Reading group: Tagore’s The Religion of Man (1931)

Rabindranath Tagore gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1930, and they were published the next year as The Religion of Man. It isn't a work of systematic philosophy but an extended reflection on the human being as the meeting point of the finite and the infinite.

Tagore draws on the Upanishads, the Bauls of Bengal, and his own experience as a poet. He argues that religion is fundamentally about the "surplus" in human beings, what goes beyond mere survival, and that the divine is realised in human creativity and fellowship. One appendix records his 1930 conversation with Einstein about whether truth is independent of humanity.

Let's read the first five chapters over two weeks. As a poet, I'm curious whether others think this kind of writing counts as philosophy.