Hajime Tanabe
Encyclopedia
was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School
. In 1947 he became a member of The Japan Academy
, in 1950 he received the Order of Cultural Merit, and in 1957 an honorary doctorate from University of Freiburg.
He was born in Tokyo. His father was the school principal of Kaisei Academy
. He enrolled in the university of Tokyo first as a natural sciences student, then moved to literature and philosophy. After graduation he worked in Tohoku University
as lecturer.
. Tanabe has come under more scrutiny and opprobrium for his political activities, though scholarship provides some mitigation of the harsher picture of Tanabe as an ardent fascist in the mold of his one-time teacher, Martin Heidegger
.
Tanabe was born in a household devoted to education. His father was principal at the Kaisei high school. Tanabe's father was also a scholar of Confucius, whose teachings may have influenced Tanabe's philosophical and religious thought. Tanabe also taught English at Kaisei after graduating from the University of Tokyo
.
After graduating from university, Kitaro Nishida invited Tanabe to teach at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University). After Nishida's retirement from teaching, Tanabe succeeded him. Though they began as friends, and shared several philosophical concepts such as Absolute Nothingness, Tanabe became increasingly critical of Nishida's philosophy. Many of Tanabe's writings after Nishida left the university obliquely attacked the latter's philosophy.
Tanabe accepted the position of Associate Professor at Kyoto University in 1919. He spent two years studying in Germany at Berlin University and then the University of Freiburg from 1922-1924. At Freiburg, he studied under Husserl
and was tutored by the young Heidegger
. The influence of these two philosophers stayed with Tanabe throughout his life, and much of his thought exhibits the assumptions and terminology of Ontology
.
During the Japanese expansion and war effort, Tanabe worked with Nishida and others to maintain the right for free academic expression. Though he criticized the Nazi-inspired letter of Heidegger, Tanabe himself was caught up in the Japanese war effort
, and his letters to students going off to war exhibit many of the same terms and ideology used by the reigning military powers. Even more damning are his essays written in defense of Japanese racial and state superiority, exploiting his theory of the Logic of Species to herald and abet the militaristic ideology.
During the war years, however, Tanabe wrote and published little, perhaps reflecting the moral turmoil that he attests to in his monumental post-war work, Philosophy as Metanoetics. The work is framed as a confession of repentance (metanoia) for his support of the war effort. It purports to show a philosophical way to overcome philosophy itself, which suggests that traditional western thought contains the seeds of the ideological framework that led to World War II.
His activities, and the actions of Japan as a whole, haunted Tanabe for the rest of his life. In 1951, he writes:
He lived for another eleven years after writing these words, dying in 1962 in Kita-Karuizawa, Japan.
Although the Kyoto School used western philosophical terminology and rational exploration, they made these items serve the purpose of presenting a unique vision of reality from within their cultural heritage. Specifically, they could enrich a discussion of the ultimate nature of reality using the experience and thought of various forms of Buddhism
like Zen
and Pure Land
, but embedded in an analysis that calls upon conceptual tools forged and honed in western philosophy by thinkers ranging from Plato
to Descartes to Heidegger
.
Tanabe's own contribution to this dialog between eastern and western philosophy ultimately sets him off from the other members of the Kyoto School. His radical critique of philosophical reason and method, while stemming from Immanuel Kant
and Soren Kierkegaard, which emerges in his work Philosophy as Metanoetics, easily sets him off as a major thinker with a unique position on perennial philosophical questions. Some commentators, for example, suggest that Tanabe's work in Metanoetics
is a forerunner of deconstructionism.
Tanabe engaged with philosophers of Continental philosophy, especially Existentialism
. His work is often a dialog with philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche
, and Heidegger
. Because of his engaging these thinkers, especially the first two, Tanabe's thought has been characterized as Existentialist, though Makoto Ozaki writes that Tanabe preferred the terms "existentialist philosophy of history," "historical existentialism," or "existential metaphysics of history." In his masterpiece, Philosophy as Metanoetics, Tanabe characterized his work as "philosophy that is not a philosophy," foreshadowing various approaches to thinking by deconstructionists.
Like other Existentialists, Tanabe emphasizes the importance of philosophy as being meaning; that is, what humans think about and desire is finding a meaning to life and death. In company with the other members of the Kyoto School, Tanabe believed that the foremost problem facing humans in the modern world is the lack of meaning and its consequent Nihilism
. Sartre, following Kierkegaard in his Concept of Anxiety, was keen to characterize this as Nothingness. Heidegger, as well, appropriated the notion of Nothingness in his later writings.
The Kyoto School philosophers believed that their contribution to this discussion of Nihilism centered on the Buddhist-inspired concept of nothingness, aligned with its correlate Sunyata. Tanabe and Nishida attempted to distinguish their philosophical use of this concept, however, by calling it Absolute Nothingess. This term differentiates it from the Buddhist religious concept of nothingness, as well as underlines the historical aspects of human existence that they believed Buddhism does not capture.
Tanabe disagreed with Nishida and Nishitani on the meaning of Absolute Nothingness, emphasizing the practical, historical aspect over what he termed the latter's intuition
ism. By this, Tanabe hoped to emphasize the working of Nothingness in time, as opposed to an eternal Now. He also wished to center the human experience in action rather than contemplation, since he thought that action embodies a concern for ethics
whereas contemplation ultimately disregards this, resulting in a form of Monism
, after the mold of Plotinus
and Hegel. That is, echoing Kierkegaard's undermining in Philosophical Fragments
of systematic philosophy
from Plato to Spinoza
to Hegel, Tanabe questions whether there is an aboriginal condition of preexisting awareness that can or must be regained to attain enlightenment.
Tanabe's insistence on this point is not simply philosophical and instead points again to his insistence that the proper mode of human being is action, especially ethics. However, he is critical of the notion of a pre-existing condition of enlightenment because he accepts the Kantian notion of radical evil
, wherein humans exhibit an ineluctable propensity to act against their own desires for the good and instead perpetrate evil.
as a cultural entity in tension with the existential meaning that religion plays in individual lives. Tanabe uses the terms genus to represent the universality of form that all entities strive for, contrasting them with the stable, though ossified form they can become as species as social systems.
Tanabe contraposes Christianity
and Christ
, represented here as the opposition between Paul
and Jesus
. Jesus, in Tanabe's terms, is a historical being who manifests the action of Absolute Nothingness, or God
understood in non-theistic terms. God is beyond all conceptuality and human thinking, which can only occur in terms of self-identity, or Being
. God becomes, as manifested in human actions, though God can never be reduced to being, or self-identity.
For Tanabe, humans have the potential to realize compassionate divinity, Nothingness, through continual death and resurrection, by way of seeing their nothingness. Tanabe believes that the Christian Incarnation
narrative is important for explaining the nature of reality, since he believed Absolute Nothingness becoming human exemplifies the true nature of the divine, as well as exemplar to realization of human being in relationship to divinity. Jesus signifies this process in a most pure form, thereby setting an example for others to follow.
Ultimately, Tanabe chooses philosophy over religion, since the latter tends toward socialization and domestication of the original impulse of the religious action. Philosophy, understood as Metanoetics
, always remains open to questions and the possibility self-delusion in the form of radical evil
. Therefore, Tanabe's statement is a philosophy "of" religion.
--, "The Logic of The Species as Dialectics," trns. David Dilworth; Taira Sato, in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1969), pp. 273–288. [Available as pdf through JSTOR]
--, Philosophy as Metanoetics (Nanzan studies in religion and culture), Yoshinori Takeuchi, Valdo Viglielmo, and James W. Heisig (Translators), University of California Press (April 1987), ISBN 0-520-05490-3.
Dilworth, David A. and Valdo H. Viglielmo (translators and editors); with Agustin Jacinto Zavala, Sourcebook for modern Japanese philosophy : selected documents, Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1998.
Fredericks, James L., Alterity in the thought of Tanabe Hajime and Karl Rahner [microform], Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1988.
Heisig, James W., "Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School", Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture, University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
Ozaki, Makoto, Individuum, Society, Humankind: The Triadic Logic of Species According to Hajime Tanabe (Brill's Japanese Studies Library), Brill Academic Publishers (April 2001), ISBN 90-04-12118-8, ISBN 978-90-04-12118-8.
Pattison, George, Agnosis: Theology in the Void, Palgrave Macmillan (February 1997), ISBN 0-312-16206-5. ISBN 978-0-312-16206-1.
Unno, Taitetsu, and James W. Heisig (Editor), The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture), Asian Humanities Press (June 1990), ISBN 0-89581-872-8, ISBN 978-0-89581-872-0 .
Cestari, Matteo, "Between Emptiness and Absolute Nothingness: Reflections on Negation in Nishida and Buddhism."
Ruiz, F. Perez, "Philosophy in Present-day Japan," in Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 24, No. 1/2 (1969), pp. 137–168. [Available as pdf through JSTOR]
Sakai, Naoki, "SUBJECT AND SUBSTRATUM : ON JAPANESE IMPERIAL NATIONALISM,"
in Cultural Studies; Jul2000, Vol. 14 Issue 3/4, p462-530 (AN 4052788)
Viglielmo, V. H., "An Introduction to Tanabe Hajime's Existence, Love, and Praxis" in Wandel zwischen den Welten: Festschrift für Johannes Laube, (Peter Lang, 2003) pp. 781–797.
Waldenfels, Hans, "Absolute Nothingness. Preliminary Considerations on a Central Notion in the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro and the Kyoto School," in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (1966), pp. 354–391. [Available as pdf through JSTOR]
Williams, David, "In defence of the Kyoto School: reflections on philosophy, the Pacific War and the making of a post-White world," in Japan Forum, Sep2000, Vol. 12 Issue 2, p143-156. [Available through Academic Search Premier]
Buri, Fritz, "Hajime Tanabe, Philosophy of repentance and Dialectic of Death," in The Buddha-Christ as the Lord of the True Self: The Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School, trns. by Harold H. Oliver, Mercer University Press, 1997, pp. 65–94. [via Google Books]
Driscoll, Mark, "Apoco-elliptic Thought in Modern Japanese Philosophy"
Hajime, Tanabe, Jitsuzon to ai to jissen (Existence, Love, and Praxis) [1947], (from vol. 9, Complete Works of Tanabe Hajime), Tokyo, Chikuma Shobô, 1963. A partial translation by V. H. Viglielmo http://www2.hawaii.edu/~valdo/, for which the Preface, Chapter One, and translator's introductory essay are published in “An Introduction to Tanabe Hajime’s Existence, Love, and Praxis." in Wandel zwischen den Welten: Festschrift für Johannes Laube, Peter Lang, 2003.
Mierzejewska, Anna, "The Buddhist Inspiration of The Concept of Faith in The Philosophy of Hajime Tanabe," in SILVA IAPONICARUM, FASC. VI・第六号, WINTER ・冬 2005, pp. 18–37.
Odin, Steve, "Hajime Tanabe," in The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, pp. 114–117.
Ozaki, Makoto, "On Tanabe's Logic of Species," in ΠΑΔΕΙΑ: Comparative Philosophy.
--- ---, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe: According to the Seventh Chapter of the Demonstratio of Christianity, [Doctoral Thesis] Amsterdam, Eerdmans Publishing Company, [1990?] [via Google Books Online].
Takahane, Yosuke, "Absolute Nothingness and Metanoetics,".
Tanabe, Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, (Nanzan studies in religion and culture), T. Yoshinori (Translator), University of California Press (April 1987). [numerous pages missing] [via Google Books]
Wattles, Jeffrey, "Dialectic and Religious Experience in Tanabe Hajime's Philosophy as Metanoetics"
-- --. Philosophy and Spiritual Experience: The case of a Japanese Shin Buddhist
Yata, Ryosho. "An Examination of the Historical Development of the Concept of Two Aspects of Deeep Belief, Part 1".
Kyoto School
The Kyoto School is the name given to the Japanese "philosophical movement centered at Kyoto University that assimilated western philosophy and religious ideas and used them to reformulate religious and moral insights unique to the East Asian cultural tradition." However, it is also used to...
. In 1947 he became a member of The Japan Academy
The Japan Academy
is an honorary organization founded in 1879 to bring together leading Japanese scholars with distinguished records of scientific achievements. The Academy is currently organization attached to the Ministry of Education; and the organization's headquarters located in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan...
, in 1950 he received the Order of Cultural Merit, and in 1957 an honorary doctorate from University of Freiburg.
He was born in Tokyo. His father was the school principal of Kaisei Academy
Kaisei Academy
-History:The school, which has produced many notable alumni, was founded in 1871. At first, it was established as a Kyōryū Gakkō of the prepschool to Senior school such as First High School（After the WWⅡ,this school was integrated into The University of Tokyo.）. Its motto is "The pen is mightier...
. He enrolled in the university of Tokyo first as a natural sciences student, then moved to literature and philosophy. After graduation he worked in Tohoku University
Tohoku University
, abbreviated to , located in the city of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture in the Tōhoku Region, Japan, is a Japanese national university. It is the third oldest Imperial University in Japan and is a member of the National Seven Universities...
as lecturer.
Biography
Tanabe was a founding member of what has become known in the West as the Kyoto School, which also includes the notable philosophers Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani. While the latter philosophers have received recognition in western philosophy, Tanabe's writing has received less notice. All the philosophers of this school received opprobrium for their perceived active role in the Japanese empire's nationalistic regime. However, their participation in resistance to the political environment has been documented widely by James HeisigJames Heisig
James W. Heisig is a philosopher who specializes in the field of philosophy of religion. He has published several books, their topics ranging amongst the notion of God in Jungian psychology, the Kyoto School of Philosophy, and contemporary interreligious faith...
. Tanabe has come under more scrutiny and opprobrium for his political activities, though scholarship provides some mitigation of the harsher picture of Tanabe as an ardent fascist in the mold of his one-time teacher, Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
.
Tanabe was born in a household devoted to education. His father was principal at the Kaisei high school. Tanabe's father was also a scholar of Confucius, whose teachings may have influenced Tanabe's philosophical and religious thought. Tanabe also taught English at Kaisei after graduating from the University of Tokyo
University of Tokyo
, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...
.
After graduating from university, Kitaro Nishida invited Tanabe to teach at Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University). After Nishida's retirement from teaching, Tanabe succeeded him. Though they began as friends, and shared several philosophical concepts such as Absolute Nothingness, Tanabe became increasingly critical of Nishida's philosophy. Many of Tanabe's writings after Nishida left the university obliquely attacked the latter's philosophy.
Tanabe accepted the position of Associate Professor at Kyoto University in 1919. He spent two years studying in Germany at Berlin University and then the University of Freiburg from 1922-1924. At Freiburg, he studied under Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and was tutored by the young Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
. The influence of these two philosophers stayed with Tanabe throughout his life, and much of his thought exhibits the assumptions and terminology of Ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
.
During the Japanese expansion and war effort, Tanabe worked with Nishida and others to maintain the right for free academic expression. Though he criticized the Nazi-inspired letter of Heidegger, Tanabe himself was caught up in the Japanese war effort
Japanese militarism
refers to the ideology in the Empire of Japan that militarism should dominate the political and social life of the nation, and that the strength of the military is equal to the strength of a nation.-Rise of militarism :...
, and his letters to students going off to war exhibit many of the same terms and ideology used by the reigning military powers. Even more damning are his essays written in defense of Japanese racial and state superiority, exploiting his theory of the Logic of Species to herald and abet the militaristic ideology.
During the war years, however, Tanabe wrote and published little, perhaps reflecting the moral turmoil that he attests to in his monumental post-war work, Philosophy as Metanoetics. The work is framed as a confession of repentance (metanoia) for his support of the war effort. It purports to show a philosophical way to overcome philosophy itself, which suggests that traditional western thought contains the seeds of the ideological framework that led to World War II.
His activities, and the actions of Japan as a whole, haunted Tanabe for the rest of his life. In 1951, he writes:
He lived for another eleven years after writing these words, dying in 1962 in Kita-Karuizawa, Japan.
Thought
As James Heisig and others note, Tanabe and other members of the Kyoto School accepted the western philosophical tradition stemming from the Greeks. This tradition attempts to explain the meaning of human experience in rational terms. This sets them apart from other eastern writers who, though thinking about what life means and how best to live a good life, spoke in religious terms.Although the Kyoto School used western philosophical terminology and rational exploration, they made these items serve the purpose of presenting a unique vision of reality from within their cultural heritage. Specifically, they could enrich a discussion of the ultimate nature of reality using the experience and thought of various forms of Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
like Zen
Zen
Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...
and Pure Land
Pure Land Buddhism
Pure Land Buddhism , also referred to as Amidism in English, is a broad branch of Mahāyāna Buddhism and currently one of the most popular traditions of Buddhism in East Asia. Pure Land is a branch of Buddhism focused on Amitābha Buddha...
, but embedded in an analysis that calls upon conceptual tools forged and honed in western philosophy by thinkers ranging from Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
to Descartes to Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
.
Tanabe's own contribution to this dialog between eastern and western philosophy ultimately sets him off from the other members of the Kyoto School. His radical critique of philosophical reason and method, while stemming from Immanuel Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
and Soren Kierkegaard, which emerges in his work Philosophy as Metanoetics, easily sets him off as a major thinker with a unique position on perennial philosophical questions. Some commentators, for example, suggest that Tanabe's work in Metanoetics
Metanoetics
Metanoetics A neologism coined by Hajime Tanabe in Philosophy as Metanoetics to denote a way of doing philosophy that understands the limits of reason and the power of radical evil...
is a forerunner of deconstructionism.
Tanabe engaged with philosophers of Continental philosophy, especially Existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
. His work is often a dialog with philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, and Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
. Because of his engaging these thinkers, especially the first two, Tanabe's thought has been characterized as Existentialist, though Makoto Ozaki writes that Tanabe preferred the terms "existentialist philosophy of history," "historical existentialism," or "existential metaphysics of history." In his masterpiece, Philosophy as Metanoetics, Tanabe characterized his work as "philosophy that is not a philosophy," foreshadowing various approaches to thinking by deconstructionists.
Like other Existentialists, Tanabe emphasizes the importance of philosophy as being meaning; that is, what humans think about and desire is finding a meaning to life and death. In company with the other members of the Kyoto School, Tanabe believed that the foremost problem facing humans in the modern world is the lack of meaning and its consequent Nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
. Sartre, following Kierkegaard in his Concept of Anxiety, was keen to characterize this as Nothingness. Heidegger, as well, appropriated the notion of Nothingness in his later writings.
The Kyoto School philosophers believed that their contribution to this discussion of Nihilism centered on the Buddhist-inspired concept of nothingness, aligned with its correlate Sunyata. Tanabe and Nishida attempted to distinguish their philosophical use of this concept, however, by calling it Absolute Nothingess. This term differentiates it from the Buddhist religious concept of nothingness, as well as underlines the historical aspects of human existence that they believed Buddhism does not capture.
Tanabe disagreed with Nishida and Nishitani on the meaning of Absolute Nothingness, emphasizing the practical, historical aspect over what he termed the latter's intuition
Intuition (knowledge)
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. "The word 'intuition' comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is often roughly translated as meaning 'to look inside'’ or 'to contemplate'." Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify...
ism. By this, Tanabe hoped to emphasize the working of Nothingness in time, as opposed to an eternal Now. He also wished to center the human experience in action rather than contemplation, since he thought that action embodies a concern for ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
whereas contemplation ultimately disregards this, resulting in a form of Monism
Monism
Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic...
, after the mold of Plotinus
Plotinus
Plotinus was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas and he is of the Platonic tradition...
and Hegel. That is, echoing Kierkegaard's undermining in Philosophical Fragments
Philosophical Fragments
Philosophical Fragments was a Christian philosophic work written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. It was the first of three works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, the other two were Johannes Climacus, 1841 and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical...
of systematic philosophy
Systematic philosophy
Systematic philosophy is a generic term that applies to philosophical methods and approaches that attempt to provide a framework in reason that can explain all questions and problems related to human life. Examples of systematic philosophers include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, and...
from Plato to Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...
to Hegel, Tanabe questions whether there is an aboriginal condition of preexisting awareness that can or must be regained to attain enlightenment.
Tanabe's insistence on this point is not simply philosophical and instead points again to his insistence that the proper mode of human being is action, especially ethics. However, he is critical of the notion of a pre-existing condition of enlightenment because he accepts the Kantian notion of radical evil
Radical evil
Radical evil A phrase coined by Kant in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone.There Kant writes:- Bibliography :Huang, Hshuan,...
, wherein humans exhibit an ineluctable propensity to act against their own desires for the good and instead perpetrate evil.
Demonstratio of Christianity
Tanabe's "Demonstratio of Christianity" presents religionReligion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
as a cultural entity in tension with the existential meaning that religion plays in individual lives. Tanabe uses the terms genus to represent the universality of form that all entities strive for, contrasting them with the stable, though ossified form they can become as species as social systems.
Tanabe contraposes Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
and Christ
Christ
Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...
, represented here as the opposition between Paul
Paul
Paul may refer to:*Paul , a given name or surname -Christianity:*Paul the Apostle Paul may refer to:*Paul (name), a given name or surname (includes a list of people with that name)-Christianity:*Paul the Apostle Paul may refer to:*Paul (name), a given name or surname (includes a list of people with...
and Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
. Jesus, in Tanabe's terms, is a historical being who manifests the action of Absolute Nothingness, or God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
understood in non-theistic terms. God is beyond all conceptuality and human thinking, which can only occur in terms of self-identity, or Being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
. God becomes, as manifested in human actions, though God can never be reduced to being, or self-identity.
For Tanabe, humans have the potential to realize compassionate divinity, Nothingness, through continual death and resurrection, by way of seeing their nothingness. Tanabe believes that the Christian Incarnation
Incarnation
Incarnation literally means embodied in flesh or taking on flesh. It refers to the conception and birth of a sentient creature who is the material manifestation of an entity, god or force whose original nature is immaterial....
narrative is important for explaining the nature of reality, since he believed Absolute Nothingness becoming human exemplifies the true nature of the divine, as well as exemplar to realization of human being in relationship to divinity. Jesus signifies this process in a most pure form, thereby setting an example for others to follow.
Ultimately, Tanabe chooses philosophy over religion, since the latter tends toward socialization and domestication of the original impulse of the religious action. Philosophy, understood as Metanoetics
Metanoetics
Metanoetics A neologism coined by Hajime Tanabe in Philosophy as Metanoetics to denote a way of doing philosophy that understands the limits of reason and the power of radical evil...
, always remains open to questions and the possibility self-delusion in the form of radical evil
Radical evil
Radical evil A phrase coined by Kant in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone.There Kant writes:- Bibliography :Huang, Hshuan,...
. Therefore, Tanabe's statement is a philosophy "of" religion.
Primary Sources
Tanabe, Hajime, "Demonstratio of Christianity", in Introduction to the philosophy of Tanabe: According to the English translation of the seventh chapter of the demonstratio of Christianity, translated by Makoto Ozaki, Rodopi Bv Editions (January 1990), ISBN 90-5183-205-2, ISBN 978-90-5183-205-1, .--, "The Logic of The Species as Dialectics," trns. David Dilworth; Taira Sato, in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1969), pp. 273–288. [Available as pdf through JSTOR]
--, Philosophy as Metanoetics (Nanzan studies in religion and culture), Yoshinori Takeuchi, Valdo Viglielmo, and James W. Heisig (Translators), University of California Press (April 1987), ISBN 0-520-05490-3.
Books and Theses
Adams, Robert William, The feasibility of the philosophical in early Taishô Japan [microform] : Nishida Kitarô and Tanabe Hajime, Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1991.Dilworth, David A. and Valdo H. Viglielmo (translators and editors); with Agustin Jacinto Zavala, Sourcebook for modern Japanese philosophy : selected documents, Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1998.
Fredericks, James L., Alterity in the thought of Tanabe Hajime and Karl Rahner [microform], Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1988.
Heisig, James W., "Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School", Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture, University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
Ozaki, Makoto, Individuum, Society, Humankind: The Triadic Logic of Species According to Hajime Tanabe (Brill's Japanese Studies Library), Brill Academic Publishers (April 2001), ISBN 90-04-12118-8, ISBN 978-90-04-12118-8.
Pattison, George, Agnosis: Theology in the Void, Palgrave Macmillan (February 1997), ISBN 0-312-16206-5. ISBN 978-0-312-16206-1.
Unno, Taitetsu, and James W. Heisig (Editor), The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture), Asian Humanities Press (June 1990), ISBN 0-89581-872-8, ISBN 978-0-89581-872-0 .
Articles
Heisig, James W., "Tanabe's Logic of the Specific and the Critique of the Global Village," in Eastern Buddhist, Autumn95, Vol. 28 Issue 2, p198, (AN 11229660)Cestari, Matteo, "Between Emptiness and Absolute Nothingness: Reflections on Negation in Nishida and Buddhism."
Ruiz, F. Perez, "Philosophy in Present-day Japan," in Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 24, No. 1/2 (1969), pp. 137–168. [Available as pdf through JSTOR]
Sakai, Naoki, "SUBJECT AND SUBSTRATUM : ON JAPANESE IMPERIAL NATIONALISM,"
in Cultural Studies; Jul2000, Vol. 14 Issue 3/4, p462-530 (AN 4052788)
Viglielmo, V. H., "An Introduction to Tanabe Hajime's Existence, Love, and Praxis" in Wandel zwischen den Welten: Festschrift für Johannes Laube, (Peter Lang, 2003) pp. 781–797.
Waldenfels, Hans, "Absolute Nothingness. Preliminary Considerations on a Central Notion in the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro and the Kyoto School," in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 21, No. 3/4 (1966), pp. 354–391. [Available as pdf through JSTOR]
Williams, David, "In defence of the Kyoto School: reflections on philosophy, the Pacific War and the making of a post-White world," in Japan Forum, Sep2000, Vol. 12 Issue 2, p143-156. [Available through Academic Search Premier]
Online Links
Bracken, Joseph, "Absolute Nothingness and The Divine Matrix"Buri, Fritz, "Hajime Tanabe, Philosophy of repentance and Dialectic of Death," in The Buddha-Christ as the Lord of the True Self: The Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School, trns. by Harold H. Oliver, Mercer University Press, 1997, pp. 65–94. [via Google Books]
Driscoll, Mark, "Apoco-elliptic Thought in Modern Japanese Philosophy"
Hajime, Tanabe, Jitsuzon to ai to jissen (Existence, Love, and Praxis) [1947], (from vol. 9, Complete Works of Tanabe Hajime), Tokyo, Chikuma Shobô, 1963. A partial translation by V. H. Viglielmo http://www2.hawaii.edu/~valdo/, for which the Preface, Chapter One, and translator's introductory essay are published in “An Introduction to Tanabe Hajime’s Existence, Love, and Praxis." in Wandel zwischen den Welten: Festschrift für Johannes Laube, Peter Lang, 2003.
Mierzejewska, Anna, "The Buddhist Inspiration of The Concept of Faith in The Philosophy of Hajime Tanabe," in SILVA IAPONICARUM, FASC. VI・第六号, WINTER ・冬 2005, pp. 18–37.
Odin, Steve, "Hajime Tanabe," in The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, pp. 114–117.
Ozaki, Makoto, "On Tanabe's Logic of Species," in ΠΑΔΕΙΑ: Comparative Philosophy.
--- ---, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe: According to the Seventh Chapter of the Demonstratio of Christianity, [Doctoral Thesis] Amsterdam, Eerdmans Publishing Company, [1990?] [via Google Books Online].
Takahane, Yosuke, "Absolute Nothingness and Metanoetics,".
Tanabe, Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, (Nanzan studies in religion and culture), T. Yoshinori (Translator), University of California Press (April 1987). [numerous pages missing] [via Google Books]
Wattles, Jeffrey, "Dialectic and Religious Experience in Tanabe Hajime's Philosophy as Metanoetics"
-- --. Philosophy and Spiritual Experience: The case of a Japanese Shin Buddhist
Yata, Ryosho. "An Examination of the Historical Development of the Concept of Two Aspects of Deeep Belief, Part 1".