout history. He writes,
‘Poetry and the arts cherish in them the profound faith of man in the unity of his being with all existence, the final truth of which is the truth of personality.’
And he further builds upon it to argue that
The principal object of art, also, being the expression of personality, and not that which is abstract and analytical, it necessarily uses the language of picture and music.
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…the truth is, analytical treatment will not help us in discovering what is the vital point in art. For the true principle of art is the principle of unity. When we want to know the food-value of certain of our diets, we find it in their component parts; but it’s taste-value is in its unity, which cannot be analyzed.
In his last days, Tagore felt really ill. Even though he lived most of his life in solitude and loneliness, and as his diaries later revealed, in depression, he still lived his life to the fullest of the standards he held.
His prime philosophy was ‘giving’ and he gave a lot to this world in terms of his philanthropy, and his educational institute, and of course his writings that are so many that even the most well-read people have not come close to completing his full set of works.
Remember he said that ‘The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.’
Well, it’s under the trees planted by him that we are still finding shade and food for our creative and intellectual souls which I hope we continue to find for generations and generations to come.
To listen to Tagore’s songs: try this collection, to see Tagore’s full set of paintings, try this. To read his literary works in English, The Essential Tagore is a good place to begin. And to read his nonfiction writings, start with his autobiography, My Reminiscences, along with his essays Creative Unity, Sadhana, On Art and Aesthetics and Nationalism.
