12
To pair Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) as philosophico-religious thinkers for a conversation on political theology may seem conceptually awkward, at first glance. They are worlds apart on faith tradition, weltanschauung, historical sociocultural period, and literary intention. Tagore gained international prominence during his lifetime, and the other, only after his death. Further, one emphasized the community and spoke on behalf of all humanity, while the other took to addressing and emphasizing the single individual. Adding to the seeming asymmetry is whether they have anything relevant to say about a postmodern phenomenon occasioned by a crisis of modern liberal capitalism.
Rabindranath Tagore produced his intellectually mature prose writings mainly in the first few decades of the twentieth century, within a cultural-intellectual revitalizing phase identified as the Bengali Renaissance movement568 in Indian history. More than a writer, he is a Bengali poet, artist, music-song composer, educator, and social reformer in colonial India. At his best, he is a bard. In 1913, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali, a collection of his poems or song offerings he rendered into English from Bengali. Introducing the collection to Western readers, William Butler Yates described it as “the product of a whole people, a whole civilization immeasurably strange to us.”569 Time and again, Tagore would take as guide in his thinking insights from the Upanishads,570 texts containing core philosophical doctrines or truths about ultimately real and human nature. He was bought up in a culturally rich home that would quote from the Upanishadic collection. Later, his thoughts and criticisms would be of political significance to his intellectual contemporaries—those shaping India into a modern nation or constitutionally secular state with a democratic heritage completely different from that of the West.571
In contrast, Kierkegaard is a thinker and religious author of a small Christian kingdom, Denmark, during the middle of the nineteenth century. The period, marked by economic prosperity and romantic nationalism, is considered the last phase of the Danish Golden Age. His literary productions are also at a time of growing political agitations that resulted in a transition from a feudal to a capitalist society in 1849. Politically, the change meant that inhabitants ceased to be subjects of the king to whom the Danish Church belonged. The transition inadvertently left the church without a legal status that later raised for the newly formed parliament questions about its place and significance in the state.572 Status aside, Kierkegaard argued that the establishment church in the kingdom was preaching a watered-down version of Christianity compared to New Testament teachings. By his observation, many people were living in categories foreign to New Testament teachings but were of the view that belonging to a Christian kingdom was enough to certify them as Christians.573 That together with the prevailing cultural Christianity forged in the crucible of romanticism and Hegelian philosophy created a frightful illusion, in Kierkegaard’s view. He took upon himself the task of offering a corrective, showing what it means to become a Christian. But first the illusion had to be dispelled and his countrymen had to be awakened to the spiritual crisis. This was part of the task he took upon himself, directing his literary talents as an author to be an unsettling and disquieting voice of true, biblical Christianity.
Tagore, on one hand, belonged to a progressive Brahmo sect574 of neo-Hinduism. Its core teachings include belief in an infinite spirit that is creator and preserver and worshiped through righteous deeds and love, and in a universal humanism. Tagore blended those beliefs with the spirit of the renaissance movement of which he is the last icon. As such, he was relentless in his opposition to British rule with its aggressive materialism and commercialism that he felt was dealing a deathblow to the spiritual freedom of the individual, and was reducing Indian society to docility. His antipathy to Western imperialism produced his polemical stance against nationalism that morphed into a deification of the nation-state. The state itself was an organized mechanism of power in pursuit of wealth and conquest at the expense of freedom of the individual spirit. For Tagore, the idea of nationalism has no place in the traditions of India transmitted by its saint-poets: Kabir, Guru Nanak, Dadu, Rajjab, Mirabai, and others. While his writings take up modernity as a problem, he strongly advocated for an East-West civilization alliance to benefit all humanity. His literary intention was to that end—to the benefit of humanity.
Kierkegaard, one the other hand, understood himself as an author in Copenhagen, which was then a small market town. He was aware of his literary abilities as a poet of a kind, a dialectician, ironist, polemicist, and social critic. In writing to show the difficulty of becoming a Christian, he implicated himself in the church as well as cultural politics. He refrained from direct involvement in national political agitations for a constitutional monarchy. Instead, he remained focused on a sustained attack leveled at Christendom, making use of his literary talents to reintroduce Christianity to the Danish literary intelligentsia, through mainly communicating aesthetic and ethico-religious possibilities in writing. That is, he sought to describe a possibility such that the reader as a single individual would choose to make it actual in his/her own life. The significance he accorded to the categories of the single individual and human existence made his writings a resource for crisis theology and existentialist thinking in the twentieth century.
Furthermore, neither author was acquainted with political theology. Characteristically, political theology is a Western Christian movement emerging in Europe after World War II and later engaging theologians in a North-South hemispheric dialogue. Its subject matter ranges from liberal democracy, post-colonialism, preferential option for the poor, gender theory to queer theory and even “Indecent Theology,” as Marcella Althaus-Reid called her project.575 Needless to say, questions surround political theology: Is it a discipline, a style of thinking in theology, a discourse about God, a new post-secular version of political theory? It is not entirely clear even whether political theology is possible in the first place. If it is, are there different versions relative to cultural context?576
Despite the questions and differences, similarities between Tagore and Kierkegaard emerge to warrant considering them together. Their writings are in the genre of life-philosophy, vis-à-vis modernity as a problematic. Each is focused on the human condition, seeking to awaken their people from spiritual malaise, the result of something having gone awry within the social-cultural and political context. Their joint concern was to raise a question about the limits of the secular relative to the spiritual. In this, they shared a common mission: to rehabilitate self or personhood by calling attention to how it was compromised by the prevailing social and political institutional arrangements of their own period. They wrote passionately to challenge their audiences or readers to become morally responsible selves as members of society. Moreover, in doing so, each author developed epistemological and metaphysical viewpoints that were similar, while remaining fundamentally oriented to their own religious tradition. Some stark differences at key points in their religious traditions do not prevent similarities and resemblances from arising along the way. But juxtaposing Tagore and Kierkegaard might lead to new or flexible ways of conversing so that they may be seen as a possible resource for political theology or even for interrogating the role of the concept of political theology in theological thinking.
Thus, this study starts a conversation between the two authors with respect to the self or person and political theology. It views the latter broadly as an attempt to understand the proper limits of the secular with respect to the spiritual for each thinker. Limits do get fuzzy, similar to a scrimmage line, when the secular is taken as loosening of the ties between religion and government or when theological reflections lend support to political structures that are just or unjust. Hence, political theology may include calling into question the established order, its sociocultural institutional arrangements, and rule with respect to notions of freedom, justice, and becoming fully human. To assist in starting the conversation I proceed comparatively to answer the question about proper limits of the secular with respect to the spiritual for each thinker. But first, it requires settling on appropriate texts and ideas that have some import for thinking about the primacy of the secular. The argument advanced here is that the positions sketched for Tagore and Kierkegaard on the question from the perspective of the idea of self or person, have a striking affinity to one another.
Preliminary Considerations: The Choice of Texts and Ideas
Pinning down a representative text for each author is difficult. The literary corpus of each is massive, representing different genres and containing a plurality of voices. Tagore, as one scholar notes,577 has at least three influential voices: that of the bard of Bengal, for he was considered original and powerful as a poet; that of a novelist and storyteller, for he was influential in depicting family and social life, and that of a creative artist, clever satirist, and playwright creating characters and scenarios for his comic plays. There is, I think, a fourth voice, that of the philosophico-religious thinker delivering invited lectures and addresses, at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Oxford, and other universities aboard, as well as in India. Although hardly a systematic thinker, the voice is rational, engaging in critical inquiry without drawing a distinction between philosophy and religion or poetry as done in the West. He is no philosopher in the academic sense of engaging sophisticated logical techniques as part of argumentation. One of his short comical plays depicts the futility of obsession with analysis to suggest how people can become tied up in knots by such activities.578 In the weltanschauung of this poet-philosopher, philosophy is a kind of seeing reference by the Sanskrit term darshana, More specifically, the term refers to a glimpsing of the divine, or in the context that Tagore uses it, a glimpsing of fruitful ways of thinking about humans in relation to one another and the environment.
This thinking or Indian outlook (darshana) is exemplified by his first serious English prose writing, Sadhana (1915), a collection of spiritual discourses, many of them delivered at Harvard University. It deals with the relation between the self and nature, the realization of selfhood, the dispelling of illusion, and draws on Upanishadic insights to deepen our subjectivity or consciousness. Hence, it might be classified as ethic-religious, referencing an underlying unity between the human and the Infinite or Universal spirit. Ideas from Sadhana underlie or are taken up later as discourses and addresses, collected under at least ten different titles. Among well-known ones are Personality (1917), Creative Unity (1922), and Religion of Man (1931). As such, Sadhana is one place to look for an answer to our question on limits of the secular with respect to the spiritual.
Kierkegaard is no less problematic in settling on a voice that represents fully his own viewpoint. Many of his best-known works are by pseudonymous authors and editors, strategically deployed to represent different human types or life-orientations. Their literary productions as editor or publisher include even other pseudonymous voices.579 Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms may seem confusing, but it allows him to depict in detail different life orientations, putting them into conversation with each other as representing live options. Further, the use of pseudonyms is in keeping with Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication by directing attention away from the master author—Kierkegaard—so as to engage the reader to choose for him/herself one of the possible lifestyles depicted.
The two-volume Either/Or (1843), in his literary corpus of about thirty-four titles, is our choice for this study. The text is representative of Kierkegaard’s authorial intent and thematically comparable to Sadhana. It is the earliest and most celebrated of his pseudonymous titles and has ideas that either recur or anticipate others in later texts. Its pseudonymous editor, Victor Eremite, relates that he found accidentally two sets of papers by unknown authors he labeled A and B and has published them respectively as volumes one and two. The A collection reflects the mood of life or outlook of a young person, for whom the highest expression of life is to be found in a heightening of the senses—theater, music, drama, love. The B collection has an underlying principle of duty compared to the depiction of experiencing varieties and moments as in the previous collection. According to the volume editor, the B papers are of a judge named William, responding in earnest to the young person A of volume one. In a friendly letter, the Judge urges him to take responsibility for his life by choosing married life along with all its duties, for it incorporates an aesthetic or pleasurable existence as well. However, as the Judge continues, it becomes clear that either kind of existence (pleasures or duty and pleasure) detracts from realizing oneself as a spiritual individual, and becoming fully a person, even though duty is a move in a forward direction. To underscore the incompleteness of such existential choices (aesthetic and the ethical) the second volume of Either/Or closes with a sermon on how in relation to God, people are always in the wrong.
The second volume of Either/Or, as with Sadhana for Tagore, introduces ideas that are conceptually clarified and even developed by later titles, but from different perspectives. This is so with the closing sermon that indirectly calls into question the Hegelian idea of society as a manifestation of the divine. Kierkegaard did not believe that social institutions such as the church, influenced by Hegelian ideas of civil society and historical progress, could lead troubled people in the right direction to deal with inner difficulties that are suggestive of a relational disharmony or incompleteness as individuals. Only God is in the right and approaching the divine is done through inwardness or faith and not through the social level. For example, the idea of a passionless society as a revolt against the divine is central to the text Two Ages (1846). The idea of exception later developed in the 1843 publications Fear and Trembling and Repetition led the German theorists Carl Schmitt in the twentieth century to formulate what is axiomatic for political theology: political concepts of the modern state are secularized theological ones. The idea of the self is developed by Sickness Unto Death (1849). And the polemical Practice in Christianity (1850), as well as the Attack Upon Christendom (1855), are onslaughts against the deification of the political-social order as contributing to spiritual indifference.
Clearly, Sadhana and Either/Or II, strike similar notes: political programs and social philosophy of the day are having a leveling effect on the passionate side of the individual. The challenge for their respective authors was to reintroduce those dimensions of selfhood that would enable the individual to regain dignity and become an ethico-religiously responsibly self. What then are the limits of the secular with respect to regaining the spiritual? When does the political-social becoming a hindrance to the spiritual?
The major differences and similarities in their answers depend very much on their intellectual assumptions or what they take as bedrock. One the one hand, each is assuming that his own religious tradition is the proper guide or resource for becoming a full human self and that his own Scripture has the capacity to arouse a human response to meet the ethical-religious deficit of the age. On the other hand, Tagore and Kierkegaard are in accord that nationalist fervor and existing ideologies are hastening the decline already under way as a result of negligence by religious institutions. The range of negligence includes ossifications of the scriptural teachings, and practices, be it the caste system of Orthodox Hinduism, with its mechanical performance of social practices and mindless rituals, or accepting that to be born in Denmark is enough to call oneself a Christian. Central to these concerns, therefore, is the understanding of what it means to be a self. We turn now, to sketch for each author the understanding of self in the selected titles.
Self in Sadhana
A view of self is a fruitful starting point for a conversation between our two thinkers relative to political theology. In Tagore’s discourses, other terms used to reference the self include individual, soul, and personality. To understand their uses better, it must be recalled that concepts, like individuals, have histories, and so retain a kind of homesickness for their childhood scenes. The backdrop scene for the use of all four terms is a fusion of at least two perspectives: first, in Victorian life, of which Tagore is a child, religious and moral ideals were real to people. There was no argument as to whether they constitute a part of reality. To exist meant the actualizing of ethico-religious ideals. Second, naturalistic assumptions were integral to the twentieth-century scientific culture: only a scientific account gives the full story of reality, and any reference to transcendent reality associated with religion must be imaginary.
Tagore, accepting the importance of the scientific method to determine facts of the objective world to which the self must relate, was aware that the method has its limitation. It could not account for reality of the whole self or individual. The discourse “The Problem of Self” presents the view of the self as having two polarities or aspects, as requiring freedom and as realizing itself through love. It opens with an Upanishadic-like description of the self as a superstructure subtended by two polarities: one relates to the world of objectivity including sociocultural and political norms, in brief the finite world. Tagore strikingly puts it, “At one pole of my being, I am one with stocks [sic] and stones. There I have to acknowledge the rule of universal law. . . . Its strength lies in its being held firm in the class of a comprehensive world and in the fullness of its community with all things.”580 The self, then, has a social dimension implied by it being finite, grounded in time and thus having a history that would include a social relationship with others and in a community, with the world or universe at large. Though necessary, the relations might easily become dysfunctional or take forms that lack the good. It would explain Tagore’s disavowal of lifeless social practices connected with institutionalized religion, dogmatic interpretations, scriptural literalism or the seeking to extract oneself from the world through ascetic or contemplative practices. The self stands related to itself, according to this pole, through relating socio-ethically to the community and environment. This means having social and political responsibilities as members of a community. Knowledge, rational inquiry, and freedom of mind or creativity are requisite for relation to the finite.
At the other pole forming its superstructure, the self comes to experience itself through the privacy of subjectivity or consciousness. It wants to touch or reach over the limits of its finiteness but finds expression of the inner urge or surplus through exercising the will in action and love. In its subjective isolation, it is standing alone; separate from the community of social relation or the world of facts. Simply put by the discourse, “at the other pole of my being I am separate from all. There I have broken through the cordon of equality and stand alone as an individual. I am absolutely unique. I am incomparable. The whole weight of the universe cannot crush out this individuality of mine.”581 The relationality or movement that occurs is from the pole or sphere of social-ethical toward the realization of what is deep seated within the self as a gift in its creation.
To arrest that experience of oneself is to demolish individuality; it is to separate the self from what gives it joy. The discourse presents it this way: “If this individuality be demolished, then though no material be lost . . . the creative joy which was crystallized therein is gone . . . this individuality, which is the only thing we can call our own, and which, if lost is also a loss to the whole world.”582 Loss of individuality is not through an act, but by failure to act. Failure is a result of ignorance or avidya, a Sanskrit term that Tagore renders as the obstruction of vision, of seeing the truth of the self, realizing it.583 That is, the self in its total reality is more than its quotidian or phenomenal identity. Not to acknowledge by acting to realize, whether it be by ignorance or defiance, means the demise of individuality or personality.
Not a substance, self is life or activity connected with the idea of freedom. It is born out of a freely willing to relate harmoniously two sets of polar relationships: the social-finite, and the spiritual-Infinite. Tagore understands freedom in a positive sense, not as independence to will as one pleases or in defiance but in taking responsibility for the world, the secular as one might say today. This is what the lines of our cited passage above are rendering when it says, that which we call our own (personality or individuality) is, if lost, a loss to the whole world. In speaking about the function of religion he again ties the idea of freedom to becoming a whole or true self: “We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature. . . . It is the function of religion not to destroy our nature but to fulfil it.”584 Any discussion of the self in relation to freedom for Tagore must take into consideration also the notion of harmony understood from an aesthetic perspective. That is, one’s relationship with the world of facts, social and political governance and all sort of civic or social arrangements of the finite world have to be meshed with the spiritual self that is experienced in the privacy of subjectivity. This is precisely what religion helps to accomplish, to take responsibility for political structures and social practices that are unjust or that suppress knowledge, critical inquiry, and freedom of the mind or spirit and set it right, in accord with dharma.
For Tagore, religion is not about the sacred or transcendence, about social practices prescribed by Hindu orthodoxy. The Indian tradition has no word for religion as understood in the West. It speaks of dharma, which Tagore interprets as a reference to “the innermost nature, the essence, the implicit truth of all things.”585 On his rendition of that Sanskrit term, a human has for dharma realization of the true self or freedom and it may require a sacrifice by which one breaks free from the materialism and worldly advantages of our social-cultural existence. The breaking free is a struggle that may involve making personal sacrifices of worldly benefits and advantage, clashing with the establishment, and opposition to unjust political and instructional structures. That struggle, according to Tagore, will result in experiencing self in its fullness of humanity, freeing itself from the narrowness associated with worldly cares that benefit no other. This is how the discourse explains the two aspects of self: “The self which displays itself, and the self which transcends itself and thereby reveals its own meanings. To display itself it tries to be big, to stand upon the pedestal of its accumulation and to retain everything for itself. To reveal itself it gives up everything it has, thus becoming perfect like a flower that has blossomed out from the bud.”586
Struggle is a mark characteristic of the integrating activity to gain oneself and hence is dharma action. Voluntary, the struggle stands in contrast to involuntary struggle: disharmony, pain, and suffering occasioned as part of living in the world or engaging in activity that is non-dharmic or not for the good of humanity. A struggle that is integrating may ensue from taking a reflective stance in relation to social and political structures, and whether one is engaged in doing the right thing, doing dharma work. Explaining dharma work, a subsequent discourse, “Realization of Action,” references self by the term soul and ties it to the idea of freedom. Accordingly, some may think of “activity being in the material plane” as restricting the free spirit of the soul.587 But the discourse continues, “We must remember that as joy expresses itself in law, so the soul finds its freedom in action. . . . Likewise, it is because the soul cannot find freedom within itself that it wants external action. The soul of man is ever freeing itself from its own soul by its activity. . . . The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be.”588 Elsewhere in the discourse, Tagore mentions that the soul “cannot live in its own internal feelings and imaginings. It is ever in need of external objects; not only to feed its inner consciousness but to apply itself in action, not only to receive but also to give.”589
Tagore’s concept of activity is that which is extending the boundaries of the ego. How? Through engagement with others, building human solidarity and community, allowing room for creative growth by expression of the surplus within the self. This is the activity or work of love that he understands as burning up of acquisitive desires for worldly advantages and power and thus working toward unity or freedom of our self.590 We have for this understanding of love the emphasis placed on freedom in action rather than from action. Tagore understands love to be that which an end itself is: “Everything else raises the question ‘Why?’ in our mind, and we require a reason for it. But when we say, ‘I love,’ then there is no room for the ‘why’; it is the final answer in itself.”591 It is love that makes the struggle against unjust political structures or whatever suffocating the spiritual, not burdensome but a freedom. Love is the surplus expressed, the inner energy or impulse as a gift at creation.
We have culled enough from the discourse on the problem of the self to begin thinking thought what Tagore might say about the limits of the secular relative to the spiritual. Foremost, his understanding of religion as dharma does not imply observing a fixed boundary between the secular and the spiritual. Next, self is a rationality concept for it is relating itself simultaneously to finite ends, and Infinite spirit or Universal mind and in accord with dharma principle, for the good of all humanity and not for itself. Limits of the secular, with the perspective of the sociopolitical in mind, are conditions that do not impose or favor religious practices of any kind. The flip side is that conditions have to be arranged to avoid stifling the actualizing of moral values or experiencing spiritual disharmony with doing one’s dharma.
The limits of the secular then are definable in terms of dharma, of holding firmly to the cosmic principle of realizing truth (satya) and avoidance of harm (ahimsa). A multifaceted concept, dharma may also be unpacked in terms of the upholding of goodness, justice, and truth, at the minimum. Praxis is essential to what dharma action is. As such, limits have to be accommodative of knowledge acquisition, truth seeking and doing, critical inquiry engagement, freewill exercise, and creative impulses. For, how else is one to recognize and have the ego strength to resist unjust political structures or morally stifling social and cultural practices? Limits have to remain porous, but over time may become nonporous or hardened to shut out of daily living the creative urges and surplus defining the self as life.
In Tagore’s lifetime, two examples illustrate the limits of the secular becoming nonporous and thus contributing to the spiritual malaise of his time. One is British education in colonial India that in Tagore’s view has become narrow, utilitarian, and restrictive with respect to educating the entire self.592 The other example is nationalism, which he considers an evil, in his drawing of a distinction between society and state or government. Committed to praxis, Tagore as a social and political reformer directed his talents to regenerate his society, to make it truly democratic with porous limits. A question to consider in light of limits becoming nonporous is whether the rule of law that is essential to the modern nation state is ever able to accommodate fully the rule of the people as dharma. When law is made universal it can produce tribalism, social indifference, and spiritual emptiness. Tagore’s refashioning of the human with respect to dharma to which is coupled the question about the rule of law is reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s remark that significant concepts about the modern state are secularized theological concepts. It leaves one pondering whether the concept of sovereignty of law is dharma secularized, in relation to the examples.
Self in Either/Or II
As with Tagore, Judge William too takes moral ideals to be real, givens that are simply accepted as defining a form of life. His letter to the young friend A recommends to settle down and take charge of his own life. He declares that what he is urging is not from academic wisdom, but is learned growing up and applicable to anyone.593 In urging A to make a purposive choice understood as a life commitment the Judge is advancing a position similar to the one that Tagore takes about the self and renders it in terms of activity, freedom, harmony, unity, and joy. In a way, the self for both thinkers is a finite center of experiences, is concretized to make psychically coherent two relational aspects of itself. One is with respect to the external world: the environment including the social-political order. The other is internal to the self, abstract, and experienced only in the isolation of the I, or subjectivity. These twos are integrated by the individual choosing to actualize moral ideals. Hence, the self is the center of experiences. By committing itself, the self acquires consistency and psychic coherency in its doing, hoping, believing, thinking, with respect to setting and realizing life-projects. It has dispositions and capacities that have to be integrated with its wants and desires as a finite and living reality.
The young friend is in despair. Writing to him, the Judge renders the idea of self from the perspective of despair but does so introducing other terms such as freedom and personality to demonstrate the how of choosing self. He is clear that in the first place the self is a relationality established through choice (an activity) in the privacy of oneself. How one chooses it is important, for the choice has to be absolute, unconditional, and eternally valid. We are to understand “valid” to mean having applicability or holding true both in the here-now and hereafter, the latter intending to represent beyond the finite and temporal dimensions. Furthermore, that which is to be chosen has to be universally human, accessible to anyone regardless of one’s station or condition of life (style). What else can that be other than my reality or self which is such that I cannot rid myself of it?
The Judge puts it to the friend in this way: “But what is it then that I choose—is it this or that? No, I choose absolutely, precisely by having chosen not to choose this or that. I choose the absolute . . . myself in eternal validity. . . . If I choose something else, I choose it as something finite, and consequently.”594 Continuing, he tells that the choice consists of two moments of expression: a first whereby that which is chosen is quite abstract, and a second whereby that which is chosen is “also the most concrete of all—it is freedom.”595 Furthermore, everyone has within themselves that which cannot be erased even by wishing in the harshest situation in life to be somebody else or another. This observation of people in suffering who wish to be other than themselves to escape the situation but not really willing to let go is, according to the Judge, an indication of coming close to the truth, of feeling “the eternal validity of the personality.”596 The Judge draws from his observation, a conclusion that there is “something within him that in relation to everything else is absolute, something whereby he is who he is even if the change he achieved by his wish were the greatest possible.”597
As such, to choose oneself as the Judge suggests means that the self must dialectically relate two sets of sustainable relationships. One set is finite, is in relation to the social and political world and nature. Every inhabitant in the world does that out of necessity, validating him/herself by acquiring a social identity or social self, acquired simply by being born and socialized. This dimension of self is for Tagore the acquisitive self. The other set follows from what the Judge recommends: to position oneself by a choice that is absolute or by a second dialectical movement whereby the self “is infinitely concrete, for it is he himself, and yet it is absolutely different from his former self, for he has chosen it absolutely. The self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the choice, and yet it has existed for it was indeed ‘himself.’”598
The Judge offers a detailed descriptive analysis of what Tagore presupposes in his lectures for a university-level audience. For he notes also that by choosing oneself absolutely, good and evil as categories are posited and come to acquire significance for personal existence: they have an absolute difference between them such that there is no mistake which must recede and which to advance.599 How does one know with such clarity? According to the Judge, a person in choosing himself freely and absolutely, makes himself absolute; by that choice he declared the validity of the category good for his life, and the good becomes his for it is he himself who willed it: “The good is the being-in-and-for-itself, posited by the being-in-and-for-itself, and this is freedom.”600
In his meticulous deliberation on choosing absolutely, the Judge is advocating for an ethico-religious form of existence, in contrast to one that is utilitarian or defined by performing dutifully what is expected. The self is ethico-religiously determined, coming to rest in God in the second movement or moment. To choose absolutely takes courage. For that which is chosen in the first instant has an identity or history. It is comprised of a boundless multiplicity of relationships or a relationship to the whole human race through other individuals. Painful moments and events, some deeply buried, are part of the history that has to be acknowledged in choosing oneself finitely, “for he is the person he is only through this history.”601 At the same time, in making the acknowledgment he is fast sinking into isolation, into the “very root by which he is bound up with the whole.”602 However, the uneasy, sinking feeling arouses the passion of freedom, already presupposed in the choice in the first moment and correlates with choosing absolutely himself (the second moment). It struggles in holding to the history despite the most painful memory that surfaces. Why? The history is himself as well, his acquisitive self, and cannot be given up. It is for his sanity or salvation. Repentance is the expression, according to the Judge, for the holding to the history: it is in effect a movement of going “back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God. . . . And this is the only condition he wants, for only in this way can he choose himself absolutely.”603
To underscore my point, struggle correlated with absolute choice does not cancel out responsibility for properly positioning oneself to the surrounding world. This includes obtaining the necessities of life and for that matter relating sociopolitically in the society or community. Though the reward is very small, for it may be barely what is needed to keep going in life, still responsibility for the world and its norms is educative. As the Judge tells it, “Cares about the necessities of life are so ennobling and educative because they do not allow a person to delude himself about himself . . . the struggle is ennobling because it constrains him to see something else in it . . . a struggle to gain himself.”604 And in this context, the Judge follows up by distinguishing an ethical from an aesthetic view of life. The ethical has the advantage in that everyone has a duty to work for a living; further “it is in harmony with actuality, explains something universal in it . . . and conceives of the human being according to his perfection, views him according to his true beauty.”605
Having introduced the idea of the self as a finite center of experiences, I am now able to articulate Judge William’s views on the limits of the secular with respect to the spiritual. To be sure, the idea of limits is presupposed by his theological anthropology—by his views on what it means to be human. At minimal, limits would refer to whatever situations or conditions, finite relationships, keep one making the second dialectical movement, choosing absolutely. Limits would include obstacles to repenting, to finding oneself in God, or conditions that are snuffing out the passion of freedom, posing a threat to actualizing the universal human in everyone. This would include political structures, ideologies, forms of government, social norms and whatever threatens to deprive the individual or society of the possibility to be in harmony with actualizing moral and spiritual ideals. The choice to make ethico-religious ideals real for one’s life is in effect a further step in the direction of becoming fully human, placing oneself before the eternal. The limits are the conditions imposed by human constructs and institutions in social life that rob the individual of the passion for life, that hinder the integration of the two dimensions of relationships, that is capacities including spiritual ones by which we become a coherent personality. The Judge’s language for limiting conditions is despair, of which there are multiple forms. As a condition, despair is the shutting out of the spiritual dimension within the self, a failure to choose absolutely a self that is eternally valid. Despair may occur also as a result of either innocently not willing to shut out (aesthetic), or being aware but delaying to will.
Similarities and Differences in the Two Positions on Limits
I am arguing that the positions of the Judge and Tagore on the limits of the secular with respect to the sacred have an affinity to one another. The limits are best understood from the point of view of their religious-philosophical anthropologies. Accordingly, their views of being human are fashioned out of a shared strand or idea that everything finite is related to ultimate reality. In Christian theology, that idea follows from the doctrine of creation. In Indian thought, it comes out of the Upanishadic cognitive account of the nature of ultimate reality, of what lies behind the phenomenal word of experiences, of the unity underling the many and referenced by terms such as Brahman, and Universal Soul. The Judge and Tagore each draws on concepts characteristic of their own faith tradition to fashion their views of what it means to live fully as a human being.606 They employ the concepts without bothering about doctrinal loyalty, and as such impart to them fluidity in meaning: repentance in Christianity, dharma and Brahman or the ultimate in Indian thought. Further, each author correlates experiencing selfhood with struggle and moral ideals that include the following: freedom, unity, harmony, individuality, personality, and joy. When the correlation is interrupted or is not actualized, then the secular has transgressed its limit with respect to the spiritual. In short, the Judge and Tagore see the struggle as that of the personal or ethico-religious self, born of solitude or inwardness and of historicity or contingent life circumstances. That is, he or she is in the first place a social-cultural self that is to be transformed ethico-religiously through deepening of inwardness.
The Judge and Tagore understand the spiritual element within the self to be largely the surplus of emotional energy seeking expression. Both are of the view that humans experience a sense of lack even after their needs are met, and have inwardly a reservoir of emotional energy, a surplus, wanting to express itself to burst through the finite to relate or touch the other side of the finite, the non-finite or infinite and eternal. This is in fact the spiritual dimension seeking freedom and to which the finite dimension or social self must be integrated. God functions linguistically to certify our obligation to attend to the fulfillment of that need through our creative urges for Tagore, and through choosing absolutely for the Judge. From this perspective, the limits of the secular for the Judge and Tagore correlate with situations that tend to dampen the expression of the surplus. This understanding of the surplus or reserve of emotional energy requires neither one to commit to any metaphysical doctrine about reality or creator God. Nor does it require holding that the political and theological are two realities or divisions of the self that are separate. In fact, they both seem to share at the minimal a position that the spiritual is enveloping and that the I or finite self is to become integrated with it.
Different, however, are the backgrounds against which the implied limits of the secular are conceived. They may throw further light on the conditions that tend to threaten our humanness and humanity. Tagore’s account is given against a background that differentiates between society and national politics. The nation-state with its politics requires allegiance to principles, ideologies, and conditions that nourish or deify the nation, and that expect citizens to make a sacrifice to the state/political apparatus. The differentiation is evident in Tagore’s resistance to nationalism and British rule in India that he saw as reducing humans to utility, machinery in service of the interests of the empire, and thereby stifling the creative urge. He wanted to break out of the limits or confines of the secular by educating the whole person. Hence, he undertook educational and social reforms, and through invited lectures and discussion abroad advocated for an East-West civilizational alliance. He was aware that social practices and political structures have dehumanizing tendencies that he estimated are best countered by reintroducing moral values, and emphasizing rational thinking and human agency. In short, nationalism or political ideology (with its economic interests, territorial sovereignty, and political or military might) could not be an organizing principle that allows for the human spirit to realize those values. It has definite limitations.
When Kierkegaard was composing Either/Or (Oct 1841–Nov 1842) the differentiation had not occurred in Denmark. Nationalism was in the air but was not an actuality.607 Hegel, the bright light of German idealism reaching to Denmark, wanted to make citizenship correlating with a rational state into a personal identity or self. But to Kierkegaard, such correlation blurred the boundary lines between an ethical view and what nationalism called for. In a way, the Judge is making a testimony or deposition that counts against mistaking the limits of the secular (nationalism or state-sanctioned institutions and practices) as the spiritual. Note, however, the Judge’s account is incomplete without the sermon by the country priest closing Either/Or II. The Judge tells his young friend that the sermon best expresses what he would like to communicate: “the upbuilding that lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong.” Implicit in what is told is a testimony: the human self does not have the capacity to recognize truth, beauty, and justice. It must reply on God’s help to know them and even to discern the limits. This would mean the limits have no fixity, but have to be discerned in fear and trembling.
We may ponder what weight to give to the Judge’s deposition that takes the form of letter writing in deriving Kierkegaard’s stance on the limits of the secular with respect to the spiritual. But as resource for thinking in terms of political theology, Kierkegaard seems to be more in accord with a radical political theology—a refusal to align the becoming fully a self with any political agenda or stripe. Is Tagore doing that? He offers the option, as a resource for political theology, of a playful dancing or engagement of the spiritual with contemporary culture and politics. In short, Tagore is opting for a twisting free of the self from any religious or political orthodoxy.
Further Conversations
How is the conversation to continue when each of our thinkers has plural voices? A suggestion would be to bring all the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard to sit at the same table with the multitalented, polyphonic Tagore for a conversation. Either the two key authors or a pseudonym might ask also how relevant the concept of political theology is for doing what each sets out to do as an author. Listening to the conversation we may come to grasp their significance as resources for dealing with issues characterizing political theology today. That is, it may assist in an astute critical inquiry on how modern liberal democratic structures co-opting religion and religious ideas compromise the limits or how institutionalized religion may unwittingly end up in a dangerous alliance with political structures operating under principles of liberalism, or neo-conservatism in a global world or collective identification instead of being a liberative force for the human spirit. Further still, their discussion may help in drawing a distinction between the personal self and a self that is either social or national and associated with a constitutional patriotism.
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568. Denoting a group of nineteenth-century intellectuals in the state of Bengal, the movement is analogous to the Enlightenment in European history, tackling the proliferation of Western ideas under British rule and the impact it was making on the mind-set of Indians with a culture, history, philosophical outlook, and reform strategies of their own for modernizing India. Rationalism tempering free thinking, critical inquiry, atheism, and scientific advancements are some of the hallmarks of that phase.
569. Tagore, Gitanjali, xxv.
570. Thirteen principal ones, from among two hundred, are considered to be composed around 500–200 BCE. The texts contain insights of the rishis or seers, followed by explanations in the form of a dialogue between guru and student, or of an interactive public argument. Later, a scholar who did his pre-university education at Tagore’s school in Shantineketan would note that India has its own tradition of dialogic discussion and argumentation that are that are integral to secularism, public discussion, and democracy. See Sen, Argumentative Indian, xi, 12–23, 304–32.
571. Gandhi and Nerhu are among shapers of modern Indian for whom Tagore is political significant. The 42nd amendment to India’s constitution in 1976 committed India’s future to a secularism understood as being impartial to all religions, a non-alignment with any established religion. That, along with its tradition of freedom and self-determination rooted in Upanishadic thought, instead of the Magna Carta, or the tradition shaped by thinkers such as Hobbes Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocquville, for example, distinguish its democratic heritage.
572. For more details on church and state, see Kirmmse, Kierkegaard, 73–76.
573. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 41–54.
574. Known as Adi Dharma or Brahmo, it was founded in 1848 by Rabindranath’s father. It considers Hinduism to be corrupt beliefs, and differs by affirming one Supreme Spirit, no salvation (soul is immortal), no revelation or Scripture and no priest or sermon, but affirms dharma as principle (good works of righteousness or through love for Supreme).
575. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology.
576. See Kirwan, Political Theology, and Phillips, Political Theology.
577. Singh, “Desire for Motion,” para. 4. Tagore’s corpus in Bengali takes up 18,000 pages comprised of 28 volumes of texts which include plays, letters, short stories, etc.
578. The set is identified as Riddle Plays in Rabindra Rachmanabali, 6:127–29, according to Gupta, Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, 7–8. Gupta, calling attention to the particular play Subtle Analysis, is one of the handful of scholars taking note of the idea of obsession with analysis, and for that matter the playful, humorous aspect in Tagore’s writings. For an instant of the playful humor, see also the opening pages of Tagore, King of the Dark Chamber, 2. The guard at the city gate is asked by visitors attending the city festival which path to take. The answer that any path will get you there elicits a derisive remark about the guard.
579. A recent study adds to the perplexity of which voice by referring to a hidden authorship referencing a reduplication of inwardness. Cf. Sawyer, Hidden Authorship, 134–35.
580. Tagore, Sadhana, 69.
581. Ibid.
582. Ibid., 70.
583. Ibid., 72.
584. Ibid., 74.
585. Ibid.
586. Ibid., 76.
587. Ibid., 120.
588. Ibid.
589. Ibid., 125.
590. Ibid., 78. He is echoing Bhagavad Gita 12:10, a core text in the Hindu tradition for the idea of the work of love.
591. Ibid., 77.
592. Ibid.
593. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2:217.
594. Ibid.
595. Ibid., 214.
596. Ibid.
597. Ibid.
598. Ibid., 215.
599. Ibid., 69, 223–27.
600. Ibid., 224.
601. Ibid., 216.
602. Ibid.
603. Ibid.
604. Ibid., 285.
605. Ibid., 288.
606. Gupta makes the point about Tagore not having any dogmatic loyalty to Upanishadic doctrine of ultimate reality. In fact, she points out that what is for the Upanishadic seers a matter of inference from a metaphysical view is for Tagore manifested emotionally and imaginatively as direct personal experience? See Gupta, Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore, 10, 11, 52–55, 78, and 79, that discusses also some themes pertinent to this study such as nationalism, distinguishing it form patriotism, and the notion of self.
607. Habermas, New Conservatism, 260, holds that nationalism, though a first step toward reflexive appropriation of cultural traditions, does not serve as complement to Kierkegaard’s ethical view.