Philosophy as Metanoetics 4

Tanabe meant his Philosophy as metanoetics to be an answer to the ethico-religious Koan which he had to face at the time of Japan's defeat in 1945. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Anticipating the coming unconditional defeat of Japan, he asked Nishida to send his message to the ex-prime minister and member of the ImperiaI House, Konoe , who had been a student of Nishida at Kyoto University. In this message Tanabe tried to persuade the Imperial House to decide to give all its properties to the people for the reconstruction of the nation after the war at its own initiative rather than from the compulsion of the A1lied Powers, so that the Imperial House might be the true symbol of the unity of the people by its self-negating decision. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Although his message was rejected by Nishida as unrealistic, this episode shows how Tanabe, having repented his tacit agreement to imperialistic policies, felt responsible for the disastrous results of the "holy" war, the war which he could not have prevented during the period of ultra-nationalism. The leitmotif of Tanabe's Philosophy as Metanoetics was to criticize radically the totalitarian ideology of the wartime Japan through metanoia (repentance) of its crimes.

What makes Tanabe distinct among the Kyoto school is that he has thought through the problems of history and ethical practice from the standpoint of Nothingness. He criticizes and reformulates Nishida's philosophy of Absolute Nothingness so that clearly he can reject any monistic or totalitarian interpretation of this philosophy.

According to Tanabe, philosophy cannot begin from a self-determination of wholeness because the totality of beings cannot be an object of our intuition. Rather, we can only move from "the microscopic and local" analysis to " the macroscopic and universal" synthesis, from " the differential " equations to "the integral " solutions as Tanabe often

characterizes his own methodology in terms of mathematical physics. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ In his philosophy of science, Tanabe compares Nishida's conception of absolute Nothingness as topos analogously with Lorentz's or Newton's idea of absolute space as something like sensorium dei. Tanabe prefers Einstein's "relative and local" approaches to Lorentz's "absolute and universal" because the latter remains to be a mere dogma whereas the former has a firm foundation in our experiments and observations.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Einstein's theory has its own concept of absolute existence, but this absolute is neither mere-space nor mere-time, but space-time as the four dimensional manifold which we can describe only through our experimental measurements, or what Tanabe calls "action-realization" although we cannot "Intuit" the totality of space-time. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ One of the important amendments which Tanabe has made concerning Nishida's logic of topos is that Tanabe has considered "the contradictory self- identity" as essentially temporally mediated rather than as the absolute principle of immediate intuition. Tanabe criticizes Nishida's metaphysical topology of Nothingness for its lack of dialectics of dynamic temporal activity: philosophy based on the unity of opposites without temporal mediation would remain to be a "speculative" mysticism without any positive principle of historical practice. In the Logic of Species and the Schematism of the World, Tanabe writes; ⁽⁷⁰⁾

Although (Heidegger's fundamental ) ontology of temporal existence needs synthesis with spatial elements if it is to become a concrete ontology of a social being through the schematism of the world, these spatial elements should not be considered as the spatial expression of the infinite topos of Nothingness, or the Eternal Now.. . . Coincidentia oppositorum in the topos of Nothingness conceived as the mere spatiality is nothing more than the static unity of mystical intuition and cannot be the dynamic unity between time and space; this unity would be possible through the mediation of a subject's practice rather than through an immediate intuition of the substratum.

Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming which involve novelty and a discontinuous jump in crisis. ⁽⁷¹⁾ For him history has become "the overall Koan" in which the metaphysical topology of a static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness i n the historical world. Nothingness considered as mere spatiality which abstracts somewhat from a temporal becoming is the mere concept of pure nothingness which Hegel has identified with the pure being in his dialectics; therefore this is not to be confused with Absolute Nothingness which Tanabe considers essentially as the creative principle of self-transformation. ⁽⁷²⁾

Nothingness as the transformative principle of mediation is a key to our understanding of Philosophy as Metanoetics: just as Pure Land Buddhists of Jyodoshinshu, abandoning their own self-power, calls on the name of Amida Buddha as the savior and mediator of sentient beings for their attainment of Freedom (nirvana) , in the same way Tanabe , underscoring the essentia1 finitude of human existence, recommends both metanoia (repentance) and metanoesis (transcendence of reason) as the necessary means by which we are permitted to attain freedom through dying to and being resurrected from the historical world by the grace of the Other Power. If we were able to observe history sub specie aeternitatis, repentance and hope would be meaningless because it would be a folly to care about what has been determined in the past or will necessarily be in the future, as Spinoza clearly states in his Ethics. ⁽⁷³⁾ But we cannot really observe history as if it were an object of our intuition be cause our existence itself has a temporal "ecstatic" structure which is always going beyond or overcoming a previously determined self; it is a "thrown projection" as well as a "projected thrownness" that conforms to and mediates the determination of the past, a transformation of the determined into the determining, and therefore it has to be seen as "an opening up to nothingness". Concerning the relation between the historicity of human reason and metanoesis, Tanabe writes: ⁽⁷⁴⁾

Human reason must be driven through the impasse of contradiction to its own death. And, there, mediated by the transformation of absolute nothingness, it must be restored to a middle way that belongs to neither pole of the contradiction but develops in a new theory as a synthesis of both. This is a circular movement of creativity, a "revolution-qua-restoration" that forms the basic structure of history. . . .In metanoesis the past is not merely a "thrownness" that has passed away and is out of our control, but a present incessantly renewing its meaning and caught up in an unending circularity in accord with the future that mediates it. We might say that "thrown project" is transformed into a "projected thrownness" .

Whereas Heidegger considers death as the ultimate possibility for Dasein, representing the utmost horizon of its existential projection of future potentialities, Tanabe, complementing "thrown project" with "projected thrownness", provides a dialectical category for "the existential communion" which the mere existential analysis of Dasein does not recognize between the dead and the living. In this respect , Tanabe' s dialectics of "thrown project" and "projected thrownness" in the existential communion is quite similar to the Whiteheadian concept of subject-superject, and, therefore, to the concept of "objective immortality" whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ In Either Ontology of Life Or Dialectic of Death dedicated to Heidegger on his 70th birthday, Tanabe criticizes Heidegger's existential analysis of being- toward-death ( Sein zum Tode ) as a "non-relational (unbeztügliche )" solipsistic singularity f or its ignoring the essentia1 relatedness of the living with the dead.

Tanabe underscores the existence of communio sanctorum⁽⁷⁶⁾ which the living hold with the dead. Whereas Heidegger dealt with death as a singular point of his ontology of life, Tanabe may be said to have resolved and redeemed this singularity into life in his dialectics of death. Just as Mahayana Buddhists transformed the Hinayana concept of nirvana as absolute death into the saving principle of life in their conception of aparatisthita-nirvana(the nirvana that does not remain in absolute nirvana on account of great karuna ), Tanabe has transformed Heidegger's solipsistic concept of absolute death into an essentially communal one, thus expanding the context in which we can dialectically discuss both death and resurrected life.