Leonard

OVERCOMING WARTIME NATIONALISM: TANABE POST NISHIDA

Gray Leonard
American University, CAS 2016
February 29, 2016

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Abstract
A logic of nationalism pervades the philosophy of history that the Kyoto Schools Nishida Kitar
developed during the 1930s. History for Nishida is determined by the hard labor of man.
However, unlike Marxist labor, Nishidas labor is located at the site of historic-corporeal
species or Gemeinschaft, an essence that possesses the cultural significance of a people. A
culture will always attempt to dominate others: imperialist expansion is the condition for a
culture to determine an epoch of history. Nishida seeks to recoup the role of reason in historical
progress; he thus claims that expanding to the point of universality is societys process of
becoming-rational. Although a society has an irrational myth that constitutes its origin, it is
through expansion in the world that it claims rationality. This is similar to the Eurocentric
philosophies of Kant and Hegel: only Europe has logos. Because Nishida does not reject the role
that reason has in historical progress, he cannot overcome the limits of his European influences.
Tanabe Hajime articulates this limit in his Philosophy as Metanoetics, written after Japans
defeat in the Second World War. He provides an absolute critique of reason that displaces
Nishidas rational-teleological history. Instead, he claims that faith, which negates reason, is the
condition for engagement with the historical world. As such, the faithful individual can act in
the historical world without mediation through the closed identity of the Gemeinschaft.
Introduction
Philosophy during the Enlightenment in Europe needed a new metaphysical grounding; it
found this grounding in reason. For Kant, reason is a capacity of the mind to understand
phenomena. For Hegel, who is foundational for Nishida, reason is not only a condition of
understanding but the force behind history: worldly reason, or Geist, constitutes a historical
event in the same way that for Kant the noumenal thing-in-itself constitutes a phenomenon. The
interaction between man and reason is hierarchical: man can act historically but he is never
aware of what his historical actions will cause reason is outside the subject. As Hegel writes,
"The states, nations [Vlker], and individuals involved in this business of the world spirit emerge
with their own particular and determinate principle [...] In their consciousness of this actuality
and in their preoccupation with its interests, they are at the same time the unconscious
instruments and organs of that inner activity [Geist] in which the shapes which they themselves

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assume pass away []"1 Nishida Kitar, head of the Kyoto School, builds upon Hegels
philosophy of History in the 1930s, retaining and reworking the importance of a nations culture
(Vlk translates to a people) in a way that challenges the Eurocentrism of Hegel but avoids
working through the contradictions of actual and spiritual, particular and universal, that sustains
the Hegelian structure of history. This avoidance allows Nishida to justify a Japanese imperialist
nationalism: nationalism has the possibility of decentering history away from the West so that
the East can determine the epochal stage.
Tanabe Hajime, a student of Nishida who later succeeded him as head of the Kyoto
School, also supported the war efforts in the 1930s, but his post-war Philosophy as Metanoetics
acknowledges the instability of universal and nationalist thought that is caused precisely by an
unquestioned and uncritical use of reason. To resolve his philosophical errors, Tanabe provides
an absolute critique of reason (a critique that comes from outside reason, contra Kant) and
argues that faith, not reason, is the relation between the subject and the historical world. Faith
demands absolute self-negation, whereas reason, being a capacity of the subject, cannot ever
accomplish absolute self-negation. In this paper I will first articulate Nishidas
reconceptualization of Hegels thesis on history, and then, using Tanabe, show its nationalist
consequences and limits. To conclude, I will introduce Tanabes notion of faith as a way out of
the primacy of reason and thus any essential configuration of identity such as nationalism.

1 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 373.

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Reason, History, and Gemeinschaft in Nishida
The sole thought which philosophy brings to the treatment of history is the simple
concept of Reason: that Reason is the law of the world and that, therefore, in world
history, things have come about rationally.2
Nishida Kitar, in his 1935 The Standpoint of Active Intuition, articulates the dialectical
relation between time, space, and things. The relationship between time and space is, for
Nishida, time-qua-space: time is nothing other than the amalgamation of historical interactions in
space. As he writes, [t]he concept of time necessarily assumes this spatiality as possibility and
limit; the concept of space necessarily assumes this temporality in turn as its possibility and
limit.3 Space has a freedom to determine the movement of time: this is because space contains
within it things that interact with each other in an indeterminate way. These things, although
created out of time, do not have their actions bound by time because interactions in space are
sites of freedom and of conflict. Importantly, things are constituted by their position against and
interaction with other things. Things, in other words, are what Nishida calls singularities: a
singularity cannot be thought merely as one thing in isolation; it is because a singularity is a
singularity in contradistinction to another singularity that it is a singularity.4 To summarize:
Space is the extreme limit of time, and things are the constitutive elements of space. In each new
space, interacting things determine the progress of time. This relationship between the three
elements opens up a space for historical action within a spatial moment.
Nishida moves from this abstracted construction of time and space to a more concrete
one. He transitions from time to history, and from space to bash: topos or place. He

2
G.W.F. Hegel, excerpts from Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Upper Saddle River:
Prentice Hall, 1997).
3
Nishida Kitar, Ontology of Production, trans. William Haver (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2012), 26.
4
Ibid., 69.

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essentializes history in the historical world, distinct from the biological world. History is a
particular kind of time: it is dialectical instead of linear. Linearity is attributed to the biological
world because it does not have self-conscious and self-reflective things that express themselves
there is only natural, linear cause and effect. Dialectical history means that the extreme bash
sublates the past: the place incorporates the past. Further, this extreme limit is a stage of conflict
for singularities that exist within that space. The historical thing is imagined as a subject-quaobject, as a thing that is constituted in the historical similar to Hegels historical subject who
enters into the historical. Importantly, however, things, for Nishida, are not individuals. The
world-historical stage is not made up of individuals, but cultures, what Nishida calls
Gemeinschaft. As he writes, our individual selves are not constituted as merely individual
selves but as members of historically constituted societies.5
History becomes teleological when Nishida claims that reason is the activity of selfdetermination, the forming activity, of [the historical world].6 Nishidas repositioning of reason
is based on his idealism-in-materialism. Opposed to a Kantian a priori or Hegelian spirit,
Nishida locates the universal in the material world In exactly the same way as there is no body
without spirit, there is no Gemeinschaft that does not possess cultural spirit 7. Based on the
contradictory structure of self-identity no self is merely particular, but also universal Nishida
claims that the Gemeinschaft is the thing that the self is mediated through. Further concretizing
his dialectic, Nishida conceives of the historical moment as an epoch that comprises of a
Gemeinschaftliche, or a space of conflict between Gemeinschaft. A Gemeinschaft sees itself and
expresses itself in this world so that it incorporates itself into others. This is called self-negation.

5
Ibid., 118.
6
Ibid., 115
7
Ibid., 127.

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This epochal stage is the eternal now, and it is up to the Gemeinschaft to posit itself as
universal in the world, to be recognized by other Gemeinschaften. Given that universality is
always already located in the material-historical world, universalization requires an imperialist
globalizing attitude. A Gemeinschaft must become the dominant culture if it wants to claim
universality. As such, a culture universalizes itself, globalizes itself, which is its process of
becoming-rational.8 Here Nishida comes upon the basis of establishing universals such as
reason, morality, and law. It is when one Gemeinschaft mediates other Gemeinschaften that it
itself develops itself culture, as the manifestation of world spirit, comes into being the telos
of Gemeinschaft itself can be said to lie in the constitution of culture.9 Given that the dominant
Gemeinschaft, or the culture that mediates others, determines a historical epoch, and that history
is nothing other than the progression of epochal stages, the telos of history becomes a process of
cultures claiming universality and globalizing these claims. This is made evident in Nishidas
critique of Marxism it is not class struggle that determines history, but creative expressive
activity between Gemeinschaft. The reason why Nishida chose the nation was because of the
injunction of material western culture into the East. This western culture lacked a cultural
spirit, and thus Japans position in the world, newly globalized, gave it a unique standpoint from
which it could posit its radical otherness and superiority.

8
Ibid., 127.
9
Ibid., 128.

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Tanabes Metanoetic Critique of Reason
Just before Japans surrender in World War II, Tanabe Hajime, who earlier in the war
persuaded university students to enlist and was called by other Japanese academics fascist for
his philosophical justifications of nationalism,10 published Philosophy as Metanoetics, which that
critiqued both Nishidas and his own nationalist writings. In it, Tanabe articulates an absolute
critique of reason that aims not to provide a safety preserve for the criticizing subject but
rather to expose the entirety of reason to rigorous criticism and thus to a self-shattering.11 In the
place of reason Tanabe opts for faith, which is possible through metanoetics, or absolute selfnegation in the face of nothingness. As articulated in the previous section, Nishidas justification
of nationalism was to treat it as the process of ones becoming-rational. In other words, a culture
is never universal until it assumes universality by dominating others. In Tanabe, however, history
is not determined by reason, but rather a freedom that one arrives at through faith. This transition
from reason to faith marks the essential difference between Nishida and Tanabe: one is always
already a part of nothingness when one acts it is acting vis--vis nothingness. Thus, Tanabe
makes the move from the rational subject qua culture to the faithful subject.
In Nishida, the thinking subject has within him a rationality that allows him to enter the
objective world in a meaningful way. The Buddhist concept of self-negation comes into conflict
with this assumption: if self-negation is to be an absolute self-negation, then any capacity of the
self needs to be given up. This is the problem Tanabe identifies in philosophy up until the war.
From Kant, the unquestioned basis of philosophy was reason. This basis is sustained by a
distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal the phenomenal is what is presented and

10 James Heisig, Critiques of Tanabes Nationalism in Philosophers of Nothingness: An
Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 139.
11 Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), 43.

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the noumenal is transcendental, fixed. As Tanabe writes, Kants solution of separating the
phenomenal world from the noumenal is a mere compromise incapable of bringing reason to an
ultimate state of peace. reason as the criticizing subject always remains in a safety zone where
it preserves its own security without having to criticize the possibility of critique itself.12 This
criticizing subject cannot undergo absolute self-critique, and subsequently self-negation, because
it critiques from the standpoint of reason. Thus, Tanabes critique of Kant is that the latters
critique of reason didnt go far enough it didnt question the underlying assumption of rational
universality.
At the same time, Tanabe goes further than Hegels critique of Kant. Although Hegels
history is dialectical, what sustains his logic of history is at its core nondialectical. Hegel
arranged a system of reason in which both the negatively rational the dialectical and the
affirmatively rational the speculative are brought into a synthetic unity of identical reason
consisting in negation-qua-affirmation. Dialectics, deprived of its paradoxical character, can
no longer be authentic dialectic; it degenerates into a mere logic of identity.13 The Kantian
distinction between noumena and phenomena remains in Hegel with the actual and the spiritual.
Thus, Tanabe opts for the Kierkegaardian ethic of removing the absolute distinction between
universal and particular. In Kierkegaard, the subject enters into the religious universal,
relinquishes his autonomy completely, and makes a return to the world. This is similar to
Tanabes death-and-resurrection. As mentioned previously, the difference is on the object of
faith. Tanabes object of faith is nothingness that which is nothing but the totality of the
world and its contradictions. Thus, while the knight of faith in Kierkegaard returns to the world
with the religious, he cannot speak or act because he has come back with a particular-universal

12
Ibid., 43.
13
Ibid., 52.

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object of faith instead of coming back with the world. As such, Tanabe opens up a space of
absolute self-negation with an authentic return to a world that one can act in by absolutely
critiquing the authority of any universalizing reason. This is a result of the difference between
nothingness in Kierkegaard and Tanabe for Kierkegaard, nothingness is negative; for Tanabe,
nothingness is positive. By giving ones self to absolute nothingness, the intersubjective
historical world opens up instead of becoming impossible.
To extend Tanabes critique of reason to Nishida; because the Gemeinschaft claims the
cultural spirit of its people, it necessarily cannot absolutely self-negate itself. As Tanabe writes,
ones active intuition in the world in Nishida is seen to be only a matter of continually extending
the self but not of negating it in other words, it has to do not with death but with life.14 The
Gemeinschafts claim on worldly reason, enacted through globalizing itself and consequently
universalizing itself, is not done on the basis of absolute self-negation as Nishida claims, but
rather through assuming a non-absolute-contradictory self-identity that it then imposes on the
world. The world stage that Nishida constructs allows nationalism because the other is never
fully incorporated in the self. For this to be done, the self needs to open itself up completely,
self-negate absolutely, which depends on its giving up of a claim to universal reason. Any
worldly action must stem from nothingness where the self is negated for the purpose of
becoming a mediator of nothingness.15 According to John Maraldo, Nishida delimits the
experience of nothingness rather, it would be more apt to speak of nothingness as an
(objectively unexperienced) condition for the possibility of experience.16 As such, one never

14
Ibid., 47.
15
Ibid., 46.
16
John Maraldo, Metanoetics and the Crisis of Reason: Tanabe, Nishida, and Contemporary
Philosophy, in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime (Asian Humanities Press: Berkeley,
1990), 251.

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gives oneself over to nothingness. Absolute nothingness in Tanabe, on the other hand, has a
power that effects the self this is what Tanabe calls Other-power.
Conclusion
Tanabes critique of reason allows one to articulate the ways in which the self retains
elements of itself in Nishidian negation. Extended to Nishidas epochal ontology, where
Gemeinschaften vie for universality, one finds that instead of absolute negation there is only
infinite extension. Nationalism arises from this ontology precisely because there is no absolute
self-negation. Absolute self-negation in Tanabe means that one gives up all capacity to claim
access to universals or universality in order to return to the world absolutely self-negated this
necessarily means that claims to universality are not in fact universal universality arises in the
blindspot of critiques based in reason. Instead, metanoetics, relying on the Other-quanothingness to place the self in the world, is the only way towards absolute self-negation, and
worldly action based on this absolute self-negation. The Gemeinschaft no longer becomes the
locus of historical activity for the individual because its claims to universality are recognized as
only particular. After the war, Tanabes repentant attitude was, first, a crucial response to those
critics who attacked him for developing a philosophy of nationalism prior to and during the war.
More importantly, it allows one to see clearly the failings of philosophy in modernity in both
Japan and Europe: the so-called rational subject is not completely rational it cannot see its own
limits, the blind spots that reason fails to understand precisely because in doing so a unified
reason would realize its own absolute negation without mediation through the other.