Hajime Tanabe - Biography

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 Heisig. 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:

But as the tensions of World War II grew ever more fierce and with it the regulation of thinking, weak-willed as I was, I found myself unable to resist and could not but yield to some degree to the prevalent mood, which is a shame deeper than I can bear. The already blind militarism had led so many of our graduates precipitously to the battlefields; among the fallen were more than ten from philosophy, for which I feel the height of responsibility and remorse. I can only lower my head and earnestly lament my sin.

He lived for another eleven years after writing these words, dying in 1962 in Kita-Karuizawa, Japan.