In modern Japanese philosophy, Tanabe Hajime stands out as a philosopher who assimilated and transformed major parts of Western thought, specifically German idealism. Tanabe’s engagement with Hegel best displays his inspiration from German idealism. While Tanabe draws strongly from Hegelian dialectics in his own works such as the Logic of the Specific (種の論理), Tanabe ultimately reworked Hegel’s logical system to display historical fallibility, ethical failure, and the necessity of radical self-negation.¹ This comparison illuminates both Tanabe’s intellectual development and a broader evolution of the Kyoto School. While philosophers and Japanese society debated between Buddhist notions of impermanence and non-self and Western systematic philosophy, Tanabe Hajime was able to rework both areas of thought to confront guilt concerning unethical historical acts and transform the individual and society through self negotiation. Through deep engagement with Hegel’s dialectical philosophy Tanabe transforms Hegel’s philosophy by rejecting Hegel’s teleological reconciliation of contradictions and replaces it with a model focused on historical fallibility, the instability of communal structures or species, and the need for radical self-negation or metanoesis.
First in order to understand Tanabe, Hegel’s philosophy must be explained. Hegel’s dialectic operates within the teleological movement of Absolute Spirit, where contradictions are ultimately reconciled through sublation or a simultaneous canceling and lifting up of a concept.² For Hegel, the historical process tends toward increasing actualization of freedom through institutions such as the state, ethical life, and shared rational structures. Individuals participate in this rational whole and do not participate in anything outside of the rational whole.³ Historians of philosophy have often seen Hegel as offering a self-confident modernity in which reason’s capacities are affirmed, even when they operate through contradiction.
In connection to Hegel, Tanabe’s early work heavily drew from the Hegelian model of the rational structures. But by the 1930s and 1940s, Tanabe found many limitations in the idealist assumption of an ultimately harmonizing rational structure or state. In the Logic of the Specific, Tanabe replaces Hegel’s concept of Spirit, an overarching structure where all things in existence are a manifestation of this “Spirit”, with a three part structure: individual, species, and universal.⁴ While this format resembles Hegel’s universal individual mediation, Tanabe assigns a very different role to the mediating term. Hegel’s mediating structures (especially the state) are rational embodiments of universal ethical principles. Tanabe’s “species,” however, are historically contingent communities such as nations, religions, cultures, social institutions that shape the individual’s concept of meaning and are very prone to flaws such a collective delusions or mob mentality. In contrast to Hegel’s confidence in the rationality of historical development, Tanabe depicts these species as inherently unstable, prone to self-absolutization, and capable of generating collective delusions.
The shift from Hegel’s trust in rational historical development to skepticism can be associated with Tanabe’s interaction with crises of Japanese nationalism during World War II.⁵ While Hegel’s state is the ethical culmination of Spirit’s self-realization, Tanabe saw the Japanese state of his time showcasing the species’ capacity for violent error. Therefore the Logic of the Specific is both a philosophical model but also a historical critique that seeks to explain how rational systems and communal forms can betray their supposed universality.
The conflict between Tanabe and Japanese nationalism leads to what Tanabe later called metanoetics, or the philosophy of repentance.⁶ While Hegel propels Spirit forward by incorporating contradiction into higher unity, Tanabe believes the Spirit’s self realization signals the breakdown of reason’s self-sufficiency. Tanabe states, reason cannot fully comprehend or repair its own failures and transformation requires not sublation but absolute self-negation through “other-power” (tariki), a concept drawn from Shin Buddhist thought.⁷ Tanabe’s turn to metanoetics marks a significant rejection of Hegel’s rationalism in order to focus on existential and Buddhist forms of dialectic.
Overall, Tanabe retains Hegel’s insight that human existence is mediated by communal and historical structures where individuals cannot access the universal directly but Tanabe uses this framework to criticize Japanese imperialism. Where Hegel envisioned reconciliation, Tanabe insists on an ongoing cycle in which individuals are forced to confront their complicity in the failures of the species and must reform it. Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific represents a reorientation of dialectical philosophy toward historical consciousness where Buddhist-influenced self-negation and ethical responsibility are used to navigate modernity’s crises.
- Tanabe, Hajime. Philosophy as Metanoetics. Translated by Yoshinori Takeuchi, James W. Heisig, and Valdo Viglielmo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
- Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
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Hegel, G. W. F. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
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Tanabe, Hajime. The Logic of Species (種の論理). In Tanabe Hajime: Collected Works, vol. 7. Trans. Yoshihisa Yamamoto. University of Tokyo Press, 1998.
- Heisig, James W. Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
- Ozaki, Masakatsu. “Tanabe’s Interpretation of Hegel.” The Eastern Buddhist 20, no. 2 (1987): 107–130.
- Tanabe, Hajime. Philosophy as Metanoetics. Translated by Yoshinori Takeuchi, James W. Heisig, and Valdo Viglielmo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.