Tanabe Hajime and the Kyoto School

Self, World, and Knowledge

Takeshi Morisato

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350101739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía oriental

This introduction to Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), the critical successor of the "father of contemporary Japanese philosophy" Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945), focuses on Tanabe's central philosophical ideas and perspective on self, world, knowledge, and the purpose of philosophizing. Addressing Tanabe's life-long study of the history of Anglo-European philosophy, Takeshi Morisato explores his notable philosophical ideas including the logic of species, metanoetics, and philosophy of death. He sets out Tanabe's belief that the Anglo-European framework of thinking is incapable of giving sufficient answers to the philosophical questions concerning the self and the world together and discusses the central ideas he developed while working in both Judeo-Christian and Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Featuring comprehensive further reading lists, discussion questions, and teaching notes, this is an ideal introductory guide to Tanabe Hajime for anyone interested in Japanese and World philosophies, as well as the early development of the Kyoto School.

Part One

Essays

1

Tanabe Hajime and the Philosophy of (No-)Self

Three Senses of the Self and the Logic of Species

Tanabe’s notion of “self” can be articulated in relation to the “logic of species,” which includes the principle of “absolute mediation” (zettai baikai,

) and anticipates his later formulation of the “metanoetic” (zangedō-teki,

) worldview. To avoid obvious confusion over the term “self,” I would like to emphasize here at the outset that it could convey multiple senses throughout his work. First, it could refer to the concrete, single individual that each of us can recognize as the “I.” The singularity of one’s existence as a this/once is an indispensable factor in ascribing this meaning to the term. Second, it could also mean a group of individuals that holds a certain identity or a characteristic by which we can distinguish its specificity from other groups of individuals. This represents a communal self that we can recognize as the “we.” Tanabe strives to show how we cannot talk about the social and individual self apart from each other: hence, we have to keep in mind that they are integral to our process of defining one’s selfhood. Last, the term could also function as a metaphysical notion or principle that gives an ideality of selfhood. This concept is foundational for the ways in which the first two senses of self are articulated. It could be seen as a merely formal and empty concept in itself, but plays a significant role in determining the singular and the communal sense of the “self.” In line with the Mahayana Buddhist tradition (especially the Zen and the Pure Land schools in Japan), this self is recognized as praxis of “no-self” or what Tanabe later calls an “act of nothingness.” It is certainly not anything we can call “self” in an ordinary sense of the word in English (or in Japanese). But without it, Tanabe thinks, we cannot talk about the proper relation between the individual and the societal self. These three senses roughly correspond to the threefold “logic of species” and we will examine in the following how this logic unfolds Tanabe’s polyvocal understanding of “self.”

The Logic of Species and the Absolute Mediation (

)

The Logic of Species in THZ consists of thirteen essays that are somewhat awkwardly compiled into two bulky volumes. The whole text amounts to more than 900 pages and even though they were supposed to establish his own version of “social ontology,” Tanabe was never satisfied with the end result of these articles. Naturally, neither his colleagues nor his students, nor even influential publishers could convince him to turn them into a monograph, regardless of the fact that they were celebrated as the origin of Tanabean philosophy. His dying wish was to have them compiled into the complete works simply as a historical record and never to be criticized unless the critic has read them in their entirety.

The difficulty of restructuring this massive work into a single volume lies not only in its overwhelming size, but also in the fact that the main concern of the logic shifts from the early engagement with the question concerning the state’s obligatory power over individual(s)—which includes a series of questions regarding a constitution of state authority, the unity of an ethnic, racial, or particular society (minzoku,

), and the rational foundation of state, etc.—to the later methodological question concerning the foundation of philosophy, which is examined in terms of the problem of “mediation” (baikai,

). In relation to the later concern, Tanabe argues that the history of philosophy, in its ongoing task of achieving a comprehensive understanding of reality (including human existence), exhibits a constant struggle between emphasizing the primacy of the universal and maintaining faithfulness to the irreducibility of the single individual. In order to understand reality, we would have to take into account their proper intermediation and to do that, he proposes “species” as the middle term that serves as the foundation for grounding his insight. The threefold distinction of “genus,” “species,” and “individual” thus provides us with the ontological framework in which we can articulate the threefold sense of self.

There are two interrelated concepts that Tanabe develops as the general “method of philosophy”: (1) “absolute mediation” and (2) “history.” The former focuses on the proper way in which we can conceive of the intermediation between any opposing metaphysical terms, while the latter sets forth the ultimate standpoint from which we can understand reality in concrete terms, which is supposedly comprehensive of both the human and the nonhuman standpoint (and in Tanabe’s terms, “world-scheme” or “space-and-time”). In the “Logic of Species and World-Scheme” (hereafter, LSWS), Tanabe argues that absolute mediation is the core structure of the dialectical logic of species and further claims that we have to attend to the way in which it intermediates both positive and negative terms. First, he claims that the logic of species, as absolute mediation, cannot be a kind of thinking that “abstract[s] the non-rational and include[s] what is rational alone as its content.”¹ Rather, as proper dialectical reasoning,

the logic that denies immediacy must suspend it (i.e., the negation of self) as the mediatory moment of itself and deny [the immediacy] by affirming it under the condition of absolute negation (which is a negation of negation); otherwise, the logic cannot truly deny the immediacy. Thus, [the] non-rationality that immediacy possesses should not be thrown out but must be maintained as the mediator of the logic. If we say that the logic that denies this [immediacy] is rational, it should not be that which abandons the non-rational by merely opposing it. But rather, it should constitute non-rationality-qua-rationality that affirms it through negating it. With regard to this sense of absolute rationality, [the] non-rationality of immediacy must be an indispensable mediatory moment in the process of establishing itself. This standpoint is the absolute mediation that turns the non-rational into the medium of its own self through maintaining [the non-rational].²

This intermediation of opposing terms like affirmation–negation, rationality–non-rationality, and universal–individual, based on the notion of “absolute mediation,” continuously surfaces in Tanabe’s philosophical writings, especially when he expresses his critical stance toward other thinkers. What is important to note here is that he proposes the notion of “species” as the middle ground, where we can be truthful to the concrete manifestation of the irresolvable tension between two contradictory terms. Species as the medium of the contradiction, therefore, cannot be the positive term that assimilates the negative into the further determination of the positive (even though it is possible to be mistaken as such). In this sense, we have no choice but to recognize it as the negative. However, we cannot simply equate it with the determinate notion of the negative that is placed in its opposition to the affirmative. As we will see, species is the principle of self-negation that transcends the binary opposition of the affirmative and the negative. It should be seen as the locus in which we can tarry with the negative (without quickly subsuming it into the affirmative). It is perhaps useful to note that Tanabe is adding the third term “species” to the two opposing terms of the affirmative and the negative as the greater negative, namely, the neither/nor in which we can keep the contradiction of these terms as what it is. This is what he means by “absolute mediation” in his logic of species.

Defining Genus

It is quite challenging, therefore, to define one of three metaphysical terms in a determinate and coherent fashion, precisely because each definition presupposes its relation to others in this dynamic structure of dialectical reasoning. Simply put, we cannot define one term in the logic of species without defining the others insofar as they are to be articulated through the complex process of the absolute mediation. If one term could mean a number of different things depending on how we formulate its relation to other terms, moreover, it is a matter of course that some parts of the explanations of the single term will have to wait for further elucidation vis-à-vis other terms and vice versa. In what follows, therefore, I will provide a preliminary outline of what Tanabe means by each term, in the awareness that this does not exhaust Tanabe’s understanding of absolute mediation. This exercise is necessary if we are to demonstrate how Tanabe sees their mediatory relations to each other and why he speaks of the “logic of species.”

By genus, Tanabe indicates the notion of the universal. It is an abstract notion or mere ideality when it is understood apart from other terms. In other words, it is nonexistent in and of itself. In the context of social ontology, he refers to it as the totality of all human beings (i.e., humanity) and further attributes the notions of the “state” and the “(divine) absolute” to it. In the context of metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, he argues that it represents the notion of “nothingness” as a polyvocal, open unity of all that is, and describes it as a “will to salvation” or the “city of bodhisattva” (from which all sentient beings are derived and to which they all return).³ It, therefore, represents a sort of principle of unity and rationality that is at work in other terms such as species and individual. However, if we interpret genus merely as the totality of all beings in immanent terms, Tanabe argues, we must be mistaking it for an unmediated sense of species or reducing genus to a bad (i.e., unmediated) sense of species. To understand genus properly, as what it is, we must first conceive of it as “absolute negation” or negative unity that constitutes the inseparable unity of all terms without reducing their differences to an unmediated sameness. In this sense, the concept of nothingness is indispensable for properly interpreting Tanabe’s rendering of genus. (We will come back to this notion when we examine his formulation of metanoetics.)

Defining Species

By species, the Japanese philosopher indicates the notion of the particular, that is to say, that which is more universal than the singular and more specific than the universal. It is described as the substrate (kitai,

) of all living beings, and, unlike genus, it can be seen as being both immediate and irrational in itself. Species in its immediacy, in other words, constitutes a continuous and particular whole that compiles a multitude of individuals into a relatively determinate group, and this specific group can serve as the foundation of individual lives. The prime example of this relation between species and individual would be the relation of a nation state and its citizens. If I reflect on my existence as a singular person, I can easily think of my nationality, Japanese, as a specific characteristic of it. The socio-political identification of the nation state is usually more or less given immediately (which is to say, it is usually easy to identify the nationality of an individual) and my citizenship in this particular country has provided me with certain elements that have enabled me to live my life as a free individual in this world.⁴

What is interesting about Tanabe’s argument is that rationality ultimately belongs to genus. In view of this fact, a species can provide no rational ground for legitimizing its identity over the others. Its specificity is simply beyond reason. As I will explain later, Tanabe comes to argue that species can serve as the ground for manifesting the ideality of genus in concrete reality, thereby highlighting the possibility that various forms of species can be placed in a hierarchical order. In other words, he does not deny the possibility that one species or a small group of them can come to play a leading role in manifesting the ideality and rationality of genus vis-à-vis other species. However, even in this process of relativizing species by means of genus, this realization of ideality is made through the free act of individuals (guaranteed by the general practice of “social justice”), and whether its formal specificity should be defined in one way or another in relation to the manifestation of the rational whole, remains completely contingent. Precisely in this sense, Tanabe argues that the “species is the grounding source of [the] individual’s immediate life and what ultimately ought to be denied [since] it only gives the expedient being that exists as the negative mediator of absolute nothingness’s manifestation in this world.”⁵

If we revisit the example of my nationality, the specificity of being Japanese can manifest its rational ground only when its citizens live up to the ideality of humanity (which Tanabe explains as practicing the act of nothingness or carrying out the act of no-self) and transform their socio-political belonging in the nation state into an enabling ground for an open community of free individuals. But this concrete manifestation of the universal ideal of humanity (genus) can be made through any specific group of individuals, and there is no reason why it has to be done by means of one form more than by some other, as regards their specific way of living their lives. When a group of individuals identifies the source of its individual life in a specific socio-political milieu (species) as the ultimate ground of all things (genus) and fails to recognize the contingency and irrationality of the former in its negative relation to the latter, then we witness the totalitarian dictum of ultra-nationalism, where the participants erroneously reduce genus to a bad (i.e., unmediated) sense of species. Tanabe was clearly against this reduction of the notion of genus to the unmediated sense of species.

To ground the contingency and irrationality of the specific, Tanabe notices that the notion of species must represent something more than the given irrational that we can immediately talk about as something irreducible to our individual existence in concreto or to the ideality of human existence in abstracto. In response to a criticism that Tanabe’s rendering of species seems to lack any mediation, regardless of the fact that it should demonstrate an axis of absolute mediation, he replies in “Social Ontological Structure of Logic” how species’ in-between status in relation to genus and individual represents the principle of self-negation. More precisely, it refers to an endless movement of auto-generated oppositions that has its source in nothing other than itself:

Species does not possess the negative outside itself but within itself carries that which denies itself. This self-negation has nothing beyond itself that grounds it and it is the self-negation that is entirely specific to species. The reason why species is not universal but particular is because it is simply self-negating and does not give any absolute negation [that pertains to genus]. When we say that the particularization of the universal is universal’s self-alienation, what we mean is that absolute negation [of genus] is reduced to self-negation [of species]. But without this self-negation, we cannot talk about species as species. Nor can we know its existence. The fact that we have already known and been talking about it [as the immediately given] presupposes some negation of, and oppositi...