Dialectic and Religious Experience in Tanabe Hajime's Philosophy as Metanoetics
by Jeffrey Wattles
This article was published in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, ed. Taitetsu Unno and James W. Heisig (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1990).
Philosophy as metanoetics is dialectic inaugurated and informed and sustained by religious experience. Tanabe Hajime's book lays the groundwork for a philosophy of living for scholars and non-scholars alike. From this complex book one may reconstruct a sequence of stages. (1) In the first stage, complacent confidence in reason and in the independent self abounds. (2) Then reason exhausts itself in the effort to resolve insuperable theoretical and/or practical problems, "antinomies." (3) Then comes the religious breakthrough: one confesses one's weakness and repents of one's sins and pride and receives "resurrection" through the saving grace of Other-power (tariki). (4) Thinking, newly revived, expounds the contradictions of life and thought using the dialectics of absolute mu, nothingness. In particular, philosophy reflects upon Other-power and criticizes a naive concept of the otherness of Other-power. (5) Then a reconstructive way of thought is found which affirms a mediated unity of the absolute and the relative. (6) Finally, all activities of truth and goodness and beauty (199.2) are transformed. People are "restored to life as coworkers of God or the Buddha" (190.3).
In fairness, it must be emphasized that Tanabe does not offer such a sequence of stages but at times presents the essential process as a ceaseless, circular, two-stage movement of consciousness oriented now toward relative (finite, intuitable) being, now toward absolute nothingness; and some expositions would condense some of my stages. Two problems motivate the separation of these stages. First, how can we sustain three moments which all find a place in PM: the religious orientation to Other-power; the dialectical critique of the otherness of the Other; and the Hegelian identity of the absolute and the relative? And second, how can religious philosophy produce a philosophy of living for the broad category in which Tanabe includes himself--"ordinary, ignorant people" (lx; 16.3; 85.2; 187)?
Stage 1: naive self-confidence. The evil tendency intrinsic to finite beings is to take their relative independence (both as individuals and as a group) to be absolute. This evil is reflected in pride, in the materialism of the present age, and in the inability of existing political arrangements to achieve both liberty and equality.
Stage 2: reason crashes on the rocks of antinomy. Tanabe adapts the pattern of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and insists that everyone must go through the breakdown of practical, scientific, and philosophic reason. Tanabe insists that the critique of reason must go beyond Kant to criticize the reasoning subject as well as the objective discourses of reason (38.2). The model of Tanabe's own experience suggests to him that without radically acknowledging the impotence of reason to reconcile its contradictions, one will never perform thoroughgoing zange, repentance, which opens the way fully for the invasion of grace.
Tanabe explains that scientific theory has often been misleading, and philosophy cannot accept science as an unquestioned starting point. Science needs to be understood not only in terms of its announced results but also historically and in terms of its philosophical components and their difficulties (34; 97.3; 226.3). The most basic problem in the scientific method (noted more than a decade before Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) is this: one cannot be too optimistic about the heuristic value of the experimental method, since any scientific hypothesis projects an interpretation that hinders revolutionary discoveries (62.1; 108.2). Indeed, scientific theory may "fall into absolute disruption in its opposition to and estrangement from the irrationality of actuality" (97.1). Revising previous notions of rationality, relativity and quantum physics have restricted the application of the concept of causation, formerly regarded as univocally and universally applicable to physical phenomena (60). Tanabe's critique of science stands in tension with the role of science in the resurrected life (stage six).
Stage 3: repentance and conversion and resurrection through the grace of Other-power. After the breakdown of reason comes repentance and saving grace. Metanoetics in effect begins in and remains in a fundamental either/or: either one has repented, submitted to Other-power or not. One of Tanabe's contributions is to reaffirm spiritual experience as the center of philosophy. The modern temper prefers to domesticate spiritual experience, to treat it an an hypothesis, to assign it a marginal role, or to present it as a report of something extraordinary which is immediately thematized and treated objectively.
A reductionist critique is waiting in the wings for Tanabe's claims about Other-power. According to a Freudian and historicist analysis, Tanabe's sustained and intense mental crisis during the war led to psychic exhaustion. This exhaustion he acknowledged as he abandoned his previous philosophical orientation. Upon releasing his hold upon the subjective factors that had led to his exhaustion, Tanabe experienced an influx of power from the unconscious. He interpreted that influx in terms of the only live alternative available to him--Shinran's religious philosophy. Though he had not been consciously thinking of adopting this alternative religious teaching, he had been aware of it; and the reorganization of his psychic life was being prepared in his unconscious during the time of his mounting crisis. Thus he mistook his psychic influx for a gift from "Other-power." Steven T. Katz, for example, has emphasized that religious experience is mediated through tradition. But Tanabe's critical relation to Shinran begins to address this concern. And James Robertson Price III has challenged the assumption that claims to religious experience can only be claims to a form of immediate knowledge. Tanabe gives us the information that would permit a reductionist critique to be mounted while maintaining superb allegiance to the ground upon which alone that critique could be defeated: the quality inherent in the very insurge of Other-power which "sweeps aside all doubt about itself" (2.2). He refuses to descend to the level of trying to prove the validity of his own metanoesis or the reality (non-illusoriness) of Other-power. It is rather his strength to affirm and unceasingly to reaffirm Other-power in undoubting faith, whether expressed in the moment of the immediacy of indubitable power (2.2), in the dialectics of mediation, or in symbol (294-95).
What qualities of the religious Other are manifest in spiritual experience? Other-power saves the sinner; it is the Great Compassion (24.2) whose activity inspires gratitude. Other-power engages the total personality (88.3). It acts through relative beings whom it choses to function as axes of transformation (24.2). Other-power is to be obeyed (81.3), and it may be discerned as the deepest part of the self. Nor could one repent without the grace of Other-power.
Tanabe refuses theistic accounts because he sees in them a static, dogmatic tendency to view God as another being. Static concepts are fatal to progress in thought; philosophy articulates what Hegel called the fluidity of the concept. Theism represses freedom of thought (thereby reflecting the arbitrary and selective "divine" will) and insists on a fixed starting point in myths and revelations which do not permit reciprocal transformation of faith and reason. But God, as Tanabe recognizes, need not be limited to this caricature. "Of course, if we identify the will of God with the love of God, and divine grace with the working of divine love, then grace, far from destroying human freedom, only draws it out" (82.4).
Tanabe explores transcendence primarily as transcendence-in-immanence. He records "the transferring activity of Other-power working within and flowing forth from the bottomless depth of one's mind" (205.3). He finds the "center of the self" located in decision (10.2). "In metanoesis the Original Vow of the transcendent Amida Buddha becomes active in a direct manner, entering immanently into the consciousness of sentient beings" (227.2). The "higher and deeper self" is identified as "the spontaneous ideal element of self-consciousness" (175.2), as the authentic existence implied in self-consciousness of inauthentic existence (152.1) and simply as self-consciousness of the higher self as realized in action (72.3).
The phrases just cited illustrate a problematic continuum that joins two distinct factors: (1) Other-power operative as an uncanny kind of other, a non-intuitable presence within the depth of the mind mind and (2) one's own higher self, accessible in self-consciousness. The point that is essential to Tanabe is that Other-power cannot be intuited as an immanent, eternal now (113.4; 75.2). If "the Buddha-nature within" or "the Kingdom of Heaven within" are taken as terms indicating some datum for introspection, then, he says, they are nothing more or less than symbols of "the realization of eternal nothingness in one's individual existence brought to action-witness" (292.3). But if Tanabe wants to avoid the danger of overeasily ascribing every movement of repentant mind to the guidance of Other-power, does he not need something like a distinction between self-consciousness (even consciousness of a higher self) and indwelling spirit, however obscure the distinction may be phenomenologically?
Stage 4: dialectical critique. But how is the Other-power encountered in repentance to be conceived? Tanabe speaks of mu, nothingness, whose meaning derives partly from Mahayana tradition and partly from western philosophy; following the latter, nothingness is simply that which is not any one of the relative beings, but their context. The concept of nothingness operates to radicalize the philosophic drive to overcome the human tendency to conceive of transcendence as something or someone on the model of relative things and persons. The concept of nothingness also honors mystery and launches an unceasing effort to articulate the most remote subtleties of consciousness and action, as attention continually moves between the finite which it can conceive and nothingness which is finally unfathomable.
What is the motivation for regarding Other-power as an other?
Since that which the self obeys in faith must transcend the self as an "Other" and since the Great Nay of absolute critique transcends the relative self by virtue of its being absolute, the Great Nay of the transcendent power of negation, even though it is nothingness, is believed in as that over against which the self is posited and through which the self is mediated. (88.3)
Relating to nothingness, or the absolute, as an other is both necessary and not quite right. On the one hand, "[T]he relative is relative in virtue of its opposition to other relatives, and can confront the absolute only by way of this relative-to-relative relationship" (236.2). On the other hand, such a relationship cannot rest unchallenged by philosophy: "Between being and nothingness there can be no such relative relationship" (234.3; 213; cf. LPR-vol I, 396-106). Tanabe concludes that the relative and the absolute are neither simply identical nor exactly different, neither simply one nor exactly two (176; 257.2).
The legitimate conclusion of this critique is that thinking about Other-power on the basis of analogy with otherness between relative beings does not yield an adequate cognition. But a problem remains. This critique addresses the most fundamental concept in religion, the concept of Other-power, or, put more generally, the conviction that there is some other person, reality, or level beyond the relative or mundane. There has been controversy (for example, in Hegel scholarship) about whether genuine religion can survive such an incursion into its essential concept. But as Tanabe goes into the cave of thought to do battle with the Minotaur of static concepts, the one thread that he carries with him is a concept of nothingness which is no cold and distant abstraction. It is not a postulate of reason, though reason can explain that mu cannot be one of the relative beings. Tanabe tacitly associates the notion of being with the notion of thing, and so it is clear that Other-power cannot be a thing but rather no-thing--mu. Nothingness is an ab-sent (nonperceived) reality whose significance is mediated by the life and rigor and warmth of Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Pure Land tradition, as well as by other eastern and western philosophers.
If Tanabe's concept of nothingness were a mere abstraction of rational negation, his critique of the alterity of Other-power in the name of nothingness would leave a dilemma: either (1) gratitude to Other-power loses all focus and reference, and merges into aesthetic bliss (which Tanabe consistently rejects); or else (2) a stalemate results between a naive affirmation of Other-power and a flat, thoroughgoing, logical denial of the alterity of Other-power--an antinomy characteristic of stage two. This second horn of the dilemma is a non-progressive circling between religion and secularism from which there is no exit. In such conflict, both intellectual and spiritual levels would become falsified. The concept of Other-power would ossify, and intellectual dialectic would pre-empt the spiritual significance of nothingness. From the intellectual standpoint, gratitude to Other-power would be demoted to the status of a mere antechamber to truth. Affirmation would be seen merely as a moment in an overarching negation. Artistry in action would mean skating over that thin and now transparent ice that portends doom for the slow and over-heavy tread of naive consciousness: it is transparent to the bottomless movement that hastens to negate every position-taking and -denying. A new religion of philosophy would result that the non-scholar could not share. One could no longer say, "How great Thou art!" but only, "The greatness is so transfinite that it cannot be a Thou."
Wisps of tension between the primacy of the spiritual and the adventure of dialectic do linger in PM. If that circle were the best that we could do without compromising our integrity, then we would learn to rejoice in it and find nobility in resolutely following its turns. But the conflict would confuse and exhaust the spiritual impulse. Nor does it point to the goal: "A religion of the people must offer peace of soul and inspire trust in action" (284.1). Therefore, to move forward, Tanabe appeals to a further phase of dialectic.
Stage 5: philosophical unity. Contradiction is suspect in formal thought because it permits chaos. In dialectic, talk of contradiction must be with care to avoid confusion. At one point Tanabe defines negation as "the simultaneous presence of annihilation and preservation. These two meanings, or two aspects of one and the same dynamic, interpenetrate with the accent shifting now to one, now to the other as the situation changes" (218.1). Everything depends on how that accent is placed. If the first phase of philosophy is "contradictory and negative" development, the second phase is "affirmative and unifying" return (74.2). Philosophy strives to "break through to a point where the contradictories can be brought into dialectical unity by the transforming mediation of absolute nothingness" (232.2). Once we admit the negation of negation, it is possible to resurrect versions of concepts that were previously rejected as onesided.
A striking example of dialectical unification is found at 270.3. Tanabe here gets a handle on the contradiction between the religious orientation to Other-power and philosophic negation of the alterity of nothingness. He revives what from any previous perspective can only appear to be the enemy (174.2)--the Hegelian identity of the absolute and the relative. Any absolute worth its salt will be a knowing absolute which also encompasses the relative, includes human consciousness.
Basically, absolute knowledge means a wisdom that knows the absolute. If this were understood in the sense of making the absolute an object of one's knowing, all knowledge of the absolute would have to remain relative, and there could be no attaining to absolute knowledge. Absolute knowledge can only mean that knowledge as such belongs to the absolute, that it is the self-consciousness of the absolute. That on the one hand. On the other, philosophy is something that takes place in us relative beings, so that if absolute knowledge is limited to the self-consciousness of an absolute apart from us, it has to be relative as something opposed to our consciousness. Hence absolute knowledge must be the self-consciousness of the absolute and at the same time our knowledge. And if it is not to be knowledge of an absolute that stands opposed to us, the self-consciousness of the absolute must at the same time signify our self-consciousness. (270.3)
A true Infinite must somehow include the finite; a true absolute must include the relative. Not wishing to affect a standpoint outside of and superior to the human situation, Tanabe makes his point here through conditional statements and explications of meanings. But his conclusion situates the relative in the framework of the absolute. Resurrection through Other-power gives the basis for realizing this mediated identity of the absolute and the relative. Tanabe criticizes Hegel for not seeing that the concept of "the identity of absolute contradictories" could only be grasped by resurrected self-consciousness (lvi).
In the unifying phase of dialectic we see an emerging realization that an adequate concept of the absolute (or God or mu) must perform at least two tasks. (1) It must validate the heterological religious orientation to transcendence insofar as one is saved by, feels gratitude to, and obeys the Focus (and note that the Focus is not simply a phenomenological correlate of subjective intending, since that intending is now understood as enabled and empowered by the absolute). (2) Such a concept must also sustain the philosophical dialectic that teaches, among other things, that the absolute is not properly conceived as simply a different being. An adequate concept, like a living cell, must have stability as well as flexibility. It should be possible to enhance the stablization of this movement without ossification of the dialectic.
There is a spectrum of alternatives here between the extremes of a static theism and a corrosive nihilism. Tanabe's solution assigns priority to negation, but there is an alternative that assigns priority to affirmation. This is to conceive of God as the self-focalization of Infinity. (God is here conceived as spirit, transcendent with respect to consciousness, anterior to actuality and to potentiality and in that sense beyond being.) It then becomes possible in a sequence of thoughts to do justice both to the religious orientation to Other-power and to philosophical reflection: First, God is. Next, God is in us. Finally, in God we live and act and have our being. The first of these affirmations is consistent with a direct heterological, even theistic orientation; it validates gratitude and obedience. The next one finds transcendence in immanence, modifies the heterological implications by its inward turn, but does not remove all sense of otherness; it can acknowledge guidance, and God is still named. The last one validates brotherhood, diffuses the heterological focus, but continues to refer in thought and word, thus making possible continuity with the two previous phases of faith-witness.
Stage 6: the new life in naturalness. "In this resurrected life, philosophical thought and other cultural activities of a moral nature that were once abandoned in despair are now reinstated . . . performed in naturalness" (248.2). The resurrected life is not immune from antinomy, but it is experienced in antinomy, a veteran of the trenches of contradiction, and is not continually occupied in explicating every possible mediation when confronted by the appearance of immediacy. It is the achievement of PM to have labored so nobly to set foot in this promised land; yet much work remains to be done in giving accounts of the activities in the realms of truth, beauty, and goodness as these activities are resurrected in the new life. On some topics Tanabe did the stage 4 critical work but did not complete the stage 5/6 unifying return.
Science. Along the way of reintegration, Tanabe now honors science for bringing us face to face with the brute facts of actuality, thus countering the prejudices of a moralistic approach to reality (263.2). Facts may dis-illusion us, occasioning repentance. In any case, facts are not to be taken as atomic, obvious tools for self-power, but viewed in the light of mediation. On the scientific level of truth, Tanabe hardly casts a glance at what might be called the grammaticality of circumstance ("propositional truth"). And clearly a coherence theory will not work, since each of our theories is contradicted, sooner or later. In addition, the task of philosophical mediation between science and religion comes into view as a priority (264.3). Tanabe's demarcation between what he rejects of science and what he accepts largely follows the distinction between fact and theory. But on two points he shows positivist tendencies in the ease with which he classifies certain religious teachings as myth. He appears to regard the question of the continuation of the soul apart from the body as an empirical question. And without attempting to provide a cosmological framework for human existence, he lets the current state of cosmology decide about the existence of the Pure Land or Heaven. "Given my high regard for science, I can find no basis for belief in either the Pure Land or the Kingdom of Heaven, nor can I believe in the continuation of a disembodied soul after death" (157.1; 295.1--but note the hope for survival at 148.4). While criticizing Kant's enterprise of religion within the limits of reason (50.3), Tanabe praises Pure Land Buddhism for the ease with which it can be demythologized such that "its doctrine makes no appeal to miracles or anything that contradicts the scientific mind" (225.2). But Tanabe also uses infinity as a factor in cosmology (34.2) and speaks of "the strongly resistant functioning of karma in the present enters into the pulsation of infinity as the transforming stuff of creation that gives birth to the stars" (111.4).
Philosophy. Truth is possible because philosophy participates in the inner dynamics of the the process--the mutual mediation of nothingness and finite beings--which occurs throughout the universe and within the mind. Metanoetics, philosophy in the resurrected life is no longer a pastime or a profession of self-power reason, but a capacity rooted in repentance to range over stages two through five as the situation requires. Tanabe insists on the inclusion of theoretical work into the transformed life of action. The new philosophy is always already praxis. The fundamental praxis is casting oneself into repentance. All transformed action is rooted in repentance.
Tanabe's refusal of a robust sense of personal identity is profoundly argued, yet finally unsatisfying. The difference between the sinful past and the future of resurrected freedom is so substantive that Tanabe refuses to acknowledge any identity of the personality that persists throughout these changes (74.5; 109.3). But it is difficult to see how one could continue to feel sorry for sins prior to one's conversion without presupposing one's identity through time. How can we make sense of our ability to recognize one another and to anticipate a future that is ours? Indeed in many ways Tanabe softens his denial of personal identity, though never renounces it. His language implies personal identity when he uses the first person pronoun to talk about his experiences prior to his conversion and when he says that "the self is resurrected" (88.2). True, the selfishness of the ego clinging to life must be abandoned (197.3; 243.2); but how does "ethical" abandonment relate to "metaphysical" abandonment? Tanabe's main point appears to be that a rigid notion of the self as a kind of substance or quasi-thing will not facilitate resurrection (18.1). And no action can proceed on the basis of (clinging to or consciousness of) self-identity (75.1). I interpret this point as an instance of the larger point that action transcends contemplation and, a fortiori, self-contemplation. Tanabe acknowledges the need for a ground or unity underlying the temporal process: "Freedom is in need of the ground of transcendent nothingness in order that the self may break through itself without destroying its spontaneity in the process (86.3)." Can responsible individuality be located on a chart that has only nothingness and temporal discontinuities? The closest to personal identity that Tanabe does acknowledge is continuous repentance, "unshakable or irreversible faith" (5.3; 189). So long as one persists in repentance, any future sin "would not add further negativity to the nature of its new being" (5.3).
Religion. "Religion" no longer names a set of devotional activities insulated from the operation of nothingness in thought; it now becomes a name for the whole of resurrected life. Spiritual truth is available only through repentance, which reveals simultaneously our wretched sinfulness and our gracious acceptance. Note that when religion is defined in terms of authority, revelation, doctrine, historical beliefs, spreading the faith (31.4; 226.2; 247.4-48.1; 91.3 contra), then philosophy rather than religion is the domain of genuine experience (248.1). By characterizing philosophy and religion as I have done, I have sought to preserve metanoetics from a fate which is a tendency evident in PM: the creation of a religion in which philosophers alone can participate. What we have on the whole in PM, I propose, is a religion whose consciousness is philosophical. Renewed religion might loosen positions that were tightly held in previous stages without betraying the spirit of metanoetics. I will suggest three revisions, beginning with the one that I think Tanabe could most easily accomodate, and moving to the one that might be hardest for him to accomodate.
First, Tanabe regards the concept of revelation as pre-empting the initiative of philosophy, yet he writes of Shinran's returning to teach him personally (30.3) and of disciplining himself to the guidance of Shinran's writings (224.2). But Tanabe preserves a critical and creative distance from Shinran. Why not take Tanabe's practice as contributing to a de-absolutized notion of revelation and a critical relationship to revelation?
Second, it might not be necessary for metanoetics to regard all religious contemplation as the sacrifice of praxis and an opiate of the people (283.3), the illusion of immediate aesthetic unity with absolute nothingness. The gratitude that Tanabe celebrates rises to worship. He challenges spiritual relaxation with the insight that a given moment of mediation in nothingness "quickly recedes into the past as an established fact, which then needs to be mediated again" (96.2); but this insight may be used to assist contemplation rather than to reject it. Nor does sustained devotion entail that its Other is displayed for inspection as an object present at hand.
Finally, it is possible to ask about the predominance of repentance as a religious technique. Tanabe has great insight into the need for continuous adjustment in living. And every adjustment may be characterized as a negation of what went before. But not every such negation need be undertaken as repentance. Many of Tanabe's negations are intellectual, not encounters with evil and sin. And even in relating to one's lesser past, repentance is sometimes required by the situation, sometimes not. There are tacit and cheerful ways of letting go of the old by welcoming the new. Not that one's sins merit anything less than shame and bitter regret. Nor does one's radical evil cease in its capacity to become actual evil. Tanabe sees the ethical perspective of repentance and the metanoetic perspective of forgiveness as both valid and mutually contradictory. But forgiveness is the larger concept, incorporating ethical consciousness as a presupposition within itself and freeing the self from crippling memories. Those memories are valuable safeguards against pride. But just as we want to avoid static concepts, we also want to avoid crystallization of emotions. Is this last suggestion consistent with the core of metanoetics? Probably no, if PM is taken as canonical and stages 5 and 6 are tightly constrained by stage 3. Otherwise, perhaps, yes.
The "wondrous" grace of Other-power is our introduction to beauty. But how far may beauty be said to extend into human life? Continuing Kierkegaard's radical distinction between aesthetic and religious modes of life, Tanabe sustains a radical critique of aestheticism as a hedonistic, upper class, ethnocentric, indulgence of immediacy whether in artistic creation (self-expression) or contemplation, a serene betrayal of the dialectic of nothingness into the hands of a naive intuition that can only provide the illusion of basking in pantheistic union with the absolute. But neither will Tanabe identify with the moralistic rejection of pleasure. Against each mistaken alternative he heralds
the joy and fullfillment of love in human social existence. . . . In the negativity of the Great Nay, love has something in common with moralistic austerity; and in the gratitude and joy of the Great Compassion, it can also partake of the aesthetic enjoyment of culture. Love synthesizes both as aspects of itself and transforms negation into a mediator of affirmation. (265.2)
The key to metanoetical aesthetics is the concept of symbol. A symbol, e.g., "the lotus in the fire" (191.2), transcends expression and cultural formation (Bildung) and incorporates absolute mediation within it (42.3). A symbol is also defined by the action-response required to comprehend it: "The material existence and spiritual meaning of the symbol do not coincide immediately and inseparably here as they do in expression, but are . . . united relatively through action" (263.3). Symbolic speech conveys that behind every intuition lies nothingness; indeed, everything is a symbol of nothingness (183.3). Since symbol is defined by its mediating function, Kant's concepts of God, freedom, and immortality are included (43.1); so is Amida Buddha (212.4). But that functional definition also enables Tanabe to use "shining darkness" as a metanoetical symbol (189.2) while rejecting Heidegger's "bright night of the dread of nothingness" (84.1) as latent ontologism.
The tension of Tanabe's struggle to integrate dialectic and religious experience is dissipated when poetry shines forth, such as when Tanabe quotes Zen poets or Shinran, when his own luminosity radiates in the prose, and when he expresses himself symbolically. Thus it is no accident that Tanabe uses poetry to convey central truths about the resurrected life in mu (49; 153; 157; 172). And his supremely dramatic conclusion to the book is an elaboration of the image of spiritual reality as an ellipse with the Dharmakara as the visible son of the unseen Father, surrounded by the finite beings in a communion of mutuality ordered by spiritual teachings (294-95).
What about the beauties of nature? Nature and history fall outside one another in PM. Tanabe's intellectual-moral rigor almost wholly dominates his response to nature. He is repelled by the notion, which he attributes to Kant, of identifying God and nature, since it "brings religion perilously close to art" (267.3). Tanabe speaks of the Taoist hermit falling into a subethical "state of nature" (171.2); "naturalism" names a constricted philosophy; and a "natural" view of religion connotes reductionism (268.4). The desire for deliverance from samsara is a "demand of nature" (289.2). Nature is delivered up to natural science, whose business is "to replace myths with laws" (295.1). Indeed, Tanabe, strictly speaking, writes not so much about resurrection to new life than about resurrection to a state which is neither death nor life (55.3). He does assert that "there are no grounds for preferring artistic pleasures over material ones" (265.1). But, except for resurrected wonder and gratitude and the pangs of repentance, he generally deprecates feelings (174.1; 180.2; cf. LPR 121, 138, 143). He tends toward a dualism between the realm of freedom and the realm of determinism within the self, a dualism which arguably impedes the liberty of resurrected living. How shall metanoetics develop a rich appreciation of the beauties of nature? While acknowledging the mystery that things are and that things are the way they are (295.1), Tanabe rejects the concept of a Creator on account of the mutual implication of absolute and relative and the beginninglessness of the relative (23.3; 242.4). Can Tanabe regard the beauties of nature as the gift (genso, the return from the Pure Land) of nothingness (291.3; 292.3)? Mu, after all, is artistic, uses upaya, skillful means, whereby absolute mediation transpires (22.3; 42.3). The need for a more replete metanoetical aesthetic is not trivial, since it affects how far love, art, and authentic temporality involve our perceptual and bodily life.
Among the values of truth, beauty, and goodness, Tanabe's emphasis on action effectively assigns priority to goodness. Tanabe rejects Hegel's identical reason in favor of Kant's practical faith, in order to "mediate knowledge and faith by action" (57.3). We have traced his critique of aestheticism. He has a similar critique of what we could call aletheism. He criticizes a merely hermeneutic standpoint (82.2; 78.4; 86.4). And he levels the charge of merely contemplative mysticism at the tendency to interrogate praxis only for its contribution to theory (89.1). He writes that the "realization of a higher and deeper self is based on a breakthrough, an overcoming of the self in action. This is why action becomes the mediator of self-consciousness" (72.3). Therefore he treats religious and philosophical consciousness as action, not contemplation. The action of actions is interaction with the absolute as "one casts oneself into absolute mediation" (257.2).
Authentic goodness is to participate in the oso genso process of the Dharmakara, whose discipline of self-perfection (oso) culminated in the manifold vow to save all beings (genso). We (except for "sages and saints") cannot manage the arduous ascent of oso, but in repentance we can open ourselves immediately to the influx of Other-power. Tanabe's metanoesis thus solves a problem widely faced in religion--how to maintain a vital unity between the inner orientation to transcendence and outward service to others. What if striving for God consumes one's major energies? What if one must first master a philosophic labyrinth before emerging into the light of natural living? Or what if service projects so monopolize one's attention that primal spiritual contact is neglected? When these two sides of the spiritual life fall apart, the result is a monastic asceticism which loses its social conscience or a social activism which loses its spiritual fragrance. Tanabe's philosophy achieves a striking integration of these two sides. The practice of repentance short-circuits the potentially endless human effort to climb towards the Absolute. Rather, zange is simply an opening to Other-power whose grace is already there. But secondly, Other-power is understood as Compassion itself, so that the natural outworking of spiritual restoration is service: ". . . gratitude issues in an enthusiasm to act on behalf of others" (48). Metanoetical thinking is located within these two vectors of spiritual action--(1) repentant opening to Other-power and (2) the resurrected life that follows.
One of Tanabe's key concepts is the axis of transformation, the fulcrum against which Other-power can apply its lever of power. At times Tanabe speaks as though we can only find salvation through the mediation of other beings (22.3), but it is not clear how to identify the axis of transformation. If the point is that the Absolute does not work directly on a given relative being, R1, but only through another relative being, R2, then the question remains how the Absolute gets R2 to work on R1, except, perhaps, by persuading R3 to get involved. At some point a more direct influence must occur if this way of talking is to be sustained. And this is what we find. Faith in the present can become an axis of transformation of the past (241.1). And ". . . the center of the self, which is at the same time the axis of absolute transformation, is located in the decision of each religious existence . . ." (10.2). I interpret this to mean that the center of the self is the transcendence-in-immanence which requires decision as its axis of transformation.
Tanabe grounds participation in history in the deepest layer of self-consciousness, our temporal structure of past, future, and present. We are "thrown" into a situation in which we must simply accept the contingency of historical facts. They are what they are; we cannot ground them in reason. The past "determines our existence in such a way that our existence has to avail itself of its mediation in order to achieve authenticity" (65). But we are not the prisoners of the past. It is our freedom to project into the future. Indeed "negation and transformation of the past" are involved in any action (211.3). Authentic existence, moreover, highlights a most intimate aspect of the past--its own misdeeds. Repentence now determines what will be taken from the past (161.3). The past accepts "the continual renewal of its meaning," while the future renews the past "from its own deeper sources," and without the tradition of the past the future "cannot produce any creative content" (241.1). Tanabe rehearses Shinran's teaching that "the future-oriented desire for rebirth is transformed by metanoesis for the past into the sincere mind of action of no-action" (221.2; 218.1). Eternal nothingness is present in the mutual mediation of past and future (277.2). In Tanabe's culminating metaphysical symbol of the ellipse, the two foci of past and future generate cycles of activity (292.1).
What hope for character achievement does Tanabe hold forth? He appreciates Hegel's critique of the confident and exclusive "beautiful soul" that presumes itself to be supreme and good (266.4). By insisting on the "radical evil" that remains after conversion, the continued capacity for or tendency toward sin, Tanabe discourages optimistic expectations of growth. He tends to regard saints and sages as almost a different variety of the human species. Moreover, the joy of the Great Compassion is eternity in time; one does not think of growth in that delight. But Tanabe does offer one goal to hope for--naturalness that stems from sustained fidelity to nothingness as Other-power. That naturalness not only reflects the soul peace and trust in action of unified, affirmative living; it also leads one, as the situation requires, into and through the contradiction and pain and humiliation of repeated repentance.
NOTES
Translated by Takeuchi Yoshinori (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986)--hereafter referred to as PM. References include paragraph numbers.
1. I cite Tanabe's order--truth, goodness, and beauty--here, while following the sequence truth, beauty, and goodness in the closing exposition. Tanabe's sequence suggests the spontaneity with which goodness (genso) emerges from the realization of truth (nothingness). The exposition here aims for a symmetry in which the danger of neglecting beauty is reduced and the dominance of goodness is highlighted. Indeed, Tanabe portrays so radically the unity of thought and action that it is difficult to separate truth and goodness as realms of value for him.
2. "The 'Conservative' Character of Mystical Experience," in Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 3-60.
3. "The Objectivity of Mystical Truth Claims," The Thomist, 49 (1985), 81-98. But note Katz's distance from the position Price attacks, clarified in "On Mysticism," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66.4 (Winter 1988), pp. 751-57.
4. According to Johannes Laube, Tanabe continued to develop the Christian terminology of love and God, though redefined philosophically; and he regarded Jesus as the paradigm of liberated existence. Dialektik der absoluten Vermittlung: Hajime Tanabes Religionsphilosophie als Beitrag zum "Wettstreit der Liebe" zwischen Buddhismus und Christentum (Freiburg i/Br.: Verlag Herder, 1984), 158-165.
5. This concern may perhaps be answered by some way of interpreting the Mahayana thought that nirvana is non-different from samsara, but Tanabe does not take this route. A similar problem occurs in Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, when Hegel identifies soul with concept (186), spirit with reason (206; 396n), and spirit with knowledge (110); see Peter C. Hodgson ed., The Lectures of 1827 (the one-volume edition) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988--hereafter cited as LPR-1827).
On repentance see Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol I, Introduction and The Concept of Religion, Peter C. Hodgson, ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1988), 220. Hereafter cited as LPR-vol I.
Religious sensibility swings back and forth between the determinacy of their antithesis and their unity and satisfaction. . . . Being aware of one's own inner existence and conviction as of no account, along with self-consciousness on the side of the universal condemning the former, results in the sensation of repentance, of anguish about oneself, etc. Being aware that one's empirical existence, furthered on the whole or in one or another of its aspects--and indeed not so much through one's own self-activity [as through] a connective power external to one's strength and prudence, which [is] represented as and attributed to the universal's having being in and for itself--results in the sensation of thankfulness, etc.
6. Tanabe follows Hegel in asserting that only in human consciousness does the absolute achieve self-consciousness (LPR-1827 118). These philosophers did not utilize the resources of Christianity and Buddhism for affirming the self-consciousness of the absolute on a superhuman level of perfection. A cosmology that accepts multiple levels of mind can better harmonize humility and dialectic: human mind is merely a humble level, but one whereon may occur not only error but also the revelation of the Infinite to itself.
7. Heterology is the discourse on the other (Greek: heteron).
8. Regarding the use of "infinity" rather than "the absolute", Tanabe sometimes names mu with the term infinity--in juxtaposition with finitude (38.4) and in a cosmological context (111.4). He is willing to speak of the "infinity and eternity of zange" (lii). Despite his affirmation of the infinity of space and time (110.2) he warns of taking time as a "bad infinity" of mere unlimited extension (73.1), and also of Augustine's symmetrical infinity of time (130.2) and of the mysticism of infinite transcendence in abstraction from immanence (174.2).
9. Hegel says that "God gives himself this ultimate singularization of thisness," and becomes "the object for a cognizing activity," "gives himself the relationship of God to the feeling subject" (LPR-vol I, 140). This concept is not immediately bound up with that of incarnation; what is essential is a trans-subjective Focus which sustains itself through the progressive moments of thought.
10. Hegel (like Tanabe) generally uses "immediacy" to name naive resistance to the recognition of mediation; but he also acknowledges that both immediacy and mediation are complementary and mutually necessary (LPR-vol I 407ff). Without this relaxation of dialectic, daily life cannot be lived.
11. For this point I am indebted to Langdon Gilkey's review article on PM in The Journal of Religion 68.3 (July 1988), 438-39.
12. Tanabe's exposition is distinguished by abstaining from the traditional categories of philosophical anthropology and from the language of "inner" and "outer" and even "experience" with its potentially dualistic implications. I can only propose here that heterology consider such a rich concept of personality as Nicolas Berdyaev provides in the opening chapter of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944). His concept of personality includes the following features: Personality is that which is identical throughout all change, all growth. Personality is a mystery. Personality is unique. Personality includes physical, mental, and spiritual factors which move toward mature unity as spirit strives for the mastery.
13. See PM 168.1; 47.2; 98.1; 167.4; 262.2; 265.1; 283.2.
14. Three of these, drawn from Zen, identify the stage of resurrected living with stage four negation. The stages of frustration in antinomy and the invasion of Other-power fall away. Stage five unification persists simply in the identification of negation and freedom.
15. One can find both in Buddhism and Christianity the concept of humankind as the children of a divine Father. Cf. from Nichiren's Dedication to the Lotus, "Our hearts ache and our sleeves are wet (with tears), until we see face to face the tender figure of the One, who says to us, "I am thy Father" (quoted in William Theodore de Bary, ed. The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan [New York: Random House, 1972], p. 349). This concept preserves the relative independence of brothers and sisters and affirms at the same time a relatedness which removes atomistic individualism. Any substantive affirmation of humankind as a family, however, comes into tension with Tanabe's high claims about the role of the nation (species, politically articulated culture) which can be called "sacred" inasmuch as it mediates the absolute (284.3; 287-88).
16. Tanabe does not exploit this insight for its potential to resolve Kant's first antinomy, that the world must and cannot have a beginning in space and time.
17. Tanabe does not attempt to integrate modern ethical theories in the light of a religious theory of action. For that project, see Jean Nabert, Elements for an Ethic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969). Tanabe's repentance is comparable to Nabert's three-fold negation--the experience of fault, the meaning of failure, and the deepening of solitude. This negation of self prepares the way for an absolute affirmation, the beginning of a spiritual ethic.