Philosopher
Tanabe Hajime
1885–1962
Also known as Hajime Tanabe
Nishida's colleague and critic in the Kyoto School, who rethought absolute nothingness as 'absolute mediation' and, after the war, wrote a philosophy of repentance, Philosophy as Metanoetics.
Since the absolute, as nothingness, must act as an absolute mediating force, it presupposes relative being as its medium.
Tanabe Hajime was, with Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji, one of the three most prominent members of the Kyoto School, and is often considered its co-founder. He studied with Heidegger in the early 1920s and on his return in 1924 became the first scholar anywhere to write an article on Heidegger’s thought. His own method was intensely dialectical, developed through a long study of Hegel.
His 1930 essay “Requesting Instruction from Professor Nishida”, sharply criticising his colleague, is seen by many as the moment the Kyoto School became more than a circle of Nishida’s disciples. He later applied his “logic of the specific” to argue for the Japanese nation-state as a model for others. Towards the end of the war he renounced these claims, and Philosophy as Metanoetics, first given as lectures in 1944, called for self-critique from himself, the nation and human reason as such.
Key ideas
- Against Nishida’s place of nothingness
- Tanabe charged that Nishida’s “place of absolute nothingness” was a kind of Plotinian emanation resting on mystical intuition, crossing the line from philosophy into religion, and that as an unchanging basis it fell back into a metaphysics of being.
- Absolute mediation
- Absolute nothingness is not an enveloping place but a movement of absolute negation. It works only through relative beings, so the absolute needs the relative, and nothingness needs being, as much as the reverse.
- The logic of the specific
- Between the individual and universal humanity stands the “specific”, the ethnic community; the nation-state gives it rational form. Tanabe went on to cast Japan as an archetype for other nations, a step critics call inconsistent with his own logic.
- Metanoetics
- Reason, pressing its own power, runs into contradictions and must repeatedly die to itself, to be reborn through what Tanabe, borrowing the language of Shinran’s Pure Land Buddhism, called “Other-power”. Philosophy becomes a way of repentance (zangedō), for the philosopher and the nation alike.
- Tradition
- Japanese
- Region
- Kyoto
- Schools
- Kyoto School
- Period
- Modern Japanese
Influences
Influenced by
Tanabe Hajime1885–1962
Influenced by
Tanabe Hajime1885–1962
Where these links come from
- Tanabe Hajime drew on G. W. F. Hegel. Source: Bret W. Davis, The Kyoto School, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Tanabe Hajime drew on and argued against Nishida Kitarō. Source: Bret W. Davis, The Kyoto School, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Tanabe Hajime studied with Martin Heidegger. Source: Bret W. Davis, The Kyoto School, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Philosophy as Metanoetics (Zangedō toshite no tetsugaku)
- Requesting Instruction from Professor Nishida, 1930
Sources
- Bret W. Davis, The Kyoto School, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy