Tagore, Einstein and the Nature of Reality

Literary and Philosophical Reflections

Partha Ghose

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367731335
• eBook ISBN: 9780429533907
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This volume consists of a selection of scholarly essays from literature, philosophy and history on the conception of reality as understood by Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein.

The nature of reality has been a long-debated issue among scientists and philosophers. Tagore (1861–1941) met Einstein (1879–1955) at the latter's house in Kaputh, Germany on 14 July 1930 and had a long conversation on this issue. This conversation has been widely quoted and discussed by scientists, philosophers and scholars from the literary world. The important question that Tagore and Einstein discussed was whether the world is a unity dependent on humanity, or the world is a reality independent of the human factor. Einstein believed that reality is independent of the mind and the human factor. On the other hand, Tagore adopted the opposite view. Nevertheless, both Einstein and Tagore claimed to be realists — their conceptions of reality were obviously fundamentally different. Where does the difference lie? Can it be harmonized at a deeper level?

This volume brings together for the first time a gamut of views on this subject from eminent scholars. It presents some key reflections on reality, language, poetry, truth, science, personality, human sciences, virtue ethics, intelligibility and creativity. It will be useful to scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature, history and political studies, as also to those interested in Tagore.

1
Poetic reality

Nirmalangshu Mukherji

1

During his conversation with the physicist Albert Einstein, the poet-novelist-playwright-painter-composer-educationist Rabindranath Tagore stated that ‘truth, which is one with the universal being, must be essentially human; otherwise, whatever we individuals realize as true, never can be called truth.’ ‘The truth which is described as scientific,’ he continued, ‘can (only) be reached through the process of logic’ which itself is ‘an organ of thought which is human.’¹

The point of interest in these statements is that Tagore is concerned with truths of physics, scientific truth. For him, scientific truth is one with Universal being; in other words, truth is universal. While claiming that truth is ‘human,’ there is no emphasis on social norms, cultural forms, historicity, artistic variation, etc. In particular, he is not proposing that truth is subjective, whatever that problematic notion amounts to. In that sense, truth is objective; maybe all truths – not just truths of physics – are objective!! He seems to be upholding the concept of objective truth while asserting its essential humanness. In fact, he suggests that humanness is a necessary condition for objective truth! As we will see, this ‘poetic’ notion of truth lends a new dimension to the classical debate in philosophy of science between realism and anti-realism.

As noted, Tagore was a great poet and a humanist. As a humanist thinker, he also lectured and wrote on a variety of topics of general human interest such as the character of human existence, the play of nature on human creativity, and the role of values and religion in human societies. Such concerns abound in much of his creative work too, especially in his poems, plays and paintings. His Hibbert lectures at Oxford University in 1931, the Harvard lecture in 1913, the Kamala lecture at Calcutta University in 1933, and some other writings such as the collection of addresses given at the weekly prayer at Santiniketan, were more self-consciously and directly concerned with these topics.

In one broad common sense of the term ‘philosophy,’ the writings just mentioned may well be characterized as philosophical insofar as they are general reflections on the human condition. In Tagore’s case, these reflections are often accompanied by short citations and commentaries from the classical Indian tradition such as the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, and the like, which also may be viewed as philosophical in roughly the same broad common sense of the term.

However, these reflective works are not philosophical in the narrower, more academic, sense. Broadly viewed as systematic reflections on the nature of language, thought and reality and the relations between them, academic philosophy can be safely identified, as with other academic disciplines, with its textual lineage.²

Consider the classical problem of realism opened by the Greeks, especially by Plato: does the world consist of the entities that correspond to the concepts humans employ to form a view of the world? In other words, is the human view of the world real? With the overwhelming fact of Newtonian science in hand, the problem took a particularly sharp form in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as we will see. Newer, more foundational, issues emerged as Newtonian physics gave way to relativity theory and quantum theory in early twentieth century. By the time the discussion between Tagore and Einstein took place in 1930, philosophy of science had already emerged as a significant area in philosophy with the realism/anti-realism debate at its core. There is no evidence that Tagore was familiar with the technical literature. To emphasize, there is no evidence that Tagore was familiar with the technical literature in the philosophy of science as developed in the works of, say, Ernst Mach, Henry Poincare and Karl Popper. To say this is not to deny that Tagore took intellectual – even if semi-popular – interest in aspects of modern science.

Tagore’s views on physics and science, therefore, need to be viewed not as technical comments, but in terms of general humanist reflections of a literary mind. Even then Tagore’s ‘outsider’ view carries much intellectual interest. A work of art, including the writing of poetry, is not merely a play of form. Somehow the artist has to relate the emerging forms in his aesthetic imagination to stable aspects of human experience for the forms to have an irresistible interpretation. In that sense, an artist constantly struggles with the elusive reality of artistic depictions. An artist and poet of Tagore’s genius was likely to have reached a satisfactory reflective understanding of his own artistic expressions that might have interesting philosophical implications. Elsewhere,³ I have discussed how Tagore’s poetic contemplation of bird-songs [pakhire diyecho gaan, gay sei gaan (Balaka 23)] illuminates an empirically viable conception of human musical ability. I wish to adopt a similar strategy for Tagore’s ‘poetic’ views on science and truth.

Albert Einstein also was not an academic philosopher in the sense outlined above. However, his philosophical location with respect to the issue of scientific realism was far more intimate than Tagore’s. Not only was Einstein the greatest physicist after Newton, his work was central in the new debate on scientific realism. In particular, he directly intervened in the post-quantum debate in scientific realism to suggest that quantum theory is an ‘incomplete’ theory of nature in that it fails to reach genuine (=objective) scientific truth. Thus, both for his outstanding role as a practicing scientist and a reflective thinker on the nature of science (specially, new physics), Einstein’s remarks on the nature of reality carry intrinsic significance.

2

As we know by now, at the time of the conversations, Tagore was a very familiar name in Germany as some of his literary works had been translated into German and millions of copies were sold. Tagore visited Germany several times between the two world wars. During these visits, he met many leading German intellectuals such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Schweitzer, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse and others.⁴ Einstein was perhaps the most famous German intellectual of his time. It is reasonable to assume that Einstein was familiar with Tagore’s poetry and other writings. So, it is not surprising that the two might have sought each other out during Tagore’s visit to Germany.

What is surprising is the topic of their conversation. We know that both Tagore and Einstein were deeply concerned with the rise of fascism and threat of war in Europe. Romain Rolland and others were actively engaged in organizing world-famous intellectuals against the war. It would have been a stellar topic of conversation for Tagore and Einstein. Instead, as recorded in the truncated published versions, they chose to discuss the character of science in the first meeting and music in the second.⁵ For reasons of space, I will focus only on the first without denying that the second may have some bearing on the discussion of reality as well.

Even there, the Tagore-Einstein conversation does not really have the form of a debate. Rather, it has the form of repeated assertions by two minds reflecting in parallel. And it is not very clear what these assertions were about. For example, from some parts of the conversation it appears that the conversation was about whether there is a mind-independent reality. Dmitri Marianoff, who reported these conversations in the New York Times, titled the first dialogue, ‘Thoughts on the possibility of [truth’s] Existence without relation to Humanity.’ It is suggested that Einstein says ‘yes,’ Tagore says ‘no.’ It is not clear that there was in fact such a direct opposition.

Consider the issue of the table. While Einstein clearly holds that the table continues to be there even if no one sees it, Tagore does not quite say that in that case the table won’t be there. He says instead that it will be there but under the gaze of a universal mind. So Tagore does not deny the existence of the table when no individual human is present to perceive it; he ascribes the existence in that case to the presence of a universal mind. Similarly, in his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, George Berkeley held that since sensible things may exist independently of human beings, “there must be some other mind wherein they exist.”⁶ For Berkeley this ‘other’ mind is God; Tagore called it variously Supreme man, Universal being, and the like.

The standard criticisms against Berkeley thus apply to Tagore as well. The postulation of a constantly and universally aware universal mind does not seem to have more explanatory power than the simpler postulation of the table itself. The universal mind will need the table for a veridical perception of it in any case; if that perception is non-veridical, the table won’t be there, which is a consequence both Berkeley and Tagore deny. So Tagore needs to postulate all of (a) universal mind in the form of all-pervasive consciousness, (b) ability of the human mind to grasp the universal mind and (c) veridical perception, just to say that the table continues to be there. Even though Einstein does not offer any further realist argument in favour of his view that the table continues to be there (“I cannot prove my conception is right, but that is my religion”), his robust and simple common sense seems to outweigh Tagore’s complicated idealist thrust.

Philosophical difficulties aside, for the case under study, humans do seem to have a preference for the simpler option of settling for the reality of the table because that sense of reality is in fact withdrawn in some special cases. For one, even if, other things being equal, we robustly believe that the table continues to exist when I leave the room, we do not believe that my shadow – which also I can see among other ‘thing’-like stuff – will continue to exist in the room if I leave the room. This is because other things are not equal; unlike the table, the continued existence of my shadow is tied to my presence in the room. So, there is a clear distinction between things to which we do or do not ascribe reality even if they are perceptible.

To pursue the topic of shadows a bit more, it is interesting that humans not only make a thick distinction between independent objects like tables and mountains on the one hand, and ‘dependent’ objects such as shadows on the other, they make grades of distinction between the reality of shadows as well. For example, humans ascribe reality to shadows of individual persons even if the person is not present in the frame; they withhold such ascriptions if bottles are so arranged to generate a shadow-outline of a human face. These distinctions cannot be made sense of without a prior distinction between what is real and what appears to be so, both for the human mind.

Consider another – more classical – example requiring the appearance-reality distinction. When setting out in the dark in a snake-infested area, we take a torch along even if there is some moonlight. If I see what looks like a rope, I switch on the torch to double-check that it is in fact a rope, not a snake. Under those unfavourable conditions of light, we do not generally ascribe veridicality to the perception of rope without further examination. Since the ‘universal mind’ works throughout without getting affected by specific circumstances, a Berkeleyan has no further resources to explain these special cases. Einstein’s realist conviction is thus ratified by robust common sense.

This is not to deny the appeal of Tagore’s basic assertion that 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. However, Tagore’s own explanation of what he means is not very helpful, as we saw. For Tagore, scientific truth obtains when the human mind forms a ‘universal harmony’ with the ‘supreme being, Brahman.’ Such an explanation seems unnecessary because the basic claim is obvious as scientific theories are unfailingly human products. Furthermore, the postulation of a universal being takes the explanation away from the individual human...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Preamble: a man-centric view: poet and scientist
• 1 Poetic reality
• 2 Too big a bang for language: Tagore’s critique reloaded
• 3 Tagore’s truth
• 4 Seeing things: Tagore’s sense of the real
• 5 Science and the world of personality
• 6 Positing the human in the human sciences
• 7 Why the moth cannot be a poet
• 8 Tagore–Wittgenstein interface: The poet’s activism and virtue ethics
• 9 Two conceptions of reality: Tagore and Einstein
• 10 Reality and intelligibility
• 11 The creative mind: A mirror or a component of reality?
• Appendix A: my memories of Einstein
• Appendix B: the Tagore–Einstein conversation on the nature of reality
• Appendix C: the Tagore–Einstein dialogue on youth, causality and music
• Index