Rabindranath Tagore

Let us widen the circle.

"At Schlick's request, Wittgenstein agreed to meet Carnap and some of the other members of the Vienna Circle, but it immediately became apparent that their intellectual positions were far apart--perhaps, unbridgeably so. To begin with, Wittgenstein was unwilling to discuss technical points in philosophy with the members of the Vienna Circle, and he insisted rather on reading poetry to them, especially the poems of Rabindranath Tagore. (Given his Tolstoyan position, this insistence may not have been as willfully irrelevant as it must have appeared to his audience.)" Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973), p. 215.

"... the whole point of [Wittgenstein's] polemical critique was one of intellectual liberation. Of course, the Vienna Circle philosophers also presented themselves in this same emancipatory role, but theirs was the liberation so characteristic of 'progressive' thought, in politics and elsewhere: the kind that fights old dogmas with new, rather than free itself from dogma as such. The Viennese positivists were antimetaphysical, to be sure; but their opposition to metaphysics was buttressed, like that of Hume, by general philosophical principles as arbitrary as those of their opponents. Wittgenstein's antimetaphysical approach, on the other hand, was genuinely nondoctrinal...If, on their first meeting, Wittgenstein insisted on reading the Vienna Circle philosophers the poetry of Tagore, this then was a highly Krausian action with a genuinely polemical point. For it amounted to a declaration that philosophical technicalities are, at best, a means to an end--namely, the liberation of a man's mind, so that he can face the truly profound and significant issues dealt with by writers like Tolstoy and Tagore" (ibid., 256-257).