The Creator, the creation of the world and creativity in philosophical thought of Rabindranath Tagore

The concept of God the Creator and the world as His creation in the thought of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is analyzed in the article as the foundation of ontological views by the Indian poet and 1913 Nobel Prize laureate. The theme of the Creator and creation in Tagore’s philosophical legacy remains virtually unexplored, despite he continues and develops ideas elaborated in the national-cultural renaissance in colonial Bengal. Tagore presented an original Indo-Western understanding of a being based on a reinterpretation of the ancient Indian spiritual tradition and, on a dialogue with Judeo-Christian thought. The theme also provides an answer to the question of the universality of Tagore’s religious ideas, understandable both to Indian and world audiences. Based on a hermeneutic method to analyze R. Tagore's texts, the author offers a reconstruction of his ontology, built around the ideas of God the Creator, the creation of the world and man, and the creative nature of a being. The reconstruction is based on the key categories of the Indian poet’s idiolect, which he used to clarify the meanings of his worldview. Following his own interpretation of the Upanishads, his own critique of the Indian philosophical tradition, his personal religious experience and, the intellectual legacy of the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in which Ram Mohan Ray, Debendronath Tagore, and other thinkers foregrounded the understanding of God as Creator, Tagore developed the idea of God the Artist, whose creativity is constantly ongoing in the evolution of the world and man, and of man, endowed with freedom and the gift of creativity, interacting with God in the creation of something new – culture, civilization, religion, and society. For the first time in Russian philosophical Indology, the presence of three levels of being in Tagore’s religious ontology has been demonstrated: God as an active Person creating the world; the dynamic being of the created world, including the universe, the natural world, and living creatures; and man as a free, active person, bearer of creativity, participant in creativity, and collaborator with God the Creator. Tagore succeeded to demonstrate the creative nature of being as such at all levels. One of the foundations of the universality of Tagore's poetry is embodied in the idea of creativity that is communication between the Creator and the world and the interaction of man with God and the world.