Hajime Tanabe - Thought

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 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 intuitionism. 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.