A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality

One was a Bengali polymath and Nobel laureate with white flowing beard and piercing eyes. The other was the world famous scientist, with frizzy hair and unkempt appearance. They first met in Berlin in 1926 and several times later in 1930. The first meeting that year, at Einstein’s summer home in the vicinity of Potsdam, resulted in The New York Times headline, “Einstein and Tagore Plumb the Truth.” The piece described Tagore as “the poet with the head of a thinker” and Einstein as “the thinker with the head of a poet.” Their brief meeting in late 1930 in New York, when Einstein was en route to Caltech, bore the photo caption: “A Mathematician and a Mystic meet in Manhattan.” Considering these events, it’s hard to imagine just how famous Tagore once was in the West. With his works impressing the likes of William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, Tagore lectured to packed audiences around the world. Two separate works of his became the national anthems of Bangladesh and India. Paul Mendes-Flohr, a professor at the University of Chicago, discussed Tagore’s connection to Einstein in a recent lecture hosted by the Leo Baeck Institute. “Despite their warm regard for one another, their conversation did not go particularly well,” said Mendes-Flohr. Tackling heady topics like free will versus determinism, the two titans stood poles apart philosophically. Einstein believed the world had a reality independent of the human mind. Tagore countered, saying “This world is a human world.” For him, the world depended upon human consciousness for its reality.