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The two seekers of truth, the Jew and the Hindu: a short dialogue

posted on Monday, August 25, 2008 08:27 PM

Author: Sanjay Kumar, Brighton

Einstein’s belief centred on truth independent of man: the moon is out there, whether one looked at it or not, as he famously said. Tagore fundamentally disagreed with realism of the Einsteinium kind: ‘we can never go beyond man in all we know and feel’. He made this point in The Religion of Man (1931), and it summarised Tagore’s position in relation to Einstein’s.

They first met at Einstein’s summer villa at Caputh, outside Berlin in 1926. Dmitri Marianoff, a journalist who later married Margot Einstein noted the conversation between Tagore the poet – with the head of a thinker, and Einstein, the thinker with the head of a poet. The meeting must have appeared as though two giant cosmic entities were engaged in a chat, trying to understand the mind of God.

Einstein: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe – the world as a unity dependant on humanity, and the world as reality independent of the human factor…..
Tagore: This world is a human world – the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. Therefore, the world apart from us does not exist; it is a relative world, depending upon our consciousness.
Einstein: Truth, then, or beauty, is not independent of man – is that what you’re saying?
Tagore: No
Einstein: If there were no human beings any more, the Himalayas no longer would be beautiful?
Tagore: No
Einstein: I agree with you, Tagoreji, with regard to this conception of beauty, but not with regard to truth.
Tagore: Why not? Truth is realised only through man.
Einstein: I cannot prove my conception is right, but that is my religion. Truth is independent of us human beings.
Tagore: I cannot agree with you. As Brahma said: ‘the absolute truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by mere words’
Einstein: No. The mind acknowledges realities outside of it, independent of it. For instance, nobody may be in the house, yet the table remains were it is.
Tagore: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table that is which is perceptible by some kind of consciousness we possess.
Einstein: If nobody were in the house the table would exist all the same, but that is already illegitimate from your point of view, because we cannot explain what it means, that the table is there, independently of us. Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from our humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief nobody can lack – not even primitive man. We attribute truth a supernatural objectivity. It is essential to us – the reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind – though we cannot say what it means.
Tagore: In any case, if there be any truth absolutely unrelated to humanity, then for us it is absolutely non-existent.
Einstein: Then I am more religious than you are!

Not for nothing did Einstein from that moment on, refer to Tagore as ‘Rabbi’ Tagore. Equally true is that Einstein’s basic view of sub-atomic nature has now been abandoned by most modern quantum physicists, who have adopted a position that bears considerable resemblance to the one taken by Tagore, including the current occupant of the Newton Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Professor Stephen Hawking, the author of the hit ‘Brief History of Time’

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