Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In this work I present a personal reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s work, the Indian/Bengali poet laureated with the Literature Nobel Prize in 1913. My objective was to point out some of his thought’s principles: his conception of man as an eminently religious and poetical being. The poet not only contributed to the literary field as well as the areas of religion, psychology, creativity, ethics and education, among others. In the accomplishment of this work I adopted an hermeneutic perspective related to Gadamer’s thought, in which the reading and interpretation of an author’s work is made by the encounter’s historical experience. Initially, I present some of Tagore’s concerns in relation to the human destiny and post-modernity issues; after that, I briefly contextualize his work, and then, focus the unit God-Nature-Man, the Religion of Man and the human development stages, according to his vision. As we live a particular moment in civilization’s history where it shows an intensification of the objectifying vision of man, the poet’s statements and analyses can help us to recover what, in this perspective, constitutes the human foundations of existing and happening.