Harmonising conceptual polarities: the dialectical interplay of universality and particularity in the worldviews of Tagore and Iqbal

本项目将研究印度次大陆两位主要哲学家-诗人-泰戈尔（1861-1941）和穆罕默德·伊克巴尔（1877-1938）的世界观中一系列相互关联的主题，泰戈尔的两首孟加拉语歌曲是印度和孟加拉国的国歌，穆罕默德·伊克巴尔通常被视为巴基斯坦的精神之父。因此，该项目位于伊斯兰教-印度教比较神学的更广泛领域，并将借鉴两位作者的精选文本以及泰戈尔和伊克巴尔生活和写作的社会文化和政治背景的相关历史资料。这个项目的基本原则，即普遍和特殊之间的关系，将探讨三个主题：上帝和个人之间的关系，自我和它的人类其他之间的关系，以及科学的普遍真理和有限视角的特殊性之间的关系。泰戈尔和伊克巴尔在诗歌和哲学两种形式上都详细阐述了这些主题：在这个项目的过程中，我将试图展示这三个指导主题如何作为有用的理论框架，用以理解和概念化伊斯兰教和印度教思想中的某些哲学和神学原则。通过突出普遍性和特殊性的辩证法，并探讨这种关系在不同的概念相互作用，我希望从而揭示伊斯兰教印度教比较话语的新模式。

This project will examine a set of interrelated motifs in the worldviews of two major philosopher-poets of the Indian subcontinent - Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), two of whose Bengali songs are the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), often regarded as the spiritual father of Pakistan. This project is thus situated in the broader field of Islamic-Hindu comparative theology, and will draw on selected texts of both authors as well as relevant historical sources on the socio-cultural and political contexts within which Tagore and Iqbal lived and wrote. The foundational principle of this project, namely, the relation between the universal and the particular, will be explored across three themes: the relation between God and the individual, the relation between the self and its human other, and the relation between the universal truths of science and the particularity of one's finite perspective. Tagore and Iqbal dwell on these motifs in both peotic and philosophical modalities: and I will, over the course of the project, seek to demonstrate how these three guiding themes serve as useful theorectical frameworks with which to understand and conceptualize certain philosophical and theological principles in Islamic and Hindu thought. By foregrounding the dialectic of universality and particularity, and exploring this relation across distinct conceptual interplays, I hope to thus uncover new patterns of Islamic-Hindu comparative discourse.