I read your article on the Essence of Religion in the last issue of the Hibbert Journal with very great interest.
Russell had written ' The essence of religion, then, lies in the subordination of the finite part of our life to the infinite part.
This is nonsense. Mortal life of any type is finite. God may endow a creature with eternal bliss but only after death. Religion is only concerned with life before death- hence it is itself finite. What is true of every possible religion is that it is concerned with the finite, not the infinite part of our life. Some mathematicians are concerned with the infinite and their researches in that arcane field were a very significant part of their life. Russell himself knew of great mathematicians like Cantor, who was concerned with countable and uncountable infinite, or Liebniz whose 'law of continuity' says one can sometimes say the same thing about an infinite as a finite process (which is very useful because it permits us to do calculus), or L.E.J Brouwer who had a very high opinion of Tagore.
Of the two natures in man, the particular or animal being lives in instinct,
which are merely algorithms from the mathematical point of view. One could speak of an instinct to do math or philosophy or seek God.
and seeks the welfare of the body and its descendants,
No. Darwinnian processes or 'the fitness landscape' tend to prune decision algorithms in favour of those with survival value.
while the universal or divine being seeks union with the universe,
Fuck off! I want Mummy and Daddy and all the nice nice peeps to go to Heaven. I might even want to visit from time to time. But nobody wants to merge with the universe- unless they're on shrooms.
and desires freedom from all that impedes its seeking.
No! Everybody desires the freedom to devote themselves to agitating for free gender reassignment surgery and environmentally sustainable provision of self-sodomy services for senior citizens.
The animal being is neither good nor bad in itself; it is good or bad solely as it helps or hinders the divine being in its search for union with the world.
God wants to fuck us. For heaven's sake- why? Take it from me, nobody seeks union with boring shite.
In union with the world the soul finds its freedom. There are three kinds of union: union in thought, union in feeling, union in will. Union in thought is knowledge, union in feeling is love, union in will is service. There are three kinds of disunion: error, hatred, and strife. What promotes disunion is insistent instinct, which is of the animal part of man: what promotes union is the combination of knowledge, love, and consequent service which is wisdom, the supreme good of man.'
Tagore may have actually read this turgid shite. Alternatively some pal- like Brajendranath Seal- might have summarized it in a pithy fashion for him. Basically, the gist of it would be, 'Whitey fears Hell Fire. Whitey writes stupid shite. Poor Whitey!'
Tagore's response is gentlemanly, but condescending-
It reminded me of a verse in the Upanishad which runs thus
“Yato vácho nivartanté aprápya manasá saha
Ánandam Brahmans Vidván na vibhéto Kutushchama.
“From him words, as well as mind, come back baffled.
More particularly if your ancestors were primitive marauders who only stopped short of cannibalism coz God is watching and He enjoys torturing evil bastards like you.
Yet he who knows the joy of Brahman (the Infinite) is free from all fear.”
Tagore, like Wittlesstein was telling Russell that what he had written was stupid, ignorant, shite though it was supposed to signal that Russell was some secular sort of Saint. Later, the nutter would go to jail for writing a stupid article discouraging the Yanks from joining the war.
Through knowledge you cannot apprehend him;
This is Russell's paradox. Knowledge of the Self can't be the knowledge of any particular self otherwise you are describing as a barber a guy who only shaves himself.
yet when you have the life of the Infinite and are not bound within the limits of the finite self
i.e. when you stop being a selfish tosser or a guy who wants to be taken as the second Liebniz
you realize that great Joy which is above all the pleasures and pains of our selfish life and so you are free from all fear.
Like the fear that some other dude will receive acclaim as the great thinker of the Age.
This Joy itself is the positive perception of Brahman.
For fuck's sake, if you are going to write metaphysical tosh, stop banging on about animal instincts. Most animals are pretty nice most of the time. You may be a White Aristocrat but you don't have to shoot and stuff every fucking animal you meet. Equally, you don't have to keep gassing on about how resisting the urge to shoot our feathered friends is about battling your animal instincts. Most humans are just as nice as most animals. English aristocrats could just settle for being nice people.
It is not a creed which authority imposes on us but an absolute realization of the Infinite
The relevant 'principle of continuity' is that God or the Brahman, like most people and most animals aint either a sadistic psychopath nor a hebephrenic hoping for sodomy at the hands of the Universe.
which we can only attain by breaking through the bonds of the narrow self and setting our will and love free.
Once Russell got his teeth fixed and his breath became bearable he got busy setting his dick free. Still, the dude wrote well. Come to think of it, so did Tagore. Blue blood it seems has a way with ink. I like to think that both Tagore and Russell led lives useful enough and pleasant to themselves. By contrast, some of the truly, spookily great, mathematicians- LEJ Brouwer, Godel, Grothendieck- who, so to speak, had more closely glimpsed, as though from the inside, 'the mind of God'- appear to have had an tropism towards an absolute type of harmony or justice which frankly frightens us and causes us to soil our tighty whities.
Brouwer thought that Tagore was the universal poet of his generation who could coin new words to designate the new intuitions, the 'intensions', or internally consistent and 'constructive' concepts, whose use alone could enable Man to rise above incessant War and the destruction of the Environment.
It would be easy enough for some smart Sanskrit knowing Mathsy dude to flesh out this notion. But such a person would not be an asshole and thus not a fit topic of comment for Socioproctology. Hence I must end this post by doubling down on my assertion that Russell was a silly racist and Tagore a crashing bore.
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