Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School

11 Other-Power and Absolute Passivity in Tanabe and Levinas

11 Other-Power and Absolute Passivity in Tanabe and Levinas Brian Schroeder Nishida Kitarō’s project was, in part, to provide a rational ground for the philosophy of Zen. His junior colleague and successor, Tanabe Hajime, departed however from his focus on Zen and embraced instead the approach of Shinran (1173–1262), the founder of True Pure Land (Jōdo Shin-shū) Buddhism.1 This is most evident in Tanabe’s major work, Philosophy as Metanoetics, which was written at the end of World War II and published in 1946. Tanabe did remain faithful though to Nishida’s desire to explicate Buddhist thought in a rational manner, thereby conjoining more fully the disciplines of philosophy and religious thought in an effort to generate a genuine world philosophy. A distinguishing aspect of many associated with the Kyoto School was the adoption of a decidedly religious orientation at a time when the major currents of European thinking, such as existentialism and phenomenology, were moving away from such a stance. On Nishida’s advice, Tanabe went to Germany from 1922 to 1924 to study with Husserl. It was there that he fell under the influence of the young Heidegger. Despite his early attention to Heidegger’s philosophy, however, Tanabe ultimately moved away from hermeneutic phenomenology, in part no doubt because his study of Hegel led him to think in a more dialectical manner, culminating in his original development of a “logic of species,”2 which he then deployed in support of the Japanese state during World War II; but perhaps also—we may speculate —because Heidegger did not experience, or reveal at any rate, the profound sense of repentance and remorse that Tanabe did following the end of that war, and certainly did not develop a full treatment of the question of “the other.”3 The European thinker who emerged from that era with the most consequential view of otherness for recent thinking was Emmanuel Levinas, who 194   | Brian Schroeder was also a student of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Levinas’s first major original work, Totality and Infinity,4 was published in France in 1961, and it is highly unlikely that Tanabe, who died in 1962, would have been familiar with his work. Also, like many other Europeans, Levinas indicated neither acquaintance with nor interest in the comparative work being done in Japan. Yet despite their pronounced differences, and perhaps more than that of any other contemporary thinker, the philosophy of Levinas stands closest to the heart of Tanabe’s metanoetic thinking.5 One of the difficulties that ensues in constructing a dialogue between works such as Tanabe’s Philosophy as Metanoetics and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity results from their remarkably similar composition. Neither is written, as are most philosophical essays, with the intention of putting forth a set of arguments to defend a particular thesis. Jacques Derrida’s suggestive 1963 description of Levinas’s text is pertinent for Tanabe’s own work. Both Totality and Infinity and Philosophy as Metanoetics pursue a “thematic development that is neither purely descriptive nor purely deductive. [They proceed] with the insistence of waves on a beach: return and repetition, always, of the same wave against the same shore, in which, however, as each return recapitulates itself, it also infinitely renews and enriches itself.” Being more of a “work of art than a treatise,” such texts are “beyond rhetorical abuse,” protecting them as well from any structured critique.6 Given the Buddhist predilection for paradox, this may not be such a problem for the reception of a work like Philosophy of Metanoetics , but for one such as Totality and Infinity, which implies from the start a radical self-critique on the part of reason or philosophy itself, to the degree of having to relinquish its attempt to render the meaning of ethical metaphysics theoretically graspable, it is a significant hurdle to surmount. This is, however, what arguably distinguishes ethical-religious discourse from the purely philosophical , and what leads both thinkers to dissociate the former from the latter on the foundational level. Each appeals to an experience of the Other which occurs prior to and remains beyond the total grasp of a theoretical reason. The critical difference that determines this relationship is that between the ineffable absolutely other, in Levinas, and absolute nothingness in Tanabe. The present essay brings together the thinking of Tanabe and Levinas in order to assess their respective interpretations of alterity in light of their...