At one level, the debate between Gandhi and Tagore was about a disparate set of issues. These included Gandhi’s equation of spinning with swaraj/freedom, the non-cooperation movement and the associated boycott of educational institutions, swadeshi and the burning of foreign cloth, and the possibilities of martyrdom in Gandhi’s practice of fasting. However, it is possible that Tagore’s exchanges with Gandhi did not constitute a set of disconnected arguments. These arguments could be interpreted as Tagore’s efforts to articulate his insights about the possibilities of untruth in Gandhi’s conception of the proper means to the truth/satya. One can argue that the debate took place because as a litterateur, Tagore had a deeper understanding of the myriad possibilities of self-deception and sources of untruth that could envelop an individual life and search for truth. He recognized that disguised forms of self-assertion (individual/collective) could obstruct the rigorous purity of Gandhi’s efforts to overcome untruth by moral self-rule/swarajya. On Tagore’s view, self-assertions in the guise of self-mastery would only confirm an individual and society in a life pervaded by all kinds of untruth.
Tagore argued that the various forms of individual self-denial advocated by Gandhi—in the moral life, in the cult of the nation and in asceticism—could in themselves be insidious forms of self-interest. Gandhi’s efforts at overcoming an assertive sense of self in swaraj as moral self-mastery and home rule could in itself be a deceptive form of self-love and thereby become an obstruction to the truth. For Tagore, it was on account of the “egoistic self” that “our friendships become exclusive, our families selfish and inhospitable, and our nations insular and aggressively inimical to other races”. As brought out in Chap. 3 of this book, Gandhi and Tagore thought that truth was both a cognitive and an experiential notion. Tagore (like Gandhi) believed that truth described an individual’s state of being which reflected her progressive awareness of how things really were in the world independently of self-/ego-driven projects. In Tagore’s understanding, deceptions caused by self-assertion could obstruct an individual’s progress to truth and such deceptions would lead an individual into both untruth and a loss of freedom.
In this context it can be philosophically useful to read the Gandhi–Tagore debate, not only in terms of the actual exchanges between them, but also as informed by the plays and novels Tagore wrote at the time he was engaged in writing letters to Gandhi. For it was in his novels and plays that Tagore explored (at his best) the possibilities of untruth (or of insidious sorts of ego-driven self-love) that he saw in Gandhi’s methods to overcome untruth.
This chapter and the next reconstruct the debate between Gandhi and Tagore as being primarily about the difficult nature of untruth and the proper means to become established in a state of truth qua freedom or swaraj. While the present chapter reconstructs Tagore’s arguments about the possibilities of untruth in Gandhian movements and methods, the next puts together Tagore’s alternative understanding of the nature of freedom/swaraj. It is necessary to anticipate in brief the arguments of Chap. 5 here. For Tagore’s understanding of individual freedom as primarily the freedom to reason influenced his conception of the proper means to the truth. This understanding put him at some intellectual distance from Gandhi.
4.1 The Relationship Between Individual Freedom, Reason and Rationality
Tagore thought about individual freedom primarily as a freedom in the mind that is as a freedom to reason. During the debate with Gandhi he argued that an individual’s freedom to think was the chief means of experiencing truth and becoming free of deceptions. Tagore’s objection to the national movement organized under Gandhi was precisely, that the assumption into a homogenized self, denied the individual a right to reason and to differ from others.
Tagore’s understanding of individual freedom can be reconstructed along the lines of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment. Kant had defined Enlightenment as a human being’s “emergence from his self-incurred minority.” By minority/immaturity Kant meant the individual’s reliance on external variables rather than on his/her own understanding. For Tagore, the “immaturity” from which the agent has to emerge leads to the very same factor that “liberates” the Western rational self, i.e. having reasons for what one believes to be true and for how one acts. The Kantian agent is marked as “distinct” from the “thing” only by the virtue of her rationality. It is this rationality that guarantees the freedom of the will which, in turn, makes possible the agent’s detachment from all sorts of natural desires/inclinations and makes her at home in the world of the truth. It can be argued that Tagore’s conception of individual freedom is philosophically close to Kant and the Enlightenment. However, though Tagore certainly seemed to have been influenced by the Enlightenment he cannot be entirely understood along Kantian lines. An important difference emerges if one tries to unpack what Tagore meant by emphasizing the individual’s freedom to reason. I suggest that the freedom to reason/in the mind, that Tagore argued about, can be philosophically interpreted by taking a clue from Derek Parfit’s conception of the individual’s freedom to respond to reasons in forming her beliefs and in acting in a certain way (Parfit 2013, p. 47). Tagore argued that the primary sense of individual freedom was that individual man qua man must be free to respond to reasons or apparent reasons.
It is important to reconstruct Tagore’s understanding of the relationship between an individual’s free response to reasons and her rationality as a human being qua human being. Tagore accorded priority to the individual’s freedom to understand and respond to reasons rather than to an a priori conception of rationality as a differentiating feature of a human being qua human being. It may be recalled that for Kant both the authority and the content of the categorical imperative are to be understood with reference to the requirements of rational agency rather than to some independent conception of the reasons that people have for what they believe in and do. In Tagore claims about the individual’s freedom to respond to reasons (what he calls freedom in the mind) is not grounded on any commitment to a prior claim about rational agency. Therefore, there is no commitment to any Kantian conception of universal reason. Individual freedom to respond to reasons is more fundamental than any claims of human rationality and universal reason.
It is important to raise the point about Tagore’s understanding of the relationship between individual reasons and rationality here. Section 4.4.2 examines the debate between Nussbaum and her critics on patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In that debate Nussbaum draws on (what she understands to be) Tagore’s commitment to a cosmopolitanism based on the idea of universal reason. In terms of my argument, Tagore insisted on the individual’s freedom to respond to reason without being committed to any prior understanding of the claims of individual rational agency or of universal reason. Understood in this way, judgements about reasons are independent of judgements about universal reason. In Tagore’s view we are rational when we do not believe blindly/obey passionately but respond to reason or apparent reason. Our acts are rational when, if our beliefs are true, we would be doing what we had good reasons to do.
This discussion on the priority of reasons in Tagore should not be taken to mean that he could be unreflectively called a modern. Though he was powerfully influenced by central ideas of the Enlightenment, Tagore cannot be easily called a product of the Enlightenment. His insistence that nature was alive and essentially independent of man and even of God kept him at some distance from the anthropocentricism of modernity . As he had declared in essays called “Sādhanā” he shared India’s ancient rejection of the essentially modern “anthropomorphic hallucination” of seeing man as the centre of the universe. To some extent this brought him closer to Gandhi. In their respect for the integrity of nature both Gandhi and Tagore shared the cosmological commitments of the ancients as they negotiated with Western modernity.
~~ The Tagore–Gandhi Debate on Matters of Truth and Untruth -ed- Bindu Puri
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