Japanese Philosophy and Empire: The Dangers of Taking Tanabe Hajime out of Context

Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) was a member of the Kyoto School, an intellectual network of Japanese philosophers in the early 20th century who sought to piece together the best parts of Western thought (particularly Kant and Hegel) with Japanese intellectual tradition.1 His earlier works are characterised by strong imperialist and nationalist rhetoric, some of which he revised and renounced in his later work with the ‘Philosophy as Metanoetics’ in 1945 when he turned to studying religious philosophy in a public cry of repentance.2

American philosopher James Heisig claims that Tanabe’s philosophy should be regarded as a ‘world-class philosophy’.3 He argues that Tanabe’s framework can and should be applied outside of the historical context in which it was created.4 While this may be valuable from a philosopher’s perspective, from a historical standpoint, grounding Tanabe’s work in the hyper-nationalist and cosmopolitan context he was writing in is vital because it demonstrates how outside sociopolitical factors and aspects of Western and Japanese intellectual tradition shaped his worldview (which was then used to justify nationalist expansion). Removing Tanabe’s philosophy from its historical context diminishes its lasting impact on Japan’s imperial legacy and precludes the opportunity for important discussions around colonialism.

Tanabe used principles in ‘Logic of the Specific’, ‘The Logic of National Existence’, and ‘Death and Life’ to rationalise nationalism and the supreme importance of the state, relying on the unchallenged assumption that the nation is the fundamental unit by which society should be organised. ‘In ‘Logic of the Specific’, Tanabe adopts Linnean taxonomy terminology to classify individuals’ social belonging: the species (shu) represents each nationality, and the genus (rui) represents the totality of the international world.5 He also proposes the idea of Japan as a ‘supreme archetype’, a blueprint which should be emulated by other nation-states to become ‘enlightened’.6 This emphasis on the moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority of Japan follows the trend among nationalist Japanese intellectuals to justify colonialism.7 Additionally, in ‘The Logic of National Existence’, Tanabe positions the concept of the nation-state as the ‘prototype of existence’, which further legitimizes the authority and prominence of the Japanese empire.8 In his 1943 lecture ‘Death and Life’, Tanabe encourages his audience to sacrifice their lives for the state and concludes that ‘self-sacrifice for the state’ is essentially a return to individual freedom in ‘The Logic of National Existence’.9 Tanabe’s fixation with nationhood is understandable when considering that for him, the lives and deaths of Japanese people depended on the survival or demise of the nation.10 Far from remaining in the abstract realm, Kim argues that Kyoto philosophers were utilised by the imperial regime to exert force over colonial subjects in the way citizens were subject to military conscription.11
However, Tanabe’s interpretation of his own philosophical framework is inconsistent at times, seemingly swayed by changes in public sentiment and contemporary politics. In ‘A Clarification of the Logic of the Specific’ (1935), he defends against accusations that the ‘logic of the specific’ promotes ‘extreme’ and ‘totalitarian’ nationalism.12 However, as aforementioned, later in 1943 he rationalises individual sacrifice (to the point of death) for the state, so his original work cannot be seen as apolitical. Later in 1945, Tanabe publicly apologises for being complicit in imperial expansion in ‘Philosophy as Metanoetics’, moving away from nationalist rhetoric. He explains his failure to speak out against expansionist policies as partly due to the possibility of creating conflict and division among the Japanese people.13 When considering his back-and-forth views, it is questionable as to whether or not Tanabe’s repentance in ‘Ethics of Metanoia’ is sincere or motivated by self-preservation after his original views became unpopular.

It is difficult to separate Tanabe’s philosophical framework from external factors and from Tanabe as a complex individual. However, it is important to recognise that while Tanabe’s writings partly developed as a way for him to process and react to the traumatic and uncertainty of wartime Japan and may be valuable as a world philosophy, they were also used by the nation to justify colonial violence.

  1. Robert Edgar Carter, “The Kyoto School: An Introduction,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in Bret W. Davis (ed.), unpaginated, (2019 [↩]
  2. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, and John C. Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, (University of Hawaii Press, 2011), 688. [↩]
  3. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Critique of the Global Village,” in The Eastern Buddhist 28, no. 2 (1995), 198, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44362096. [↩]
  4. Ibid., 202. [↩]
  5. Heisig, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 670. [↩]
  6. Ibid. [↩]
  7. Vladimir Tikhonov, Social Darwinism and nationalism in Korea: the beginnings (1880s-1910s): “survival” as an ideology of Korean modernity, (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 10. [↩]
  8. Heisig, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 683 [↩]
  9. John Namjun Kim, ‘The Temporality of Empire: The Imperial Cosmopolitanism of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime’, in Pan-Asianism in modern Japanese history: colonialism, regionalism and borders, in Sven Saaler et al., (London: Routledge, 2007), 210; Naoki Sakai, “Ethnicity and Species: On the Philosophy of the Multiethnic State and Japanese Imperialism,” in Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy, in Viren Murthy et al. (eds.), (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 153. [↩]
  10. Heisig, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 683. [↩]
  11. Kim, “The Temporality of Empire,” 195. [↩]
  12. Heisig, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 679. [↩]
  13. Ibid., 689. [↩]