Individuum, Society, Humankind: The Triadic Logic of Species According to Hajime Tanabe

278 Pages·2001·33.493 MB·English

by  Makoto Ozaki

INDIVIDUUM, SOCIETY, HUMANKIND
BRILL'S
JAPANESE STUDIES
LIBRARY
EDITED BY
H. BOLITHO AND K.W. RADTKE
VOLUME 14
INDIVIDUUM, SOCIETY;
HUMANKIND
The Triadic Logicof Species According to Hajime Tanabe
BY
MAKOTO OZAKI
BRILL
LEIDEN .BOSTON' KOLN
2001
Thisbook isprintedonacid-freepaper.
On the cover:letterof HajimeTanabe (datedMarch25, 1956)addressed to
ProfDr.KuninosukeImaedaonmattersof spaceand relativity.
LibraryofCongress Cataloging-in-PublicationData
Ozaki,Makoto, 1946-
Individuum,society,humankind:thetriadiclogicofspeciesaccordingtoHajime
TanabeI byMakotoOzaki.
p. : em.- (Brill'sJapaneseStudieslibrary,ISSN 0925-6512 ;v.14)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN 9004121188(alk.paper)
I. Tanabe,Hajime, 1885-1962. 1.Title. II.Series.
BL5244.T34093 2001
181'.12-dc21 01-025141
eIP
DieDeutscheBibliothek-CIP-Einheitsaufnalune
Ozaki,Makoto:
Individuum,society,humankind :thetriadiclogicof speciesaccording
toHajimeTanabeI byMakotoOzaki.- Leiden;Boston ;Koln:Brill,
2001
(Brill'sjapanesestudieslibrary ; Vol 14)
ISBN 90-04-1211B-B
ISSN 0925-6512
ISBN 9004 121188
©Cop),right2001byKoninklijkeBn'llNV,Leiden,TheNetherlands
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1. The Logic of Species 5
2. Eternal Objects and Species 17
3. The World as the Active Presence of Eternity 27
4. Matter and Substratum: Some Controversy .41
5. Beauty and Contemplation 57
6. Nature and History 69
7. Religion and Politics in Negative Mediation 79
8. Action 99
9. Experience 107
10. Space and Relativity 121
11. The Philosophical Tendencies in Today's Japan 135
12. Toward a Future Theology: Buddha and Christ in
Perspective 153
13. The Local and the Microscopic: The Distinguishing
Characteristics of Modem Japan 177
Conclusion 241
Glossary 247
Bibliography 255
Index 265

PREFACE
In the dawn of modern Japan Western philosophy was intro
duced into the intellectual circle and endeavors were made to
create a new synthesis between Eastern and Western philoso
phy. This was primarily led by Kitaro Nishida and followed by
his disciples Hajime Tanabe, Tetsuro Watsuji, Kiyoshi Miki,
and Keiji Nishitani, or even his contemporary Satomi Taka
hashi, and so on. Among them Nishida's philosophy is rather
widespread with the western language translation, and the next
Nishitani's. Tanabe's philosophy, however, is less known even
in today's Japan, despite its importance for the philosophical
construction. This is partly because Nishida and Nishitani are
in some sense continuous in their contents of thought, whereas
Tanabe makes a keen criticism of Nishida and establishes his
own position as different from Nishida, even though they com
monly stand by the fundamental notion of Absolute Nothing
ness. The difference between them lies in their interpretations
of the meaning of the same notion. This difference, however,
may be parallel to the ancient Chinese situations in which
Buddhism was introduced into China.
In the Eastern traditions, there are two streams of the idea of
Nothingness: one is the Buddhist, and the other the inheritance
of Lao-tzu and Zhuang-zi. While the Buddhist idea of Nothing
ness or Emptiness signifiesnon-substantiality of any entity in the
phenomenal world, the concept of Nothingness in the tradition
of Lao-tzu and Zhuang-zi means ultimate reality from which ev
erything comes into being and to which it goes out. The latter is
similar to the Neo-Platonic idea of the One as supra-Being or
pre-Being from which all things in the universe emanate and to
which they return. And Nishida's idea of Absolute Nothingness
is akin to such Neo-Platonic emanationist One, and bears a re
semblance to the ancient Chinese notion of Nothingness, inher
ited by Lao-tzu and Zhuang-zi. Tanabe, however, apprehends
Absolute Nothingness in terms of the self-negating conversion in
action, and his apprehension is more appropriate for what is
meant by the Buddhist idea of Emptiness as non-substantiality
which entails a perpetual negation without reaching finality. In
Ylll PREFACE
other words, while Nishida's sounds static and quiet, Tanabe's ac
tive and dynamic in character. Without reminding of this distinc
tion, one wouldfail to comprehend the difference between them.
In viewof those historical circumstances, even within the same
academic circleof the so-called Kyoto school philosophy of mod
ern Japan, the distinctively separate poles are clear enough. In
addition,Tanabe's way of thinking is inevitably involved in the
long history of Japanese Buddhist thought, and my analysis goes
to the hidden influence of the Tendai Hongaku thought, pre
vailed in the medieval Japan, on Tanabe beyond his own refer
ence to Shinran and Dogen. Tanabe's Triadic Logicof Species as
the dialectic is expected to contribute to a new creative synthesis
of Eastern and Western cultural and civilizationaldiversity.
I am grateful to the editors of the journals, in which several
chapters with slight revision originally appeared, for the permis
sion of reprint in this book. These are acknowledged in the
notes to respective chapter. I also owe the debt to the Tanabe
Memorial Society, Faculty of Letters, University of Kyoto, for
the permission of translating Tanabe's text into English.
Warm thanks are due to Professor Dr.T.E. Vetter,under whom
Icompletedmy doctoral dissertation at Leiden and under whose
constant support I have continued my research on Tanabe up to
the present time. I am also greatly indebted to Professor Dr.
Johannes Laube, who invited me to engage in research and lec
tureship at the Department of Japanology, East Asian Institute,
University of Munich, and without whose continuous en
couragement and invaluable suggestions even after my return to
Japan the present work could not appear. Moreover, I wish to
express my deep gratitude to Dr. Bruce Winter, the Warden of
the Tyndale House, Cambridge Biblical Research, for his
generous help of publishing my collected papers from the re
nowned academic publisher Brill in the book form. Finally, I
am particularly grateful to Professor K.W. Radtke, formerly at
Leiden and now at Waseda University, Tokyo, Albert
Hoffstadt, the Editor, and Patricia Radder, Assistant Editor,
who incorporate my work into the Brill's series of Japanese Stu
dies Library.
Okayama, Japan, October 2000
Makoto Ozaki
INTRODUCTION
Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962), the so-called Kyoto School philo
sopher of modern Japan, explores his own unique Triadic
Logic of Species in the form of the Dialectic as the foundation
of his whole system of thought. He creates a new synthesis of
Western and Eastern philosophy on the basis of the traditional
Buddhist notion of Emptiness or Absolute Nothingness, the
latter of which was first used by his mentor Kitaro Nishida
under whose influence Tanabe develops his ideas in a different
way from Nishida's. Nishida's system of thought focuses upon
the concept of ultimate Place or Topos as Absolute Nothing
ness which encompasses everything in the world (Cf. Chap.1).
Tanabe is very critical of this seemingly static logic of Place as
dichotomic in character and further develops his own logic in
the form of the Triadic Dialectic of the three parties, the
genus or universal, the species or particular, and the indi
vidual. Tanabe's Triadic Logic or Trinity, however, is different
from the ancient Christian doctrine of the Trinity in that the
latter occurs in the eternal dimension of God, whereas the for
mer takes place in the historical realm in which human activity
plays a central role. This means that Tanabe stands by practic
al action, without resorting to any type of contemplation of
truth, and his goal is to bring about the self-realization or self
manifestation of eternity in history through the mediation of
free human subjective action, so that his philosophy aims at
constructing the sort of philosophy of history.
His career starts with the philosophy of science, including
mathematics, culminates in the philosophy of religion, which is
divided into two types, i.e., the Buddhist way of Metanoia and
the Dialectical Demonstration of Christianity, and terminates
in the philosophy of science again, though quite differently
from the first one. This is due to the fact that his mature
thought, covering both areas of religion and science, is pene
trated by his fundamental position of the Triadic Logic of Spe
cies. So it is highly significant to analyse the logic in question
in detail; the Triadic Logic of Species is not only applicable to
2 INTRODUCTION
such contemporary problems as medical and environmental
ethics, but also to multi-cultural and cross-civilizational com
municative situations. This is because medical and environ
mental ethics as well as multi-cultural civilizational patterns
are to be approached and interpreted in terms of the Logic of
Species which mediates between genus-like universality and in
dividuality. The Logic of Species deals with a wide range of
topics such as space, time, eternity, action, history beauty, art,
nature, causality, freedom, relativity, matter, form, substra
tum, etc. These issues are discussed in regard to Whitehead,
Spinoza, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and other Neo
Platonists.
Tanabe was born in 1885in Tokyo, Japan, and died in 1962
in Kita-Karuizawa, a famous resort village near Tokyo, where
he lived and continued his philosophical activities after his re
tirement from the University of Kyoto. He was educated at
the Imperial University of Tokyo where he first studied mathe
matics and then moved on to study philosophy. After his gra
duation, he temporarily taught English at the junior high
school of which his father was the principal. At the age of 27,
he was appointed as Lecturer of TlJe Introduction of Science
at Tohoku University, Sendai, in the northern part of Japan.
In 1918 he obtained his doctorate on the thesis of A Philo
sophical Study of Mathematical Reasoning from the University
of Tokyo, and a year later was invited by Professor Kitaro
Nishida to the Imperial University of Kyoto, the old capital, as
an Associate Professor. Between 1922 and 1924 he stayed at
first in Berlin and then in Freiburg, Germany, as a research
fellow, sent by Japan's Ministry of Education, where he met
E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, Oscar Becker and others who
much influenced his entire life. In 1927he succeeded Professor
Nishida, and then gradually became critical of his mentor
Nishida's thought and developed his own idea in the direction
of the Logic of Species through the controversy with his con
temporary philosopher Satomi Takahashi, then Professor at
Tohoku University (Cf. Chap. 4).
Compared with his mentor Nishida, Tanabe is less well
known, and as a result, there is not much research on
Tanabe's philosophy. The collected works of Tanabe consisting
of 15 volumes were published in 1964, but only several works