'A Playlist for the Existentialist': Tagore Re-visited (Again!)

 To begin this article with a definition of something as broad as existentialism in simple, absolute terms would be a bit of a stretch. It is difficult to locate any particular doctrine to which existentialists uniformly subscribe to- an assumption that brings us to John Macquarie's explanation of existentialism as a style of philosophizing, rather than a philosophy. This argument is especially pertinent to any attempt to navigate existentialism in the works of an author who certainly preceded the European emergence of this philosophical trend. The first step in this attempt is then to locate Rabindranath Tagore within a national, political, and personal juncture that invariably raised an existential question: an urge for national self-determination, the poet's aversion to the burgeoning brand of aggressive nationalism, and his inclination to realize man as the center of things. 

But even as the existentialist critique religiously navigates through the works of Tagore, they are faced with a mild dilemma regarding characterization. It is true enough, that Tagore believed in an idea of sympathetic cooperation- the realization of the self as a part of a symphonic, harmonious whole- through active engagement with the tangible, material world. And it is this idea of acceptance that allows us to locate the uniqueness in Tagore's creative, subjective modernity. The Tagorean idea of harmony is then infinitely important in tracing the question of existential becoming that occupied the poet's philosophical worldview. Chakravarti writes that "in the process of evolution, human beings acquired their sense of value which they have an existential choice to make their own". This argument is, in fact, in tune with Leonara Cohen's explanation of the existential view as the individual's accountability to define the purpose of existence. It is here that the dilemma arises. Tagore is an "existentialist" so long as we try and identify his preoccupation with 'man' with the existential trait of locating man as the initiator of action. But, a complete disregard for the critical suppositions of whom Bryan Appleyard called the 'lone voice of sanity' seems inadvisable in this discussion. 

How does one distinguish Absurdism from Existentialism? A Reddit comment reads, "Absurdism is just existentialism when Camus does it. Haha."

While a range of opinion pieces have tried to explain existentialism as a response, or alternative to the "problem" of existentialism, I would urge to reader to think the other way around- of absurdism as an answer to the existentialist pursuit of meaning. The penultimate climax and the culmination of nothingness. It is important to repeat that a doctrinal categorization of Tagorean philosophy is improbable, and futile. And precisely because the boundaries between absurdism and existentialism are indeed vague, it is difficult to demarcate Tagore's affinities to either. Rather, tracing a chronological progression seems more conceivable in this context. 

Existentialism a la Sartre or Frankl claims that freedom is manifested in human actions and free will- and it is this freedom that provides some tangible meaning to human life. While Tagore's immediate political context would warrant a similar conception of 'meaning' as interrelated with freedom, his personal/creative intuition also allowed him to explore the less optimistic alternative. If absurdism propounds that the pursuit of meaning in life is ultimately futile and any efforts to justify a coherent idea of objective meaning are circular, Tagore echoes this sentiment when he writes,

"কিছুই তো হল না,

 সেই সব— সেই সব— সেই হাহাকাররব,

                সেই অশ্রুবারিধারা, হৃদয়বেদনা ।।

                কিছুতে মনের মাঝে শান্তি নাহি পাই,

                কিছুই না পাইলাম যাহা কিছু চাই ।

              ভালো তো গো বাসিলাম, ভালোবাসা পাইলাম,

          এখনো তো ভালোবাসি— তবুও কী নাই ।।"

However, we must return once again to the idea that Tagore is never entirely estranged from the political reality of his time and that Tagorean ethics must essentially be read as the juncture where the political and the existential meet. Consequently, we might refer to Spivak's argument that the impossibility of balancing the two is held in tension with the need to make choices based on what is possible in a given instance. And it is to this idea of choice that we are recurrently driven to- that seems to connect Tagore's eclectic ideological and philosophical macrocosm. We might readily call Tagore an absurdist if we believe that this paradoxical situation, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of locating any adequate answer, is, by Camusian standards, the absurd. 

I must acknowledge my inability to arrive at a conclusion. In fact, this article has only implored me to ask questions at every step, and I have risked being self-contradictory. Yet, this only seeks to justify the need to explore and identify an Indian strain of existentialist philosophy- by locating its emergence in those moments of national turbulence where the political and the existential, and subsequently the existential and the absurd became (as I would like to believe, chronologically) supplementary.