Rabindranath Tagore on the West

How did Rabindranath Tagore describe ‘the West’, and what relationship did he propose India and the rest of Asia adopt towards it?  

Renaissance Brain, Leonardo da Vinci

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath — a poet, writer, playwright, composer, intellectual, philosopher, educationist and painter — described the West as a fundamentally material, intellectual, and logical entity as opposed to the East, (including India and Asia) which was a spiritual, metaphysical and philosophical entity. He further distinguished between the ‘spirit of the West’ and the ‘nation of the West.’ The former, its essence and its people, was characterised by scientific and empirical curiosities, whilst the latter was the Western people organised as an ‘economic and political entity.’ Such an entity was typified by a will to power, greed, conquest, colonisation, subjugation, exploitation and imperialism. Tagore attributed this to its ‘intellectual’ nature which was by virtue of being intellectual, devoid of morals and ethics begetting great harm. Tagore consequently proposed that India and the rest of Asia should adopt a cooperative and dialectical relationship with the spirit of the West, for such entities complimented and completed one another, serving to mitigate the malevolence of the nation of the West. 

Tagore, in his description of the West, importantly makes a distinction between the ‘spirit of the West’ and ‘the nation of the West.’ As Surendra Munshi argues, the spirit of the West was characterised by scientific curiosity, empiricism, rationality and logic (which Tagore encountered in the works of Western individuals). Conversely, the nation of the West was the ‘political and economic union’ of Westerners, in alignment with modern day definitions of the ‘state’, as defined by sociologist Max Weber. Whilst the former has ‘no ulterior purpose,’ being an ‘end in itself,’ ‘a spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being,’ the latter ‘is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose.’ Namely, the Western nation’s telos was the will to power. It attained this through conquest, economic plunder, exploitation and subjugation, hence as Georgios Varouxakis notes, Tagore’s definition resembles what historians have come to call ‘High Imperialism.’ Ultimately, both the spirit and the nation of the West were united by their materialism — the philosophical monism which posits matter as the fundamental substance — though they were crucially divorced by their degrees of harmfulness. The Western spirit as exemplified in its people was innocuous, thus Tagore had ‘deep love and a great respect for the British race’ having produced ‘great-hearted men, thinkers of great thoughts, doers of great deeds.’‘We have felt the greatness of this people as we feel the sun; but as for the Nation, it is for us a thick mist of a stifling nature covering the sun itself. This government by the Nation is neither British nor anything else; it is an applied science,’ treacherous and cunning. 

However, this essay contends that Tagore fallaciously separates the spirit of the West and the nation of the West; the Western people from the Western state. For, it is the people that give rise to and comprise such abstract entities, irrefutably undermining Tagore's assertion pertaining to the fragmented nature of such phenomena. This repudiation evokes the profound words of Indian Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1985) during his first talk at Ojai California in 1972:

‘Psychological revolution is necessary, far more important that physical revolution, than economic revolution, or social revolution. Psychological revolution, a total transformation of the mind and the heart, is necessary because that is the root cause of any outward phenomena and change. If there is no deep, radical change in oneself as a human being, whatever you do outwardly will be conditioned by your inward state.’

In other words, the ultimate revolutionary is one who alters his psyche, for he knows that it is him who warps, twists and moulds his environment (including economic, political and social structures), demonstrating the connectedness of the individual and the state, as opposed to their separateness as Tagore emphasises. This is crucially in alignment with the Hermetic Axiom — ‘As above, so below, as within, so without.’ The Greek messenger of the gods, Hermes Trismegistus, neither here nor there, neither residing within the heavens nor within the earth, neither male nor female, understood the interconnectedness and intertwined nature of all. Thus the connection of the individual and the state serves to undermine Tagore’s framing of such phenomena as isolated.

Tagore further argues that the Western nation is a fundamentally ‘intellectual’ and ‘abstract’ concept, since it is the intellect which gives birth to it. Consequently, it precipitates evil by virtue of the cold, detached and callous nature of the intellect. As Tagore notes 

‘We all know that intellect is impersonal.’ Our ‘heart’ is ‘one with us, but our mind can be detached from the personal man and then only can it freely move in its world of thoughts. Our intellect is an ascetic who wears no clothes, takes no food, knows no sleep, has no wishes, feels no love or hatred or pity for human limitations, who only reasons, unmoved through the vicissitudes of life.’  

Such a ‘detached’ entity gains speed, ‘leaving the moral man’ ‘behind’, ‘because it has to deal with the whole reality, not  merely with the law of things.’ Hence the claim that it is abundant in ‘power’ but barren of ‘humanity.’ Consequently, Tagore describes such an unscrupulous entity as parasitic; ‘This nationalism is a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world’... ‘ready to send its poisonous fluid into… other living peoples’, such as China, Persia and India.  And as ‘predatory’; the ‘monster organization becomes all eyes, whose ugly stare of inquisitiveness cannot be avoided by a single person amongst the immense multitude of the ruled.’ It drives its ‘tentacles of machinery deep into its victims’ and ‘tightens’ its ‘grip’ to the point of ‘suffocation around every man, woman and child of a vast population, for whom no escape is unimaginable.’

Tagore’s descriptions of the immoral nature of the intellect is in alignment with Russian novelist and Slavophile Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works. Dostoevsky unfailingly depicts the antagonist or villain of his novels as sharp, rational atheists. In Crime and Punishment the villain is law student Raskolnikov who murders the old and corrupt pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta Ivanovna. In Brothers Karamazov, the antagonist is the most intelligent brother, Ivan Karamazov, who is epitomised by the dictum ‘if there is no God, everything is lawful.’ Both cleverly rationalise and articulate away their sins; creating formulas and equations to justify their decadence. Such dark intellectual characters are juxtaposed with the benevolent protagonists or heroes, who are often simple, inarticulate and naive. In Brothers Karamazov, such a hero is Ivan’s brother Alyosha and in The Idiot, it is prince Myshkin, ‘the idiot’ himself. Dostoevsky profoundly illustrates the flaw and inferiority of the intellect through the inevitable demise of such astute villains. Both Ivan and Raskolnikov are driven psychologically and physiologically ill — delirious, feverish, and mad —  by the remorse and shame which they once attempted to rationalise away.  

Furthermore, such proclamations are reinforced by psychologist Jordan Peterson’s analysis of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883, during his biblical lectures. Zarathustra the protagonist and prophet descends from the mountains and stumbles into a public square, in which a crowd surrounds and marvells at a dwarf with great ears. Ears being on the head, indicates the disproportionate vastness of the dwarf’s mind. Such a dwarf therefore personifies the intellect which is worshipped and venerated by modern Westerners. As Peterson asserts, the dwarf’s intellect is hyper-activated or overly-developed, however  his ‘being’ is underdeveloped. This renders the overall entity extraordinarily unbalanced. With its upper realms vast and mighty and its lower realms, its foundations and roots, weak and feeble, the dwarf’s, or the overly intellectual’s demise is made inevitable. Hence Zarathustra’s assertion:

‘The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men - and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.’

Indeed Nietzsche, akin to Dostoevsky, in his words the only ‘psychologist’ from whom he had anything to ‘learn’, renders the intellectual ‘cripple’ the ‘archenemy’ of the sage, Zarathustra. Moreover, Zarathustra regards the dwarf not only as a flawed cripple, but as ‘the spirit of gravity,’ which has satanic or demonic connotations. For, gravity is that which pulls down; into the underground, into the realm of Hades or Lucifer so to speak. Such is reinforced by Nicholas F. Gier’s contention in Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western perspectives that the dwarf /intellect is also the ‘antagonist’ or ‘devil’ of Zarathustra. The certain demise of Dostoyevsky's villains and Neitzsche’s dwarf parallels Tagore’s contention that the Western intellectual nation is destined to fall. 

Tagore maintains that the morally or spiritually deprived, and the overly intellectual and materialistic West, is bound to collapse for ‘man's world is a moral world, not because we blindly agree to believe it, but because it is so in truth.’ He argues that the fate of Sparta acts as a testament to such a claim: ‘in the ancient days Sparta paid all her attention to becoming powerful and she did become so by crippling her humanity, and she died of the amputation.’ Tagore’s prescription to the West was therefore a relationship between India and the rest of Asia, namely an interactive and cooperative relationship. This is attributable to his oxymoronic conception of the truth.  The West was the scientific, rational and logical half of the truth, whilst the East was the moral, spiritual and metaphysical half of the truth. Both complemented and completed one another, without which the other would not be. Together they made a rich whole. ‘Then again we have to consider that the West is necessary to the East. We are complementary to each other because of our different outlooks upon life which have given us different aspects of truth.’  Perhaps Tagore’s prescription that such entities interact demonstrates his Hegelian conception of history, the notion that history evolves through the dance and friction, warring and grappling, of two opposing ideas, epitomised by the formula — ‘Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis.’  This proposition to ‘play with’ or to ‘wrestle’ with was contrary to the suggestions of his chaste and pacifist contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, who nationally and politically proposed swaraj or independence or who scientifically and technologically prescribed renunciation. 

Tagore’s proposition of a collaborative and interactive relationship between ‘the West’ and India and the rest of Asia is undergirded by the contentions of neuroscientist Iian Milgilgrist in The Master and His Emissary. Within such a work, he characterises the eastern brain hemisphere as religious, spiritual and intuitive and the western lobe as logical, rational and scientific, arguing that such biological hemispheres map onto the sociopolitical concepts of the East and West respectively. For, whilst the modern West overly utilises its Western hemisphere, the East disproportionately employs its eastern hemisphere. This explains why the Enlightenment prevailed in the West whilst the East was deeply entrenched in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism or Islam. Ultimately, Milgilgrist prescribes to the West, as Tagore does, integration of its eastern counterpart. For, just as the two biological brain hemispheres complete one another, having evolved not in vain, having united not in vain, so too do the two geographical or socio political landscapes. As Milgilgrist notes, like the lack of communication and collaboration between the brain hemispheres renders one imbalanced and debilitated, so too does fragmentation of the East and West cause an instability, illness and toppling, perhaps of the kind that Tagore and Nietszche allude to.

In conclusion, Rabindranath Tagore describes ‘the West’ as being composed of a spirit and a nation. Both were united by their materialism, however whilst the spirit of the West was harmless, the nation was lethal. This essay refutes the notion that such entities are separate on the grounds that the spirit of the West, its essence and its people, comprise and give rise to the nation of the West. However, this work agrees with Tagore’s contention that the Western nation, a product of intellect, rationality and logic, is an unscrupulous pathogen and monster, rapidly conquering all peoples, including Indians. This work further drew upon philosophers Dostoevsky and Nietszche to consolidate such a claim. Ultimately, Tagore proposed that India and the rest of Asia adopt an interactive and dialectic relationship towards the West, helping to counteract and mitigate its materialism through its moral and spiritual essence.

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