PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume IV, Number 01 (2021): 85-100

Wittgenstein, Tagore, and Lalon‘ETHICS AND AESTHETICS ARE ONE’ (T6.421):
EARLY WITTGENSTEIN AND RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Priyambada Sarkar

Abstract
In this paper, I would like to offer a non-resolute interpretation of the remark“Ethics and Aesthetics are the same’ (T6.421) through the lens of the ideas ofWittgenstein’s favorite poet Rabindranath Tagore. The paper will be divided into
three main sections. In the first section, I will analyze Tractatus’ paragraph 6.421
from the perspective of early Wittgenstein, in the second section, I will focus on
Tagore’s aesthetics, and in the final section, I will aim to show that Wittgenstein’sview of ‘Ethics and Aesthetics being one and the same thing’ has its counterpart
in the philosophy of Tagore.

The fragmentary, dense, and cryptic paragraphs of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus have posed serious problems to the interpreter right from its publication.
The discussion of ethics and aesthetics ‘being one and the same’ is confined to a mere bracketed
portion of one paragraph.1 Regarding this, Paul Engelmann, Wittgenstein’s closest confidante,commented rightly: “I guess that the statement of the Tractatus ‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’is one of the most frequently misunderstood propositions of the book.”2
In this paper, I would like to offer a non-resolute interpretation3 of this remark throughthe lens of the ideas of Wittgenstein’s favorite poet Rabindranath Tagore. At this point it is1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974 (1921)). Hereafter it will be referred as Tractatus and the reference to paragraphnumber will be preceded by T (T6.421).
2Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, translated by L. Furtüller (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1967), p. 143.
3
According to resolute interpreters, Wittgenstein did not want to convey ineffable metaphysical truths via thenonsensical utterances of the Tractatus. My interpretation of the Tractatus in this endeavor is not resolute as I feel
resolute interpreters have not given due importance to what the author himself had suggested in his letters to
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Von Ficker. Wittgenstein candidly expressed himself by saying that the main thrustof the book is to distinguish between what can be said and what cannot. (Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The
Duty of Genius [New York: The Free Press, 1990], p. 164). Again, at the same time, he passionately believed that

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

85

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

worth mentioning that there was a “Tagore mania” 4 in Germany during the 1920’s, and thatreportedly during the meetings of the Vienna Circle Wittgenstein preferred reading Tagore’s
poems to discussing Tractatus with the logical positivists. Along with his student Smythies,
Wittgenstein even translated a portion of Tagore’s favorite mystical play The King of the Dark
Chamber. Rudolf Haller offers a list of poets and writers from Germany and elsewhere “whomay have contributed to his understanding,” which include Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Matthius
Claudius, Edward Moricke, as well as “Russian writers (especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy)
and the famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.”5
The paper attempting to interpret the remark from the perspective of the ideas of Tagore
will be divided into three main sections. In the first section, I will analyze Tractatus’ paragraph6.421from the perspective of early Wittgenstein; in the second section, I will focus on Tagore’s
aesthetics; and in the final section, I will aim to show that Wittgenstein’s statement of ‘Ethics
and Aesthetics being one’ has its counterpart in the philosophy of Tagore as well.

I
Aesthetics in the Tractatus:
Seemingly, ethics and aesthetics are two mutually exclusive discourses on the normative plane.
Usually ethics deals with actions being evaluated as good or bad, whereas aesthetics deals with
contemplation of an object as being beautiful or pleasant. Aesthetic awareness is rarely forced
upon us, whereas we cannot avoid ethical considerations even if we want to. So why did
Wittgenstein think that they are the same?
There is one reference where Wittgenstein provides us with a clue of how to interpret
this sameness. In “A Lecture on Ethics” delivered in 1929, he says:
Now I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes
what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics.6

Here he is explicit that the two subjects are not identical, as the definition of ethics will include
only a part of aesthetics – that might be ‘the most essential part’, but still it is not the whole ofit. Hence, he is not obliterating the basic distinction between the two subjects but pointing tosome fundamental points of their affinities and interdependencies. But again why would
Wittgenstein affirm that they are one? What are the connections between them? From his
various remarks one can infer that the connections lie: i) in their being values, hence being
inexpressible, ii) in their being related to viewing ‘sub specie aeterni’; iii) in their being the“what we cannot talk about is most important.” (Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a
Memoir, p. 97).
4
Martin Kampchen, Rabindranāth Tagore and Germany (Calcutta: Max Mueller Bhavan,1991), p. 12.
5
Rudolf Haller, “Wittgenstein: Poetry and Literature,” in Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster (Eds.),
Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations between Philosophy and Literature (Edmonton, Alberta: Wirth Institutefor Austrian and Central European Studies, 2003), pp. 41-42 (italics mine).
6
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 74 (1), 1965, p. 4.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

86

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore‘right view of the world’; iv) in their being linked to happiness and finally; v) in their being ‘themiracle’, ‘the wonder that the world exists’.
i) Ethics and Aesthetics being values, hence being inexpressible
First of all, ethics and aesthetics are the same in the sense that both these discourses are
inexpressible in sensible language as far as the criteria of expressibility in the Tractatus isconcerned. According to the theory of language and meaning of the Tractatus, a proposition issensible and expressible in words if and only if it pictures a particular state of affair of theworld. As abstract and normative disciplines, the content of these two discourses go beyond thescope of pictorial representations. They lie outside the boundaries of scientific language; hence
they are inexpressible in sensible language and they should be passed over in silence.
ii) Ethics and Aesthetics being related to viewing ‘sub specie aeterni’There is another thing that is common to ethics and aesthetics. Wittgenstein says, “The work of
art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis and the good life is the world seen sub specie
aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” 7 Viewing sub specie aeterni thus
provides the link between these two disciplines. Now what is this ‘Viewing sub specie
aeterni?’. In Culture and Value, we find Wittgenstein elucidating:... it seems to me that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni…. it is as though[thought] flies above the world and leaves it as it is – observing it from above, in flight. 8

Explaining ‘viewing sub specie aeterni’ in terms of ‘viewing from above in flight’ might remind
us that Wittgenstein was an aeronautical engineer at the beginning of his career. It provides us
also with an insight that such viewing leaves everything in the world ‘as it is’. It cannot bringabout any change in the facts or events of the world. And when you see from above, everything
seems to be on the same level. Looking at the world from the flight, from above, also suggests
a sense of detachment. Such viewing with detachment comes as a necessary step for
Wittgenstein to lead an ethical life, a happy life. 9 I’ll come back to this point later.
Wittgenstein elucidates that when one views an object from eternity, that object becomes
the whole world. Wittgenstein clarifies, “The thing seen sub- specie aeternitatis is the thing
seen together with the whole logical space.” 10 Logical space, for early Wittgenstein refers to
the world of possibilities; hence, when he asserts that the object is seen not in the logical space
but with the whole logical space, he means that one sees the object not as a possibility in theworld. As “The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object,” 11 thisobject viewed from eternity becomes different from the objects and facts, the totality of which

7

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, edited by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe, translated by
G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 83.
8Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, edited by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter
Winch (The University of Chicago Press, 1984; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 5.
9Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 81.
10
Ibid., p. 83.
11
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.041.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

87

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

constitutes the world. Now what exactly did he mean by ‘together with the whole logicalspace’? He explains it with the example of a stove:
As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant: as a world, each one equally significant.
If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, myresult does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one
among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove, it was my world, andeverything else colorless by contrast with it.12

Here he is explicit that the particular object, (here the stove) if conceived as an object
among other objects (that is, that a stove is different from a hot plate, used as an instrument forcooking etc.) is insignificant as it is only a fact among other facts. It is a trivial fact, which is
not valuable. It becomes valuable when it is viewed from a different perspective, from theperspective of eternity. Not only that, it also gives rise to “the mystical feeling of the world asa limited whole.”13 Now, what exactly is this viewing from eternity? This viewing from eternity
is not viewing from inside; rather, it is viewing from outside: “The usual way of looking atthings sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis fromoutside.”14 Viewing from eternity is thus,
a transformation in the way of seeing, therefore there corresponds a transformation of the object
seen, a transformation described in terms of addition of sense. This addition seems to come aboutbecause the observer, so to speak, absorbs himself in the object, in such a way that the object, though
it be ordinary and habitual, ceases to be an insignificant thing among things and becomes his world. 15

Moreover, logical space in Tractatus indicates the domain of possibilities, those which
are actual, constitute the world. The world is also equivalent to reality, which consists of both
positive and negative states of affairs, that is, it comprises the whole logical space. Hence, if
the object viewed sub specie aeterni is viewed together with the whole logical space then theimplication is that it constitutes the whole world.
Interestingly, for Wittgenstein, viewing in this manner also leads one to view the world
ethically. Wittgenstein explicitly connects ethics with the meaning of life when he attempts todefine ethics by a number of synonymous expressions. In A lecture on Ethics he writes, “Ethics
is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living.” 16 Furthermore, forhim, the good life is happy life and harmony is the criterion of happy life, which is also the only
right life. 17 The question that pops up here is How can we secure such good/happy life?
Wittgenstein gives a clue : “How can man be happy at all, since he cannot ward off the misery12

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 83.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.45.
14
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 83.
15
Gabriele Tomasi,. “Wittgenstein, the Artistic Way of Seeing, and the Sense of the World,” Kulturen: StreitAnalyse-Dialog - Cultures: Conflict-Analysis-Dialogue, edited by Georg Gasser, Christian Kanzian, Edmund
Runggaldier (Kirchberg am Wechsel: ALWS, 2006), p. 353;
http://wittgensteinrepository.org/ojs/index.php/agora-alws/issue/view/18
16
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A lecture on Ethics,” p. 4.
17
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 78.
13

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

88

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagoreof this world? Through the life of knowledge….The life of knowledge is the life that is happyin spite of the misery of the world. The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce theamenities of the world.”18 It is through the attitude of detachment/renunciation, that one canchange one’s unhappy world to a happy one. How does one acquire this quality? For
Wittgenstein, one can practice the act of renunciation only when one adopts a particularperspective. And this perspective consists in viewing the world sub specie aeterni, that is,viewing the world as a limited whole from eternity. We have noted earlier that viewing fromabove or eternity suggests a sense of detachment. It is through this sense that viewing ‘subspecie aeterni’ connects ethics and aesthetics together.
Moreover, Wittgenstein points out that viewing sub-specie-aeterni is actuallycontemplating:
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The
feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.19

It is only through contemplation that the object (in the example, the stove) becomes ‘the wholeworld for me’. This happens in the case of aesthetics (‘the work of art is the object seen sub
specie aeternitatis’) and also in ethics (in good life, the world is viewed aesthetically – ‘Good
life is the world seen sub specie aeterni’). 20 Thus the distinction between art and good life,
between aesthetics and ethics merges here. Both become one. This is common in “traditional
accounts of aesthetic contemplation where it is typically one in which the whole ofconsciousness is inhabited by the object contemplated.”21
Wittgenstein elucidates this point (‘the work of art is the object seen sub specie
aeternitatis’) clearly in Culture and Value by referring to the distinction between someone
performing some unremarkable activity in ordinary life, and seeing these same mundane things
done on stage in theatre. In this example, Wittgenstein is not imagining a sequence of a play
but merely the framing of such activity by the conventions of theatre. He says, “we should beobserving something more wonderful than anything a playwright could arrange to be acted or
spoken on the stage: life itself. But we do see this every day without its making the slightest
impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view.” 22 (“A work ofart,” he goes on to say, “forces us to see in the right perspective but in the absence of art, theobject is just a fragment of nature like any other.” 23iii) Ethics and Aesthetics as providing ‘the right view of the world’
18

Ibid., p. 81.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by C. K. Ogden (London and New York:
Routledge, 2014), 6.45.
20
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 83.
21
Nieli Russell, Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language – A study of Viennese Positivism and theThought of Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: State University of New York Press. 1987), p.71.
22
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 4.
23
Ibid., p. 4 (italics mine).
19

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

89

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

Now, what is this ‘right perspective’ or ‘right viewing’? Wittgenstein is not very explicit. He
queries in an entry in Notebooks1914-16: “Is the essence of the artistic way of looking at things
that it looks at the world with a happy eye?”24 What does the phrase ‘happy eye’ connote here?
Does only artistic way of looking at things can bring about relevant changes in one’s attitude
to the world? We find a clue again in the Notebooks where he says: “The world is given me, i.e.
my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there.” 25
So it is my will which penetrating into the world makes it my world, be it good or evil by an
exercise of a good or evil willing. Viewing the world sub specie aeterni is thus connected withthe exercise of good will. Wittgenstein makes connection between this viewing and good life
explicit when he says: “Good life is the world viewed sub specie aeterni.” 26Thus, one’s viewing the world from eternity and one’s exercise of will provides one withhappy eyes and makes ‘the world’ his happy world. Aesthetic perception thus is a shift awayfrom the everyday relationship with what is perceived, so that the object is seen and known ina way which is at once more vivid and more detached than in the everyday relationship. We areto think of the ethical as also sharing this attitude.27 This, for early Wittgenstein, was ‘the rightperspective’; he describes the ideal toward which he aims to lead his readers at the end of theTractatus:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as
senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees
the world rightly.28

For early Wittgenstein, only the artist can present an individual object in such a way that it
appears to us as a work of art. We already quoted him saying that “A work of art forces us tosee in the right perspective but in the absence of art, the object is just a fragment of nature likeany other.” 29 Wittgenstein claims that a work of art compels us to see things in the rightperspective. Art can turn an object that is a mere ‘piece of nature’ into an object that is worth
contemplating. It seems that by using the word ‘rightly’ as an adverb to ‘seeing the world’,Wittgenstein did not mean logical or propositional rightness or correctness. Rather, he probably
intended to talk about ethical/aesthetical perspective of seeing the world as a limited whole.
Here the word ‘rightly’ is used in an aesthetic sense, as when someone says that a musical noteis on its right place when it is in harmony with previous notes. It is in this sense that seeing theworld rightly as a harmonious whole is also ‘seeing it with a happy eye’.

iv) Ethics and Aesthetics as being linked to happiness24

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 86.
Ibid., p. 74.
26
Ibid., p. 83.
27
Diane Collinson, “Ethics and Aesthetics are One,” British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 25(3) (1985), pp. 266–72.
28
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.54.
29
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 4 (italics mine).
25

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

90

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

An important question troubles us at this point: Why art should always be confined to ‘happyeye’? What about the artistic expression of the ugly, the terrible, and ‘the tragic’? Wittgensteinsomehow seems to anticipate this question and in the entries of the Notebooks 1914-16 he says:
For there is certainly something in the conception that the end of art is the beautiful. And thebeautiful is what makes us happy.30

Here Wittgenstein is connecting the idea of art with that of beauty. The question that arises hereis How is art connected with the beautiful? The beautiful in art cannot be in what is depicted orpresented, for ugly and painful things are often the subject matter of art: it seems that
Wittgenstein here is using the word ‘beautiful’ in the sense that it incorporates both good andevil, beautiful and ugly. This becomes obvious when we see that according to Wittgenstein, “Ifseen with detachment… an ordinary scene looks at the same time unheimlich and wunderbar,”(that is, uncanny and wonderful).31
It is quite possible that Wittgenstein’s thought here seems to have a continuity with theidea of beauty as something beyond mere material possession and as something that transcends
loss or worldly interests. Wittgenstein’s notion of beauty seems to come from the notion ofharmony. Work of art constructs a perspective from which many different and even conflicting
elements can be brought into some unified and harmonious whole. 32 This harmonious view ofthe world and life comes from viewing the world as a limited whole, as understood in theTractatus. It contributes to a good ethical life, thus to the merging of ethical and aesthetical
viewpoints once again.
But for early Wittgenstein, this cannot be expressed in sensible terms to anyone. As heputs it to Waismann:
If I needed a theory in order to explain to another the essence of the ethical (and also of aesthetical),the ethical would have no value at all.33

This means that any attempt to theorize ethics or aesthetics, for Wittgenstein, will be ‘to run up
against the boundaries of language’. And yet, one can live an ethical life simply by having an
ethical/aesthetical attitude towards the world. In Wittgenstein’s own life, most indicative in thisregard were the years in the 1920s, which he spent as a teacher in lower Austria. Those werealso years of an aesthetical commitment which inspired him to design a modernistic house in
Vienna for his sister.
v) Ethics and Aesthetics being connected with ‘the wonder that the world exists’30

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 86.
Gabriele Tomasi, “Wittgenstein on Life, Art, and the “Right Perspective,” in Josef Rothhaupt und Wilhelm
Vossenkuhl (Eds.), Kulturen und Werte: Wittgensteins “Kringel-Buch” als Initialtext (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter,2013), p. 363.
32
Carolyn Wilde, “Ethics and Aesthetics Are One,” in Peter B. Lewis (Ed.), Wittgenstein, Aesthetics andPhilosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 174.
33
Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1979),
p. 116-117.
31

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

91

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

Finally comes the proposition ‘the miracle is that the world exists’, which serves as
paradigmatic example of both ethics and aesthetics. It shows the underlying connection between
ethics and aesthetics, whereas the peculiarity of the experience it conveys (I wonder that theworld exists!) is that it falls into the domain of the mystical, the ineffable. It is the mysticalexperience of the world as a whole where the subject feels as merging oneself with that world.
For Wittgenstein, this is an experience par excellence and mystical, which cannot be put intowords.
The discussion of the above five points reveals that the connecting link between ethicaland aesthetical discourses is ‘viewing the world sub specie aeterni. This is a viewing of theworld taken from outside, which is thus connected with the sense of the world. Thus the senseof the world as relevant to ethics also lies “outside the whole sphere of what happens and is thecase.” For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot
lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. 34 Thus both ethics and aesthetics
are transcendental and work as ‘conditions of the world’.35
Such a view of the world differs from what can be seen from any factual or scientificviewpoint, for the facts themselves are within the world. It is also for the same reason that such‘viewing from eternity’ can never be expressed in terms of scientific language. In this way,factual representation functions as a cage and ethics, and aesthetics can be taken as attempts to
run against the boundaries of the cage. But in their attempts to transcend these boundaries, theyshow themselves and make themselves understood. What this shows is that factual or
propositional representation is limited. There are points of view, which are not factual
representations, which are not fragmentary or partial, but which can offer an overview of theworld as a whole. It is interesting to note here that Wittgenstein connects this kind of viewingof the world with ‘viewing with a happy eye’ claiming that ‘the beautiful is what makes
happy’.36 The experience of value arises from such wholeness, from the perceived harmony
between the individual and the world. 37 This experience of unity is what being happy means. 38
Viewing from the viewpoint of eternity is not a perceiving of the object in terms of causality or
an orientation toward a certain end. What Wittgenstein achieves with this differentiation is toshow the difference between the question of human value and the scientific questions. 39
We will show that Tagore also takes such a stance on the way an object is viewed from thepoint of view of aesthetics. For him, a rose is beautiful when one feels the unity of a rose
coinciding with the unity of the universe, a feeling which takes us beyond temporality. This isa unity that tunes up the inner unity of oneself along with the unity of the universe.

II

34

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.41.
Ibid., 6.421.
36
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16, p. 86.
37
Julian Friedland, “Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Ethical Value,” Ethic@ - An International Journal for
Moral Philosophy, Florianópolis, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2006), p. 101.
38
Ibid., p. 92.
39
B. R Tilghman, Wittgenstein, Ethics and Aesthetics: The View from Eternity (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 44.
35

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

92

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore and Aesthetics
Tagore’s aesthetics and philosophy are intertwined with each other as ‘the touch of aesthetic
inspiration’ pervades not only his poems and songs but also his worldview and his approach tothe fundamental issues of life and thought. It is thus fair to say that “aesthetics is the dough withwhich his metaphysics and other writings are baked and cooked.”40 Still, it is very difficult tohave a logical, succinct, and structured account of his aesthetics and philosophy. He himself
has acknowledged that such a goal is bound to elude us:
I am that poet
who is a dream-like being moving about stealthily,
and who is unable to make myself understood.41

This is further complicated by the fact that his approach to art, literature, and paintings in his
later years underwent a fundamental change from that of earlier ones, provoking an enigmatic
confusion over his tenets on aesthetics among his interpreters. Thus, before identifying his
points in common with Wittgenstein, I will briefly discuss Tagore’s early and later aesthetics.
Aesthetics in Tagore’s Early Works
For Tagore, the uniqueness of the human being in this world consists in the fact that they canbe an artist. Because of their aesthetic faculty and expression, a human is distinguished fromother things and beings in the universe. Almost all of Tagore’s deliberations on the relationshipbetween the human being and the world reflect his aesthetic discernment. This becomes evident
when he conveys:
When we experience anything aesthetically, we do not experience only that object. A good poem
confers dignity on land, sea and sky, on the whole of the existence.42

For him, all works of creation such as music, dance, painting, and literature reveal rhythmic
forms and that is what is common between human and God. This is what binds God and human
together in creating this universe ‘as a work of Art’. Tagore’s approach to Art seems to be
unique because he believes that the world of reality belongs to Art. In order to grasp what hemeans by reality, truth, and the truth of Art, one will have to analyze how Tagore views thehuman being in relation to nature.
According to Tagore, a human has three aspects of being. First is their physical being,
who tills the soil, gathers food, does everything for their material being, and roams aroundunquestioningly in the domain of facts. Second is their intellectual being, who wants to find out
reason and law behind the facts. Apart from these aspects, there is yet another one, a personal
human: “This personal man is found in the region where we are free from all necessity – above
the needs, both of the body and mind – above the expedient and useful. It is the highest in man
V. S. Naravane, “Tagorene Aesthetics Concepts of Harmony and Personality,” in Rabindranāth Tagore in
Perspective: A Bunch of Essays (Calcutta: Viśva Bhārati, 1989), p. 2.
41
Narasingha P. Sil, “Rabindranath Tagore’s Aesthetics Revisited,” in Rabindra Miscellany, 2015, p. 36, available
at: https://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/Rabindra%20Miscellany.pdf (accessed on 7 April 2020).
42
Abu Sayeed Ayyub, Poetry and Truth (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 1973), p. 119.
40

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

93

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore– this personal man.” 43 In this world of the personal human being, Art takes place. Tagore
elucidates that where there is beauty in flowers, sweetness in fruits, where there is compassion
for other living beings, where there is a feeling of surrendering oneself to the Great (bhūmā),we feel ourselves as being in an eternal personal relation with the universe. We call it ‘real’, asin reality truth is personal.
Tagore treated the ultimate truth as “the Truth of relationship, the Truth of harmony in
the Universe, the fundamental principle of creation.” 44 By means of creativity, this personalityof the human being transcends the abstraction of the factual domain and triumphs over thelimitations of logical reasoning. The reality of the world thus does not belong to the physicalhuman or the intellectual human with logical reasoning. Rather, the world becomes real in thedomain of the personal where one feels one’s infinity, where one is divine. One can beconscious of personality in its narrower sense, which begins with the feeling of separatenessfrom the world. Tagore elucidates this with the delight of a miser who in their aspirations tomake more money strikes upon the unity or oneness of the world. A rich person distinguishes
themselves as a wealthy being from the rest of the world; but the unity of a rose, of a piece ofart, a poem is consistent with the unity of the world. The latter are the messengers of the One,the Infinite, and the Eternal. Art for its part expresses the delight of this unity of the finite andthe infinite in the human being.
The artist creates their reality, which is more important than the factual reality ofscientists. About this creation of reality, Tagore is of the opinion that one can modulate thenature-human-divine interrelationships through one’s creative faculty and can make truth one’s
own. Truth can be real, only when it is personal. This truth is beautiful. Beauty for Tagore is“born of man’s desire to fraternize with the outer world of life and nature.”45 Such a conceptionof beauty is different from the ordinary conception of beauty; it is based on the philosophy of
discipline and restraint. Tagore argues, “When man has the power to see things detached fromself-interest and insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then he sees that what is unpleasant
to us is not necessarily unbeautiful, but has its beauty in truth.” 46 Tagore says, “The day when
I first realized this truth, I remembered Keats’s words, ‘truth is beauty, beauty truth.”’47 Now,
Tagore assimilated this ‘beauty truth’ with goodness – “Which is really good is both useful andbeautiful.”48 For Tagore, “Beauty cannot be the aim of art and literature unless it is good. In

43Rabindranath Tagore, Personality: Lectures Delivered in America (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 12.
Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man Being the Hibbert Lectures for 1930 (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1931), p. 100.
45
Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language: Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sisir
Kumār Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 51.
46
Rabindranath Tagore, “Sense of Beauty,” Angel of Surplus: Some Essays and Addresses on Aesthetics, editedby Sisir Kumār Ghose (Calcutta: Viśva Bhārati, 1978), p. 53.
47
Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language, p. 37.
48
Ibid., p. 37.
44

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

94

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

goodness also we discover that wealth, that surplus49 which is commensurate with the wholeworld.”50
Moreover, for Tagore, when we are intensely aware of the equation of truth, beauty, andgoodness, we are aware of ourselves and the harmony of our souls with the outside universe. It
gives us joy as aesthetic experience (Ānanda). To elucidate this, one can take the example of arose. One feels happy (pure aesthetic joy) when one sees a rose; one sees the beauty of harmony
in its color, smell, and contour, that is, in the form of a flower. “The final meaning of delightwhich one finds in a rose can never be in the roundness of its petals, just as the final meaningof joy of music cannot be in a phonograph record.” 51 In Tagore’s opinion, the essence of thecreative person is their capacity to feel and also to make others feel joy as aesthetic experience(Ānanda). On the one hand, we have the artist who expresses their inner bhāva (sentiment) in
the art object. On the other, the creative process finds fulfillment only when sahŗdaya rasika (asensitive spectator who can connect with the performance with emotion) appreciates it, feels
the inner rasa (emotion of aesthetic pleasure that develops from bhāva) within, and experiencesĀnanda. In this sense, Tagore believes that human feelings are the most important emotional
forces, which transmute things into our living structures. The human being looks at the world
and absorbs it with emotions of love, hatred, wonder, fear, pleasure, pain, and so on. In Tagore’s
own words,
Our emotions are the gastric juices which transform this world of appearance into the more intimate
world of sentiments. On the other hand this outer world has its own juices, having their various
qualities which excite our emotional activities. This is called in our Sanskrit rhetoric rasa whichsignifies outer juices having their response in the inner juices of our emotions.52

Hence, the things that arouse our emotions arouse our feelings for our own selves. Then, we
feel the longing to express ourselves for the sake of expression. Art originates from suchlonging and belongs to the domain of ‘surplus’. 53
49

The notion of surplus is the central notion in the philosophy of Tagore. He elucidates it in the following way:
“Like animals, human beings also have hunger, thirst, and bodily cravings, but what makes man different fromanimals is that apart from these bodily cravings, human beings crave for completely different things. Animals arenecessarily bounded by their needs and necessities, they cannot go beyond them. Animals possess knowledge butthat knowledge is employed for useful purposes, such as how to build nests, how to jump on prey, how to avoid
danger, and so on. But human beings also have knowledge, which they often employ to fulfill their needs in life,
but they can go far beyond and declare that I am acquiring knowledge just for the sake of knowledge and not foranything else. Here they differ fundamentally from animals.
Animals possess certain altruistic tendencies such as parenting and taking interest in herd and hive.
Humans also know that they have to be good because their goodness is necessary for their race, yet they go far
beyond that. They can afford to say that goodness is for the sake of goodness. Animals also have emotions, which
they use for self-preservation.” (Priyambada Sarkar, Language, Limits and beyond: Early Wittgenstein and
Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 38-39). “Man has a fund of excess emotional energythat does not get satisfied with simple preservation. It seeks an outlet in creation of art, literature, music and dance.
For man’s civilization is built upon their surplus.” (Tagore, Personality: Lectures Delivered in America, p. 11).
50
Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language, p. 172.
51
Amiya Chakravarty, A Tagore Reader (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 88.
52
Rabindranath Tagore, Personality: Lectures Delivered in America, pp. 14-15.
53
Ibid., p. 20.

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

95

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

Aesthetics in Tagore’s Later Works
Quite in contrast with his aesthetics in his early works, the later poems and paintings of Tagore
often seem to betray the sense of conflict, discord, and dissonance at the heart of existence. In
a letter from March 1930,54 Tagore explained candidly that in earlier years his inspiration for
creation, constituting the centre of his life and the world, came from the outside world. But laterin life, when “ … he entered this passionate desire to paint and to draw. … The movement was
no more inwards from outside but outwards from inside” 55 One gets an inkling of such changes
much earlier in the poems of Balākā, 56 where the poet celebrates humanist ethos and also
salutes youthful love, beauty, and restlessness. Next, we detect Palātakā,57 which expresses the“poet’s concern with the multiple mundane trials and tribulations, and the weal and woes ofhuman life, that is a part of universal life.” 58 During the last 15 years of his life, he came into
contact with younger modern poets of Bengal, who were pioneering a modernist movement that
unhesitatingly depicted the weight of sin and sorrow, sexuality, evil, and the complexity ofintellectual experiences. He often critiqued this modernism by identifying the modern with thecrude and the trivial. Yet, one does not fail to notice the distinctive features of modernism in
his own writings of this period. He writes about the trivial in Nabajātak (1940);59 and poems
composed in these years (from Punasca [Postscript, 1932] 60 to Śeṣlekhā [Last Writings,
1941]61) seem to reveal his encounter with the real world:
I’m familiar with the road to the real world.
No fancy reality could be found there.
There the terrific and the terrible walk hand in hand.62

In Śeṣlekhā, we find expressions of his own personal tussle, uncertainties, and lack ofknowledge of being and self. At the end of the day, he confessed that he has no answer for thequestions that bothered him throughout his life, and of which he thought he had answers in his
early life. Much agony in his personal life, and much ‘hurts and pain’ out of the chaos and crisisin the outside world had made him realize that ‘Truth is hard’. Truth is not only hard but also
‘terrible’, which seems to be in dissonance with ‘the aesthetics of harmony’ in his early works.
Sisir Kumār Ghosh, a noted Tagore critic writes, “Full of dramatic discords, through alternate
rhythms of intensity and exhaustion, the poems unfold a history of a conflict, long and carefully
concealed at the heart of Rabindrean imagination.” 63 This is evident also in his paintings drawn
during the last phase of his life. It is no wonder that critics describe his “gnawed battered twisted
Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. 12 (Calcutta: Viśva Bhārati, 1961), pp. 93-94.
Ibid., p. 94.
56
Rabindranath Tagore, Balākā (in Bengali) (Calcutta: Indian Publishing House, 1916).
57
Rabindranath Tagore, The Fugitive (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921).
58
Sil, “Rabindranath Tagore’s Aesthetics Revisited,” p. 42.
59
Rabindranath Tagore, Nabajatak (Bengali book of poems) (Kolkata: Viśva Bhārati Granthalay, 1940).
60
Rabindranath Tagore, Punasca (Kolkata: Viśva Bhārati Granthalay, 1932).
61
Rabindranath Tagore, Sesh Lekha (Bengali book of poems) (Kolkata: Viśva Bhārati Granthalay, 1941).
62
Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore, edited by William Radice (Delhi: Penguin,1990), p. 68.
63
Sisir Kumar Ghose, The Later Poems of Tagore (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd., 1989), p. viii.
54
55

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

96

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

and phantasmagorical images born out of deletions as expressions of his suppressed
unconscious.” 64 Dyson and Adhikari traced the peculiarities of Tagore’s (around 2,500)
paintings to his deficiency of color vision. However, the last writings and paintings thus force
us to look at our ‘sage–poet’ (rṣi kavi) in a different manner. Here, one notices that “this Tagore
does not console us like the poet but places us in a land of uncertainty.” 65
However, I think that if one looks closely at his poems, novels, dramas, and paintings
during the 1930s, one would not fail to notice that although his creative works look at theordinary, at the crude, harsh reality, still he is not oblivious to the glory of the beautiful. It istrue that his last days are full of symptoms of resentments and perturbations. But that is not
final. He never deviates from his central aesthetics and philosophy as he writes only a few
months before his death:I have seen the light of the eternal
Behind the illusion of calamity.
Truth’s joyous form is imaged in this dust.66

This is indicative that he was able to see ‘the light of the eternal’ and the harmony of truth andjoy as aesthetic experience even in his very last months. Not only that, he was even hopeful that
the Supreme Human Being will appear in this world. In this phase, one can notice his innertensions between his central aesthetic philosophy and the new ideas of modernism. Sometimes
new ideas occupy for him the central place; but as he is firmly rooted in a harmonious pictureof the whole, it never goes fully out of sight. Because of this, he can visualize the leelā (aspontaneous purposeless self-manifestation) of divine dance, where his individual self merges
in the flow of the life of truth, where he sees the peace of the ever-constant and ‘joyous formof truth’. His uncertainty regarding the contingency and crudeness of the mundane iscontradicted by his image of merging himself into the festival of the infinite, the eternal.67 He
thus realizes that truth can be cruel but it can be also loved, and it can make free those who love
it. There is the beautiful even in the terrible, throughout history and the world. In his later work,
Tagore has described the terrible and the beautiful walking hand in hand. It is true that Tagore
portrays his feelings of distress at the sight of the harshness and crudeness of reality in somepoems of his later years; but he claims at the same time an absolute certainty in ‘the bright
eternity behind the mist of danger’. He does not intend to offer ‘a radically new ontology’, ashe still finds strength from his inner light:
He carries to his treasure-houseHis final reward.
He who could put up with your deceit receives from you the rightTo everlasting peace.68

Sovon Som, Tagore’s Paintings: Versification in Line (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2011), p. 25.
Pabitra Sarkar, “Foreword,” in Sovon Som, Tagore’s Paintings: Versifi cation in Line, p. 3.
66
Amiya Chakravarty, A Tagore Reader (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 72.
67
Rabindranath Tagore, Prantik (Kolkata: Viśva Bhārati Granthalay, 1937), pp. 23-24.
68
Amiya Chakravarty, A Tagore Reader, pp. 373-374.
64
65

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

97

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

III
Tagore and Wittgenstein: Convergence of Ideas on Aesthetics
Based on the elucidation of ideas on aesthetics of the two thinkers discussed above, one canportray the obvious divergences in the approaches of the poet and the philosopher. The poetwill be reluctant to view aesthetics as nonsensical, as aesthetics helps him to approach the ‘real’
in his life; whereas the philosopher will be happy to delineate it as an attempt to express the
inexpressible. Yet, in spite of their natural divergences, there are few important points of
convergence where their views concur, not least because Wittgenstein’s remark ‘Ethics andAesthetics being one’ has its counterpart in the philosophy of Tagore.
For Tagore, beauty exceeds what is necessary. That is why we recognize it as wealth. He
believed that beauty cannot be the aim of art and literature unless it is good. Goodness has madebeauty more than something to be seen with the eye. 69 As Tagore says:
Whatever is beneficent is in deepest union with the whole world, in secret harmony with the mindof all humanity. When we see this beautiful accord of the true and the beneficent, the beauty of truth
no longer eludes our perception. Compassion is beautiful; so are forgiveness and love. … The imageof beauty is the fullest manifestation of the good and the image of the good the consummate self ofbeauty.70

This harmony of the Good and the Beautiful, ethics and aesthetics, cannot be represented byfactual scientific language. For, they are the inexpressible. Tagore says it in his lecturesdelivered in America in 1917,
Facts are like wine cups that carry it [the truth], they are hidden by it, it [the Truth that Good is
beautiful] overflows them. It is infinite in its suggestions; it is extravagant in its words. It is personal,
therefore beyond science.71

According to Tagore, science is concerned with facts which are stateable in scientific language,
whereas this merging of the good and the beautiful is beyond scientific language. Wittgensteinuses similar analogy in his lecture on ethics, delivered in 1929, where he says,
Our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water, even if I wereto pour out a gallon over it.72

Thus, both Tagore and Wittgenstein agree that words in our everyday language are incapableof expressing the higher truth; that is, that higher truth cannot be put into words.
There is also another important point of convergence. For both of them, viewing frometernity is what connects ethics and aesthetics. In line with Wittgenstein, Tagore says “Whenwe look at a rose and find it beautiful, it becomes the whole world. Its unity of form, color,
69

Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language: Rabindranath Tagore, p. 173.
Ibid., p. 172 (italics mine).
71
Rabindranath Tagore, Personality: Lectures Delivered in America, p. 34.
72
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A lecture on Ethics,” p. 6.
70

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

98

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

texture, and smell coincides with the unity of the universe, and thus it takes us beyond
temporality. This unity aligns itself with the inner unity of oneself along with the unity of theuniverse.”73
Beauty for Tagore is a fundamental concept akin to that of being, surplus, and harmony,and this concept is most important in his idea of aesthetics. For Tagore, the poet is not a devoteeof truth for the sake of truth, or of goodness for the sake of goodness. Rather, he is a devotee oftruth and goodness as they are in themselves beautiful. And because of their beauty, the poet
got attracted to them. Tagore elucidates this with the example of a blade of grass. A lay person
who is indifferent to nature gets no pleasure from the blade of grass. It is a trifle matter to them.
He is not interested. But a botanist finds pleasure even from a blade of grass as they know theimportance of grass in the domain of plants. Similarly, an aesthetician knows how to view ablade of grass even from the point of view of spirituality, can feel themselves and the world inthat particular blade of grass and finds ecstasies in it. 74
From Tagore’s account, it follows that from the point of view of the scientist the truthof a blade of grass is important, but only as representative of a class. But to the aesthetician, ablade of grass is important not because it belongs to a class having such and such properties,
not because it has some utility, but because it becomes the whole world. It comes to the fore
and everything else goes to the background. When we look at a blade of grass aesthetically, thecover of its ‘everydayness’, that is, its being in particular spatio-temporal framework, getsremoved. The aesthetician discovers a deep harmony in the beautiful object and feels happy
from the core of their heart.75 This harmony transcends all discords, all conflicts. For Tagore,
truth, beauty, and harmony are interchangeable terms. The artist through creative synthesis
extends themselves over the whole world and feels the union with the world in them. Tagore
elucidates: I exist and everything else exists. There is this union of the two in my existence. 76
This harmony, this being with the whole world, transcend the boundaries of ordinary discourseand somehow make themselves understood by means of the suggestiveness of language inpoems, music, and other art forms.
Tagore elucidates the typically mystical experience of the union of oneself with theworld, which he had in his early years. Regarding this experience, he says in his Hibbertlectures:
When I was 18, a sudden spring breeze of religious experience for the first time came to my life andpassed away leaving in my memory a direct message of my spiritual reality. One day while I stoodwatching at early dawn the sun sending out its ray from behind the trees, I suddenly felt as if someancient mist had in a moment lifted from my sight, and the morning light on the face of the world
revealed an inner radiance of joy. The invisible screen of the common place was removed from allthings and all men and their ultimate significance was intensified in my mind.77

73

Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. 14 (Kolkata: Paschimbanga Sarkar, 1986), p. 388.
Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. 12, p. 6.
75
Sachindranath Ganguly, Rabindra Darshan (Śāntiniketan: Viśva Bhārati, 1968), p. 86.
76
Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol. 12, p. 352.
77
Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953), pp. 93-94.
74

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

99

Volume IV, No. 01/2021

PRIYAMBADA SARKAR‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one’ (T6.421): Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore

One notices similar insight in a poem where he speaks of the wonderful experience of the wholeworld embracing his heart: “I don’t know how my heart unfolded and embraced the wholeworld today.” 78 Tagore believes that “poets reveal the benign to the world in its ineffably
beauteous form. The truly benign serves our need and it is beautiful: that is, it has anunaccountable attraction that surpasses its use.” 79 “Only the true artist can comprehend thesecret of the visible world and the joy of revealing it.”80
Thus, for both Wittgenstein and Tagore, words are incapable of expressing values thatincorporate truth, beauty, and goodness. But this gives rise to the typical Tractarian paradoxicalsituation: If words are incapable of expressing values such as truth, beauty, and goodness, thenwhat purpose does this discourse on ethical and aesthetical values serve? Although from thepoint of view of the Tractatus, it might appear nonsensical, yet one can get over thisparadoxicality by referring to the Tractatrian notion of ‘logical clarification of thoughts’. 81
Hence, this discourse has a point: it points to a harmonized, value-laden, poetic universe of apoet and a philosopher. It thus clarifies human attempts to run against the boundaries oflanguage, which, though fruitless, still deserve our deep respect and admiration.

Rabindranath Tagore, “Prabhāt Utsav, Prabhāt Sangīt,” in Rabindra Rachanāvali, Vol. 1. (Kolkata:Paschimbnga Sarkar, 1980), p. 71 (trans. mine).
79
Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Writings on Literature and Language: Rabindranath Tagore, p. 172.
80
Rabindranath Tagore, On Art and Aesthetics: A Selection of Lectures, Essays & Letters, edited by Prithwish
Neogy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1961), p. 108.
81
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.112.
78

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS

100

Volume IV, No. 01/2021