Soulless Occident/Spiritual Asia: Tagore’s West

Abstract

The ideas of ‘Western civilisation’ and ‘Western decadence’ came to prominence, in Western Europe, in a sickly embrace at the turn of the nineteenth century. Surveying the various tracts on decline at this time, we often find an attitude of sophisticated cynicism. We see an intellectual community coming to equate profundity of insight with pessimism of outlook. Yet even the Great War could not remove the complacency that accompanied this perspective; the sense that to speak of Western decay was an act of provocation of an increasingly accepted and expected sort.