CHAPTER 1 Formation of the Religious Thinker War is a brutal, deadly game … But if you come back whole, you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted. —William Broyles, Jr., a veteran of the Vietnam war[1] I. The Character of the Religious Persona How does one first encounter the religious? Often it is from outside the confines of intellectual evaluation. Man first welcomes the suggestion of the religious as an inspired- being. Man’s religious sensibility is sparked by a glance toward the countenance of a holy figure, an illuminated manuscript, by arcs and fires, candles and scrolls. Before man knows a systematic theology, he may experience a personality. Before he is convinced of a message, his initial impressions about the character of its author may captivate and emotionally excite him. The initial encounter with Tanabe or Soloveitchik must foremost consider the conspicuous self-presentation of each figure as a religious persona. In their work, both thinkers return repeatedly to their personal predicament, and in so doing paint a very clear picture of an ideal religious type with which the reader can identify as he is trying to decipher the author’s meaning. This dynamic character embodies the existential affect of particular religious ideals. The reader may look to him as a benchmark for understanding or as a concrete illustration of abstract norms. Though it is important to recognize the validity of many contemporary critiques pointing to the dangers of explaining philosophy by delving into the lives of the philosophers themselves, I believe such a biographical endeavor is indispensable for us. Tanabe and Soloveitchik both invest a great deal of energy into personally portraying themselves as particular religious personae. The presentation of such personae leave a deep impression on the ways in which the larger public view their ideas, contributing to the formation of particular religious characters in the collective consciousness of their respective religious worlds. As seemingly accidental as these impressions of our thinkers may be, as unknowable the inwardness of each man, as strangely elusive the often irrational character of religious personae and as contingent the historical schema in which they lived might be, it is crucial to articulate some understanding of how our impressions of what life was like for these men affect our reading of their philosophy. As each of our thinkers experiences “world” what figures most prominently in his experience is a disruption of continuity and wholeness, rationality and stability. Each of our thinkers is foremost a sufferer. He suffers from certain assumptions he brought with him to the enterprise of religious philosophy which have revealed dichotomies that have turned into contradictions, which have in turn become absolute contradictions—crucial questions without satisfactory answers. Yet, it is not at all in abstraction that their existential dilemmas arise. Rather, as we shall see, both are men with a keen tragic consciousness. They are especially sensitive to the absurd encounter of personal subjectivity with irrational historical facticity. The tension created thereby in each man’s life is enormous, perhaps even paralyzing. Tanabe and Soloveitchik portray themselves as eternal seekers of religious truth. “Eternal” connotes the indeterminacy of resolution, the inexorable inaccessibility of completion, and the tragic impossibility of finishing once and for all. But what is to be finished? What is the finality the seeker is really after? What suffers for lack of resolution? The answer is a particular set of existential contradictions. The religious seeker, as embodied in Tanabe or Soloveitchik does not approach truth with simple questions of identity, never asking “What is...?” He is not curious, not just interested to discover the definitions of things. If he comes upon something that seems alien to him at first, in most cases, upon closer investigation, he discovers that he already has a category for it. He has identified everything previously. He is not concerned with developing a new taxonomy. Rather, he has already formed some assumptions, accepted some axioms, invested his faith in some fundamental beliefs. His questions arise in the face of contradiction and paradox, when one (or some) of the truths to which he has hitherto pledged himself differs fundamentally from another such equally as compelling truth. His question appears more in the form of “how can ...?”—as in “how can A be true if B is also true?” when the truth of both A and B is compelling to him or, more precisely “how can A be true if B is also true and B equals the opposite of A?” Most salient in this vast body of contradictions are those discrepancies that arise not only between belief and belief but between ideal and empirical reality. These particular contradictions need not become a problem for all seekers; but any who look toward the particularity of history and contrast it with the ideal structures they have created internally to explain history cannot but be overwhelmed at the continual failure of theoretical constructs to account for empirical reality. When one chooses to recognize disequilibrium not only in the world of theory but also in the world where theory and actuality collide, one has necessarily stepped beyond the bounds of pure thought. What motivates a thinker to consider seriously this latter sort of contradiction in addition to all the theoretical contradictions that might arise in the realm of pure explanation? Not all thinkers, especially philosophical thinkers, begin the normative intellectual task by discussing history. Why might our thinkers ground themselves so fundamentally in an awareness of history? For Tanabe and Soloveitchik the answer lies in the particular historical communities to which they feel beholden. In the community, individual identity as subject-seeker and historical identity as collective-sufferer converge. As spiritual leader, the religious thinker cannot fully differentiate his own distinct identity from the collective personality of the people whom he leads. Therefore, his cognitive and experiential exploration of religious motifs in life, though largely existential, is historically informed by its nature. This typological religious thinker—suffering individual crisis while still deeply woven into the chaos of religious communities—leaves a powerful impression on us when we encounter him. We are impressed by the profundity of his suffering, the irresolvable character of the contradictions he faces, and his almost obsessive dedication to realizing his ideals in the concrete world. Tanabe The inscription on Tanabe’s tombstone reads “My search is for truth and nothing otherwise.” Tanabe’s search for truth is both a personal and communal quest for self- realization. Tanabe’s religious community consists of the Japanese people. For their sake, as well as his own, Tanabe works tirelessly to open up viable paths of religious understanding, envisioning himself and what he called his philosophy of metanoetics as the spiritual-philosophical guiding light out of the “tragic and appalling circumstances” he believed the Japanese people to have fallen into after the Pacific War:[2] May there not possibly come a time when religion will be sought for the sake of people’s spiritual peace and enlightenment? If so, it would be a signal that the period of repentance for the entire Japanese people has begun. I myself have the feeling that my philosophy of metanoetics has opened the way for such action.[3] Tanabe hopes that the birth of his philosophy can lead to the transformation of the Japanese people. In his own religious self-realization Tanabe believes he can lead his historical people to spiritual regeneration: My one hope is that I might assimilate thoroughly within my being the way of transcendence … and so prepare myself to participate in the task of leading those who will choose to take that path in the future. It seems to me that there can be no other path of national rehabilitation…. My philosophy may come to have a strange kind of historical objectivity about it.[4] Tanabe intimates here how powerful he believes his philosophical discovery might be. His role in the recovery of the Japanese people approaches a grandiose optimism. His belief about himself is clear—the religious future of his people depends on his personal performance of a spiritual transformation. In this sense, he sees himself as the central figure for the Japanese people in their post-war process of spiritual recovery. If Tanabe is to be the ideal penitential figure, there must paradoxically be another side to his religious personality—that of Tanabe as the guilt-stricken sinner par excellence. He who wishes to be most penitent must also be most thoroughly sinful. He must harp upon and regret his sin most grievously. His spiritual agony must be unmatched by that of any other. Whose torment surpasses that of Tanabe? Who laments as deeply for his inability even to feel guilty with any sincerity? Though he confesses his sinful nature, he cannot but feel proud even of his confession. He knows that ultimately there is insincerity behind his sincerity.[5] Though he feels remorse for his decrepit state, even his lamentation is somehow grossly imperfect.[6] Interspersed throughout the philosophical prose in Tanabe’ s Philosophy as Metanoetics are dramatic pronouncements of his own personal “ignorant and evil nature.” He contrasts himself with a class of Great Sages and enlightened beings, the wise and intelligent to the likes of whom he could never himself aspire. For me, the very idea that ‘thought’ should have the power to transform one’s being is no more than the ideal of the wise and the holy[7]… I found my way to metanoetics as a philosophy for the ignorant and ordinary, such as I consider myself.[8] This dichotomy of the wise and holy, on the one hand, and the ignorant and ordinary on the other, is a crucial one for Tanabe. He tells us that “we must not overlook the difference between the standpoint of the wise and heroic and that of the ordinary and ignorant.”[9] Tanabe goes to all lengths to disqualify himself as a member of the religious or intellectual elite, who claim not to suffer from the agony of ordinary existence, but somehow transcend it. “The path of sages is closed to me. I am but an ordinary person groping my way through dark tunnels …”[10] Tanabe is flawed and irreparably so. He can neither hope for the perfection of his spiritual condition, nor even for some progress toward that goal. He passes only from darkness to darkness. Like his spiritual mentor, the Medieval Pure Land Buddhist Shinran, he seems to declare “Indeed, how miserable I am!” [11] Crucial in this dual self-presentation of Tanabe as, on the one hand, an agent of the spiritual salvation of the Japanese people, and, on the other, amongst the most regrettable creatures ever to have the misfortune to walk as man on earth, is that, though each seems to be the other’s polar opposite, Tanabe somehow believes that neither works to the ultimate exclusion of the other. Indeed, as we shall see, the one necessarily implies the other. Just how he is able to assert such an unlikely possibility is the heart of his philosophical logic, as we shall see below. For now what is important is to remember Tanabe’s conviction that “I, in my ignorance and sin, can participate in nirvana just as I am and without extinguishing my evil passions.”[12] For Tanabe, redemption is possible even in light of the immanence of sin. Tanabe is a seeker, but why do we call him a religious seeker? Tanabe has a proclivity to investigate expressive possibilities for his own religious experience in the language of religious and philosophical traditions other than Pure Land Buddhism. Tanabe’s peripatetic seeking leads to continuous outward transformation with respect to the terms of his practice. Stated negatively, this means Tanabe is forever unable to commit himself to a particular historical religious tradition. He envisions rather a mediation of Buddhism and Christianity in which the mythological character of Western religion is tempered by the Eastern emphasis on the notion of “emptiness” as the principle of religious self- understanding. At the same time, in such a mediation, the ahistorical nature of Eastern religion could be informed and transformed by the social-ethic brought to the Christian tradition by its Judaic origins. Toward a fusion of these elements, Tanabe hopes for a Second Religious Reformation heralded by a great religious genius and leading to the mediation of Christianity, Buddhism as well as Marxism.[13] Why include Marxism in this triad? Marx seems oddly misplaced next to Amida Buddha and Jesus. We can explain this anomaly in terms of Tanabe’s broader interpretation of the definition of religion as such. Tanabe saw religion as the mediation of the history of culture and the history of politics.[14] The interaction between a historically determined culture and its political circumstances produce certain ethical demands. Cultural mores are the ideal self-articulation of what is harmonious in peoples, the symphonic expression of national achievements. Political policy is the embodiment of a peoples’ striving, the upshot of the chaotic state of neediness and aspiration to harmony of a people. Contradiction between the two can create difficult ethical predicaments. Politics may advocate methods of achieving cultural goals that compromise the character of the goals themselves. That is, war in the modern era (politics) ironically has often taken its opposite as its aim, peace and prosperity (culture). Without culture, the methods of politics would have no aim. Without politics, the continuity of cultural ideals is threatened. Though mutually opposed, they are indispensable to each other. In the case of an irresolvable dispute there must be a third force which provides a creative manner of addressing ethical questions—something that, like cultural values, carries more normative weight and promises greater harmony, but which also actively advocates participation in the violent world of history, as would politics. The third force capable of this Tanabe calls religion. Insofar as Marxism in some capacity fulfills the dual- role of that “third force” Tanabe considers it to be religious.[15] In our provisional answer to the question of why Tanabe included Marxism in his vision for the Second Religious Reformation, we have returned to the larger question introduced previously about whether Tanabe is a religious thinker or not. We know that Tanabe was trained as a mathematician and philosopher. He neither associates with nor commits to any particular historical religious tradition exclusively. Nor does he openly practice religious ritual of any variety. Knowing this, we might ask, what makes Tanabe a religious thinker as such? That he has an abstract definition of the “religious” as articulated above may not demonstrate to us that he himself is a religious thinker. Given his peculiar brand of abstraction, might there not be some other way to test whether or not Tanabe really fits the description of “religious thinker” which we here impute to him? What proof is there that Tanabe is indeed a religious thinker? Tanabe is continually revealing deep attachment to and intimacy with historical religious traditions. He states openly that “What metanoetics has learned from the teachings of Shinran Buddhism belongs to its very essence.”[16] Tanabe accepts Shinran as “my teacher and guide,” calling him “a source of great encouragement and enlightenment.” [17] But such confessions by themselves are not sufficient evidence, for Tanabe also tells us that “Metanoetics does not always and of necessity adhere to the doctrine and tradition of Pure Land Buddhism.”[18] We could argue that Tanabe enters the religious when, in addition to utilizing religious texts and exploring the thought of religious figures, he makes experiential claims on his reader—that he must experience certain things to understand them and that without such experience the idea or text remains incomprehensible. Speaking about the Kyôgyôshinshô he tells us that “Unless one undergoes the same kind of sincere repentance as did Shinran, one will never achieve a profound understanding of the work.” [19] Earlier, in reference to his own philosophy, Tanabe tells us that, “Were someone to ask how one can become religiously conscious … I should not be able to answer satisfactorily through theoretical discourse. I could only say: ‘You must, at least once, perform zange yourself.’”[20] Tanabe’s plea is more than a rhetorical devise such as a religious mystic might invoke to compel his disciple into action. Behind this seemingly condescending call to action there is a profound philosophical idea. What Tanabe means to suggest here is the inevitable implication of the self in the totalizing religious enterprise. In religious experience the self must itself become a question, whereas in simply cognitive inquiry the self may go unchallenged at the ground of that inquiry. Tanabe calls this the “witness”[21] dimension of religious experience and it will actually become the hallmark of authentic religiosity for Tanabe. Tanabe does not seek to “expound a philosophy based on the Shin sect.” His “real intention” is more ambitious, more integrative, and closer to what makes Shin Buddhism a religious phenomenon rather than simply a cognitive gesture. Tanabe wants, “instead of interpreting Shinran’s philosophy in a philosophical manner … to remold philosophy as metanoetics, to start fresh along the way of philosophy by following Shinran’ s religious path.”[22] It is this drive to put into practice rather than simply expound Shin Buddhism that implicates Tanabe’s entire self-understanding fundamentally. This complete transformation of the seeker as he ventures into the philosophical endeavor is part of what makes Tanabe’s thought religious as such. No part of his self is any longer tenable ground for self-assertion, which is the mode proper to analytic philosophy according to Tanabe. There is a necessary element of complete surrender of the self in the movement of the philosophical to the religious—a yielding of the present self in the radical transformation to what the self will become. What Tanabe surrenders is himself—or, as he puts it using the terminology of Shin Buddhism, his jiriki, self-power. What he surrenders to is tariki, Other-power. Though some systems of Western philosophy/religion or other Eastern religions may manifest such self-sacrifice in parts, it is in Shin Buddhism as Tanabe interprets it and nowhere else that such self-surrender in transformation is so ideally embodied.[23] If religion by definition means that which thoroughly implicates the self, leaving no dimension of the self unquestioned, and allowing no part of the self to independently assert itself, nowhere else is the surrender of the self so complete as in Tanabe’s version of Shin Buddhism. Soloveitchik The sine qua non of the religious thinker, according to Tanabe, is self-implication and radical transformation at the most fundamental level. That means leaving nothing unquestioned, or, to use Tanabe’s language, submitting the self to thoroughgoing self- revaluation. “Thoroughgoing” means that nothing is left uninspected; no bit of data, no matter how difficult to quantify or capture temporally is ignored. If it involves the human self, nothing is without significance to the religious seeker. What is probed is the self, verily, my-self, and what is probed of it is everything. The result of such intense self- exploration is chaotic and unordered; the enormity of the task is often grossly disproportional to the strength of the one charged with its execution. Our impression of Soloveitchik is of a thinker who feels also beholden to just such a task. In the opening to his Lonely Man of Faith, he begins by telling us, Theory is not my concern … I want instead to focus attention on a human-life situation in which the man of faith … is entangled. Therefore, whatever I am going to say here has been derived not from philosophical dialectics, abstract speculation, or detached impersonal reflection, but from actual situations and experiences with which I have been confronted… It is a tale of a personal dilemma. Instead of talking theology, in the didactic sense, eloquently and in balanced sentences, I would like, hesitantly and haltingly, to confide in you and to share with you some concerns which weigh heavily on my mind and which frequently assume the proportions of an awareness of crisis.[24] Soloveitchik’s expression, like Tanabe’s, takes on the form of confession. He is a tormented soul with anything but answers to the questions which so plague him. He has little to offer in the way of new approaches, and expects to find none—rather what he seeks is cathartic self-expression and confession. What, though, is the nature of this self who confesses? We saw that Tanabe, as man in religious crisis, was both the redeemer and the unredeemable, simultaneously the lowest and the highest. In him we find both what cannot be surpassed as well as what has been lost beyond retrieval. And what does Soloveitchik portend is the content of his confession? What sort of “inner conflicts and incongruities”[25] so immobilize him? It is the oscillation between “ecstasy in God’s companionship and despair when he feels abandoned by God,” the self-appreciation of the former and the self-effacement in the latter, that is the essence of how he portrays his religious experience. Man’s majesty, on the one hand, and his humility, on the other, define his perplexing predicament. One moment he is standing alongside his Creator, and the next he is exiled from His presence. Both a sinner and a covenental companion, man is baffled by his lot. What allows Soloveitchik such intensity of experience, so dizzying in its simultaneous, continual ascension to the heights and descent to the depths is what he calls the depth of man’s subjectivity, his inwardness. This is the dimension of human existence that opens up to infinity, that sets man apart from a material existence which has no detectable inwardness but only surface reality. Inexhaustible in his capacity for a variety of experience, man in his subjectivity is … not satisfied just with surface existence, vacuous reality. He thinks primarily in pictures. He holds beautiful visions. He is original, unique to the extent of being misunderstood… His spiritual perception is abrupt, … he lacks precision… He does not handle well … methods of induction. Induction is not his forte. However, he is a genius in question making… He lacks perceptivity for details, for the minutia; he is impatient as far as detail is concerned. However, he is very sensitive to the tremendum of the whole… [He] projects the outline, the grand perception… [He] is visionary, and on the other hand, confuses the real with the unreal, the fantastic with the practical.[26] As his most precious human asset, Soloveitchik guards his interiority, his capacity to feel the religious heights and depths, like the Holiest of Holies on the Temple Mount was guarded—not available for the general use of the coarse public.[27] With so singular an interior life, Soloveitchik presents himself as a man of profound loneliness. This trait (along with what he will claim is its more positive counterpart “aloneness”) forms the core of his philosophical anthropology as well as his personal self-reflection.[28] Soloveitchik seeks knowledge of himself, of the dualities in his own religious experience. He, like Tanabe, also foresees no end to the inquiry—but not joyfully so, for he suffers what he does not know. He is both what Soloveitchik himself calls a homo religiosus, who is swept dreamily away by the powerful currents of the beyond, and a pedantic “cognitive man,” who must understand and make sense of the internal current of flux running through him lest he live with contradiction, who must know lest he allow disparity where none can be tolerated, who must have certain knowledge about his spiritual condition, lest he err unwittingly. Though this “furnace of struggle”[29] between all the aspects of his personality enriches and refines him, and he is deepened for having suffered the fragmentation, Soloveitchik the religious seeker hopes for an end to the torment. He loathes the idea that his seeking may be eternal. He hates zealously anyone who questions but desires no answers and is satisfied only with his questions. Though he knows his millennial dream of perfect clarity and understanding is hopelessly distant, he aspires ardently despite this for totalizing knowledge and complete redemption. As a decidedly lonely figure, Soloveitchik does not envision for himself the kind of salvific power of which Tanabe believes he and his philosophy might be possessed. That is not to say Tanabe is arrogant in his self-adulation, for essentially he is speaking of a complex process of transformation in which an exchange between master and disciple perform the task of facilitating individual passage into Buddhahood and salvation. Tanabe envisions himself and his philosophy as a link along that spiraling chain that conveys and relays the passing of Buddhas and sentient being to and from salvation—an agent that brings others to repent by himself submitting to Other-power. Soloveitchik, though he had many disciples whom he influenced profoundly, imagines no such immediate process of mutual interpenetration or salvific communion in his religious community. He is a master of a tradition, indeed several traditions, having been educated in the classics of the West as well as the classical Jewish canon. He concentrates his energies into the project of self- understanding and into leading a religious life that puts into action that understanding. But he is still perplexed and without answers. He is at a loss when asked to reconcile the various extremes of his subjectivity. His internal discourse is discontinuous and fragmented. He cannot be an agent of salvation because he too is entangled in a dilemmas that belong to the seeker in general. If anything, he is perhaps only more keenly aware of the problems than are others, and therefore also more distraught. “Judaism has many problems, but very few answers. And perhaps the more I lecture the more confused you will be.”[30] Despite this self-admittedly confused state, critical to understanding Soloveitchik as a religious personality is comprehending how deeply he envisions himself to be part and master of a mesorah—a tradition of transmission of religious knowledge. His family history, crucial to understanding his thought and life, stretches back to the times of the great Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon (1720–1797), more popularly known as the Vilna Gaon (the genius/wise man of Vilna). And beyond this, in imaginatively tracing his traditional roots, Soloveitchik goes further back than even this great leader of East European Jewry, every time I enter the classroom at the Yeshiva … [and] I start a shiur [lesson], the door opens, another old man walks in and sits down. He is older than I am… (The talmidim [students] call me the Rav. He is older than the Rav.) His name is Reb Chaim Brisker, without whom no shiur can [begin]… Then the door opens quietly again, and another old man quietly walks in. He is older than Reb Chaim. He lived in the seventeenth century. What is his name? Shabbasai Cohen, the famous Shach, who must be present when dinei mamonos [laws concerning property and money] are being discussed… And then more visitors show up. Some of the visitors lived in the eleventh century, some in the twelfth century, some in the thirteenth century. Some lived in antiquity—Rabbi Akiva, Rashi, Rabeinu Tam … More and more people come in. What do I do? I introduce them to my pupils and the dialogue commences… Suddenly, a symposium of generations comes into existence.[31] Soloveitchik was ensconced in this line of holy religious teachers. He was himself a melamed, a teacher par excellence. Soloveitchik was designated by his rabbinical peers as a chacham hamesorah—a phrase literally meaning “sage of the tradition” but implying one who “appears at a time of despair when Torah continuity seems threatened.”[32] Yet he simultaneously embodied such erratic uncertainty about fundamental questions of religious experience that he always came across as a profoundly lonely figure. Like Tanabe, he was willy-nilly represented as one who could take responsibility for the spiritual well-being of a particular historical community. From under such extreme demands, Soloveitchik emerged as a sage of unusual creativity in a time of crisis. II. Historical Underpinnings in the Emergence of Soloveitchik and Tanabe We have encountered men in crisis. We have heard the exclamatory cries which contribute to the formation of their religious personae. Yet, we are still in the dark about the essence of the crisis. The nature of the crisis itself, at the hands of which both Tanabe and Soloveitchik suffer and also in which they find their religious-philosophical points of departure is not at all vague or nondescript. Crisis as we use the word here refers not some kind of Heideggerian angst, a fear without an object only manifest in the face of the muteness of objects in the world, the nothing of the world itself or the impending threat of my ownmost death.[33] Though such might be phenomena symptomatic of the crisis these men face, the driving force prompting despair for Tanabe and Soloveitchik is foremost the concrete-historical. When students of philosophy undertake a study of great thinkers, be they politically significant or not, it is rare to find any serious discussion of the relevance of historical exigency in their life predicaments. More so of late, we are beginning to see a critical approach to the study of philosophy that does take a significant interest in the topic of history in the formation of philosophy. Generally, however, even contemporary readings of philosophy that take history into account are more interested in questions of historicity—the ways in which socio-historical conditions construct/determine normative claims in philosophy—than in understanding the ways in which historical circumstance informs philosophical thought. Scholars want more often to undermine the philosophical- grandiose by showing how historical particularity humbles totalizing theory, than to deepen our understanding of particular thinkers by showing us what forces in history made certain issues important to great individuals. In an attempt to locate rather than deconstruct Tanabe and Soloveitchik, my hope is to add a necessary depth to our understanding of each by exploring the historical difficulties to which both were bound. Tanabe and Soloveitchik are both to some extent “Holocaust thinkers.” Though for different reasons, both had to resolve the atrocities that took place during the Second World War. Both were beholden to historical communities that played a significant role in the events leading to and resulting from World War II. Unlike many intellectuals of their time, and the present day, both Tanabe and Soloveitchik, each for his own reason, neither did nor could they have left the issue of historical tragedy unexplored. Tanabe Students of Kyoto School philosophy often overlook the drastic historical circumstances in the midst of which it flourished. If one does not look for it, allusions to concrete historical phenomena do not too often explicitly appear in the volumes of text Kyoto School philosophers have produced over the years. Jan Van Bragt, scholar and translator of many central figures from the Kyoto School compared the effects of studying the historical dimension of the Kyoto school to “someone shaken by the feminist movement into realizing long-standing habits of male chauvinism,”[34] in Western philosophy. Learning about the historical implications of Kyoto School philosophy force one to reflect deeply upon the peculiar irrationalities one discovers. The philosophy of Kyoto School thinkers was unable to prevent any of the several national tragedies that led to or took place during the Pacific War. Arguably no philosopher in the Kyoto School attempted—even philosophically—to make a case against the actions of the government during the war. Many philosophers from the Kyoto School in fact expended great effort, both philosophically in their writing and publicly in nationalist propaganda, to support the Japanese government in its various military projects throughout the thirties and forties. For the remorseful Tanabe, who emerged after the war with his great confessional Philosophy as Metanoetics, his self-professed post-war act of repentance, this signified something terrible. It meant that not only was philosophy unable to prevent a disaster of international proportions, it was indeed unable to prevent the soul of even one person—even the author and creator of that philosophy— from descent into hell. In September of 1931 the colonial army of Japan stationed in southern Manchuria defied national authority and attacked the Chinese permanent military base at Mukden. A little more than a year later, the Japanese had complete military control of the entire province of Manchuria. This was to be the beginning of a fifteen-year military campaign in Asia that would end only with the unconditional surrender of the Japanese to the Allied Powers in the Pacific War. The immediate consequences of the Manchurian occupation were both severe criticism of Japan’s hostile military position from major world powers, and the consolidation of Japan’s right wing in its drive toward military supremacy in East Asia. During this period, no segment of Japan’s political or intellectual elite was immune to the influence of the powerful ideological forces of the right.[35] Several years after the incident at Mukden, the military coup of 1936 and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July of 1937), amongst other things, led to the Sino-Japanese War. The most significant of national decisions following this was the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, and Japan’s subsequent involvement in World War II. The terrors of war would end in mid August of 1945, leaving Japan in a state of deep sorrow and national disgrace with little hope for immediate recovery. Philosophically, Tanabe addresses the question of ethnic nationalism in his shu no ronri, “logic of species.” This social philosophy, mostly developed in the years of 1934–1940 challenges claims that Japan’s national unity need be established along ethnic lines, suggesting instead “a rational basis for the nation-state as the practical unity of the real and the ideal.”[36] The “species,” though its name would not indicate as much, is according to Tanabe a historical-existential, rather than an ethnic, community that ultimately seeks to transcend its own particularity. It does so not by renouncing its finite nature but conversely by communally awakening to the universal ground (genus) upon which its own particularity (species) is predicated. Though the species persists as an entity, it does so only provisionally to allow people to transcend its confines and enter the Absolute universal. The communal religious orientation of the species, informed by the humility of Shin Buddhist self-negation, most easily lends itself to such a movement. Tanabe, acknowledging the practical futility of opposing nationalistic, species driven beliefs, seeks to utilize the species to move beyond itself.[37] Such attempts at undermining the ethnic nationalism of his day, though somewhat indirect, did earn Tanabe the censure of leading ultra-nationalist organizations and figureheads. The ultra-nationalist stronghold established in 1925, Genri Nihonsha, under the leadership of Minoda Muneki (1894–1946), for example, denounced Tanabe as a pro- liberal individualist. Tanabe was not without a history of thought and action that would merit such accusations of liberalism. In 1933, for instance, in his first encounter with Shôwa Period fascism, Tanabe defended Kyoto University law professor Takikawa Yukitoki. Yukitoki was indicted on charges that he had made dangerous remarks against the state. Tanabe, in the name of academic freedom, was part of the contingent of intellectuals at Kyoto who spoke out on behalf of Yukitoki.[38] Two years later, Tanabe publicly voiced opposition to the Japanese Ministry of Education’s efforts to isolate Japan from the West, also criticizing its growing militaristic ideology the following year.[39] Tanabe’s pre-war record of intellectual and philosophical responsibility would unfortunately not extend into the war. Tanabe was sometimes scrupulous and outspoken during the pre-war years about the impropriety of certain government actions and policies. He was also an ex post facto critic of Japanese polity during the war. His philosophical position from 1941-1945, however, was itself largely responsible for directly justifying much of what he opposed in the pre- and post-war eras.[40] During his seldom spoken of “middle-period,” Tanabe conceptually absolutized the status of the state. At the Chûôkuron discussions, a year long series of meetings beginning in November 1941 where some of Japan’s foremost young scholars discussed issues of national polity, Tanabe’s proposition that “the Emperor should be regarded as a symbol of Absolute Nothingness”[41] met with the general approval of conference attendees. Even after the war in 1946 Tanabe expresses a similar sentiment: The emperor is the embodiment of the ideal of the unity of the people as a whole. Only nothingness is able to unify things that stand in opposition; simple being cannot do it. The absolute inviolability of the emperor is a function of transcendental nothingness.[42] Tanabe’s theory of national existence depicts the emperor as sacred. The highly esteemed category of absolute nothingness, the philosophical center of Tanabe’s centerless universe, is embodied in the emperor. Most surprising is that these are comments Tanabe makes after publishing Philosophy as Metanoetics, the work which most closely approximates an apology from Tanabe for his war time philosophy. Considering this, Tanabe may here have been proposing that it is the emperor’s absolute status that would make his repentance meaningful for the Japanese people. Emperor Hirohito did in a sense repent during the surrender of August, 1945. The emperor’s penitential gesture could have theoretically led the people to metanoia. Practically, however, the people never followed the emperor’s partial movement of repentance. Yet, we can read Tanabe implicitly to be making such a suggestion. This is all to say that we cannot judge Tanabe too quickly. Though remnants of his nationalism persist even after the war is over, we find him writing a final letter in 1945 to his by that time academic nemesis Nishida Kitarô speaking out against the military’s atrocious behavior. Tanabe crossed boundaries of philosophical difference to ask for Nishida’s support in requesting that Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945) put a stop to the army’s excesses.[43] Also in his favor, we can point out that Tanabe was a serious critic of the culturalism of the Taisho period which was reemerging in the mid nineteen-forties, calling it “nothing but an artistic hedonism that flatters its proud proponents with an awareness of their own privileged status.”[44] Popularly, however, Tanabe made public pleas during the conscription of students in the war encouraging drafted officers to have the bravery to fight without worrying about life or death. Telling them that “the spirit of the imperial army … is none other than the quintessential flowering of the spirit of the nation,” he claimed that service “which sees living and dying only for the sake of the Sovereign” is truly the highest glory available to a Japanese.[45] The greater philosophical vision informing comments like these consisted in the irrational dream shared by many philosophers in the Kyoto School of Japanese domination of East Asia. Tanabe’s conviction “that Japanese Buddhism, Japanized as it is by Japanese polity (kokutai) thought, contains in itself the spirit needed to carry on the creation of a new age,”[46] lent legitimacy to, and perhaps even ennobled the rightist agenda. Although he only speaks of it as a spiritual creation here, historically Tanabe, like many of his contemporaries, envisioned an East Asia under the reigns of Japanese rule. The very term Kyoto School of Philosophy was first a political designation coined in 1931 by Tosaka Jun in order to identify rightist tendencies in the circle of philosophers surrounding Nishida Kitarô. People on the “right” at that time were members of the Japanese intelligentsia who worked against rapid modernization and Westernization introduced by the government during the Meiji Period (1868–1912). Many of them, including figures as well received in the West as Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945), Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) and Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960) were philosophers who could arguably be criticized for philosophically privileging the particularly Japanese approach to religious self-understanding even as they attempted to argue the need for a synthesis of East and West. Though figures like Nishitani and Nishida focused far more closely on the standpoint of individual subjective selfhood than did Tanabe, who was more concerned with “species existence,” they also furthered ideologies of the nation-state that many would later see as contributing to the self-justification of the totalitarian fascist state. Certainly, as far as political measures of nationalism, they did not fare much better than Tanabe in the endeavor to pursue preventive measures, philosophically or popularly, in the face of a rising tide of militarism and patriotism. Unlike Tanabe, however, neither Nishida nor Nishitani laments that shortcoming later in his career. Deeply regretful after Japan’s surrender, Tanabe did not believe he had any choice but to admit his failure as a philosopher. During Tanabe’s later period, when he moved from focusing on the development of his logic of species to embracing religion as such, Tanabe went through a very deep depression. Beginning in the summer of 1944, Tanabe was forbidden by the government from freely expressing his ideas. He was also tormented by his general indecisiveness about certain of his ideas during this period.[47] From that time, therefore, he published very few papers or articles until 1946 when his Philosophy as Metanoetics first appeared. From then onward he admitted that he indeed allowed military expedience to undermine his endeavor toward philosophical truth but also emphasized that he did certain things and pushed certain ideas, even during the war years, designed to prevent the darker side of ethnic nationalism from rearing its ugly head. Tanabe not only accepted responsibility for government actions himself, but imputed it also to the Japanese people as a collective whole. He remarked that “I am deeply convinced that, in the last analysis, everyone is responsible, collectively, for social efforts.” [48] Collective responsibility means that only collective repentance can account for failure. “It seems to me that there can be no other path toward national rehabilitation than for our people as a whole to engage in repentance.”[49] Tanabe identifies Japan’s past nationalism specifically as the cause of its decline and the origin of its decadence.[50] As the agent facilitating the metanoetic movement, the state comes to have new meaning for Tanabe. No longer an incarnation of the Absolute, it is rather to be viewed as a hôben, a skillful means for the transformation in subjectivity of the Japanese people. Tanabe would in fact go on to argue that not only the Japanese people but all the world’s nations need to participate in a repentance of international proportions in order to resolve the contradictory yet simultaneously valid visions of socialism and democracy. Tanabe identifies this conflict as the “touchstone of present-day philosophy.”[51] Though he is never really explicit with regard to how this might happen, envisioned as a possible path to a fusion of the freedom of democracy and the equality of socialism, his philosophy of repentance takes on greater historical significance. “Zange is a task that world history imposes on all peoples in all times.”[52] Soloveitchik Tanabe is best understood historically in typological categories—as the distraught public intellectual whose thought not only lacks sufficient integrity to save his people in a time of crisis, but is not sufficiently powerful even to save himself from corruption. He was in a position of importance and power in which, though weighed down heavily by the rightist government, he could have taken action, even if only in the realm of theory, to mitigate the atrocious circumstances in which he found himself. Further, our image of him is of a man whose historical crisis comes to fruition at the end of a fifteen-year period beginning with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and ending in its unconditional surrender in 1945. That same year Tanabe would retire from university life altogether to spend his remaining sixteen by himself at his Kitakaruizawa cottage in deep religious introspection. His last official act as university professor would be to deliver a series of farewell lectures in the winter of 1944. The opening sentence of the first lecture in this series reads: “The people of Japan watch in alarm as their nation sinks deeper and deeper into hell.”[53] The contents of what follows would later be published as Philosophy as Metanoetics. Soloveitchik is not as accessible a character. He is not as easily classified typologically. The significance of history as a theme in his philosophical self-formation, though in some cases equally as concrete as it was with Tanabe, is not nearly as systematically presented. We do not get the sense that his is an overarching theory of history or even that his attitude toward history is consistent or distinct. Firstly, to historically locate Soloveitchik and the essence of his religious-philosophical project we must travel much further back in time, and traverse the borders of many more countries. “I am a wandering Jew. I have come into contact with many lands, [and] so many languages… I have had to come to grips with the problem of loneliness and aloneness.”[54] Born in the then Russian city of Pruzhana, Soloveitchik would travel throughout eastern Europe (mostly in Russia and Poland) as his father, the much revered Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, transferred from one rabbinical posts to another. In 1922 he would move to Germany to study at the University of Berlin; finally in December of 1932 Soloveitchik made his final move to Boston where he was installed as the city’s unofficial chief rabbi. The expanse of Jewish history, which Soloveitchik was either immediately affected by or under the shadow of which he lived continuously, is largely one of opposition to and terror in the face of the non-Jewish world. As it was for Tanabe and the Japanese people during the war, the question of ethnic particularity and isolation from the forces of greater Western civilization were always extremely salient for Jews. This was true particularly because, until the middle of eighteenth century Jews throughout Europe and outside were living in autonomous corporate states relatively independent and removed from the governments and societies of the countries through which they wandered and in which they dwelled. In an odd way, this corporate isolation mirrors very closely the national isolation of the Japanese people before the arrival of Westerners in 1853. Jewish corporate communities were uniformly religious, with almost categorical participation by all members of the community in its ritual life. Soloveitchik nostalgically remembers “a time when ninety percent of world Jewry were observant and secularists were a small minority at the fringes of the camp.”[55] Though also largely a preference of the Jews themselves, Jewish communities were separated economically, politically and socially from the rest of the Western world. The tradition of Jewish textual lore interprets this separateness as a fundamental religious condition of the Jew. Even from Judaism’s inception, according to its own sources, “the whole world was standing on one side of the river, while Abraham was on the other.”[56] Abraham, who is called haivri, the Hebrew, is thought of metaphysically as ever, or other, on the opposite side. Such strong dualism in the question of nationhood, or we might even say ethnic nationalism, as well as in other dimensions of life, is a theme that runs throughout Jewish philosophical thought, and is something Soloveitchik focuses heavily upon. Drawing distinctions between the holy and the unholy, the Sabbath and the rest of the week, the Jewish and the non-Jewish is amongst the most essential motifs of the Biblical, rabbinical and liturgical traditions in Judaism. Soloveitchik will use this tradition ultimately to reveal the dialectical nature of dichotomies Judaism creates. In so doing, Soloveitchik engages in a creative but not completely unprecedented interpretation of the Jewish tradition’s propensity to focus on principles of difference by which the world is ordered, separating in its appropriate measure things from each other. The corporate status of Jewish communal life in Europe changed radically in the era immediately preceding and during Soloveitchik’s own lifetime. Enlightenment thought and modernization in western Europe brought with it new ideals of national citizenship and the universal equality of men that would eventually make independent Jewish corporate states economically, politically and ideologically irrational entities. Thus, beginning around 1770 and taking as long as until 1917 (as was the case in Russia), the Jews of western, central and eventually eastern Europe began a process of “emancipation” from their independent yet politically inferior status to the status of “national citizens.”[57] The “elected ones, the true children of God,” as the Livornese democrat and novelist Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi would sardonically describe the people Israel, who “pass across centuries and peoples as oil in water; they never mingle, they never mix,”[58] would now willy-nilly have somehow to be acculturated to the world of post-Enlightenment Europe. In that world Enlightenment ideals of the equality of humankind (at least on the plane of reason), however, did not always unfold accordingly in practice. Historian Ira Katznelson remarks that, “The relationship of the Enlightenment to European Jewry was contradictory from the start.”[59] Who better to illustrate the irony of the historical predicament into which the Jews were thrust at this time than the Enlightenment thinker par excellence himself, François-Marie Arouet, otherwise known as Voltaire. The same individual who spoke so eloquently of the tremendous liberating power and equalizing force of human reason for all rational beings tells us in 1756 of Jews that: In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they were tolerated and enriched.[60] Such blatant disqualification of Jews as fully human inhabitants of the world which Voltaire envisions as new, free, liberated and enlightened is mitigated only by the comment which immediately follows the above tirade, in which Voltaire instructs curtly that “Still, we ought not to burn them.” The tension that results from such contradictory ideological orientations towards Jews would follow them from where it originated historically, in bourgeois Berlin society in 1770, to the present day. As Jews became more important to European economies, and as they were socially and hierarchically integrated into the institutions of mainstream Christian European life, the character of religious life for Jews would alter dramatically. What was once a remarkably uniform religious community throughout the entire continent of Europe, adhering to a relatively stable tradition in isolated religious ghettos, despite national divisions, became a community in continual rejection and radical reappropriation of its spiritual heritage.[61] In the Jewish world, two major ideological camps, with gradations between them, emerged from the revolution of Enlightenment thought. At the one extreme were thinkers in the tradition of the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, whose disdain for Jewish tradition was not unlike that of Voltaire and who assimilated as thoroughly as possible to the philosophical and cultural climate of the non-Jewish world surrounding him. Perhaps, at the other end of the spectrum, were figures like the Gaon of Vilna, a spiritual antecedent to as well as ancestor of Soloveitchik, who devoted a life to resisting himself, and aiding his community in resisting, the often seductive and more often intrusive forces of acculturation and assimilation. Decentralization and de-consolidation of Jewish religious communities resulting from emancipation was a major event in Jewish history, notable particularly for its irony. What was this irony? In the words of Todd Endleman, historian of Jews in Victorian England, “what centuries of persecution had been powerless to do, has been affected in a score of years by friendly intercourse.”[62] The liberation of Jewry led to the dissipation of Judaism. Of course, the history of emancipation in each European country was different, sometimes radically so, but in general the tension resulting between traditional Jewish religious life and possible radical reinterpretations or even complete rejections of that religious life was a theme that would shape Jewish history across the Western world. Newly emancipated Jews were subject to a kind of quid pro quo liberation: their Verbesserung (betterment), according to the standards of the governments liberating them, was expected in return for the rights they were granted. In most cases, as in Germany, this process was to be focused on redeeming the Jew through improved Bildung, education and self-formation. Ultimately, with the possible exception of England, this proved to be a false quid pro quo because no matter what measures Jews took to assimilate, even if they intermarried and converted, they were still by and large stigmatized by the societies whose standards to which they so wanted to adhere.[63] The emphasis on Bildung, however contradictory it ultimately came to be, did lead to substantive changes in the religious lives of Jews throughout Europe. Most notably, in Germany as well as ultimately France and Russia, secular education became at some level compulsory for Jews. The German rabbinate was particularly affected by this decision because rabbis in Germany were required to receive a university education in the early part of the nineteenth century.[64] A tradition that had for so longed abhorred, even forbade secular learning would be brought into the modern world under the leadership of people who had significant exposure to non-Jewish thinking and traditions. What resulted was that the foundations of faith were often challenged in non-Jewish university settings and a new liberal Jewish thinker emerged, a radical departure from central figures of the tradition preceding him but equally determined to shape that tradition for coming generations. Enlightenment thought in the Jewish world was transformed into the Haskala movement. Beginning with gigantic figures in Germany such as Moses Mendelsohn (b. 1729) who introduced enlightenment thinking to colleagues and contemporaries, the Haskala would in time make its way to Russian Jewry. Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, grandfather of Joseph, like all rabbis from the famed Brisker tradition, “despised the Haskala movement.”[65] He faced opponents like Joshua Steinberg (1825–1908), whose objective was to bring secular learning to the Great Yeshiva of Volozhin and expose Russian Jewry to advances in modern thought and culture. Successful in his endeavor, Steinberg would make sure that the Yeshiva instituted a Russian language program in 1887; later, however, because of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik’s refusal to comply with government edicts which would further secularize the Yeshiva’s curriculum, Steinberg watched as the doors of the Yeshiva were closed by imperial order.[66] Rabbi Chaim developed a new method of Talmud study which would go on to greatly influence Soloveitchik as a dialectical thinker. Soloveitchik credits his grandfather’s new approach to Talmud with having created a place for traditional Jewish learning in the twentieth century from which it would not need to conform to the institutions and demands of the non-Jewish world.[67] Soloveitchik’s family is replete with figures like Rabbi Chaim who have a history of social and intellectual action on behalf of Russian Jews during the time they and their solidarity were threatened by the encroaching world of modernity. Soloveitchik’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner (1749–1821) was the spokesman for Russian Jewry under Alexander I. He is even rumored to have met with Napoleon during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.[68] Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner’ s successor as the head of the Yeshiva of Volozhiner, his son Rabbi Itzele (d. 1849), along with the leader of the Chasidic Jewry of Lubavitch, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, met extensively with government officials in 1843 to discuss the economic plight and possibilities for social betterment in the condition of Jews in Russia. In 1882, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II when the Jews of Kiev, Odessa, and other cities were subject to widespread pogroms, Soloveitchik’s maternal grandfather met with other rabbis to petition Alexander III (1854–1894) on behalf of Russian Jewry. The case of Russian Jewry is distinct from the rest of world Jewry in that Russian Jews were granted full emancipation only after the revolution of 1917. Prior to emancipation Russian Jews suffered a history of inhuman persecution in the Pale of Settlement, the territory tsarist rulers forced Jews to settle during the greater portion of their history in Russia, after the partitioning of Poland in 1772. Actually, under both tsarist rule and later communist regime rule, Jews were subject to mass slaughter, pogroms and the horrors of military conscription. A military draft was first instituted by tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) in 1827 on the Jews with the specific purpose of converting them to Greek Orthodox Christianity.[69] Each community had to produce a quota of young men per year to be conscripted as officers. The result was that Jew turned against Jew, as kidnappers took other peoples’ children, sometimes as young as ten years old, to send to the military. Years later, in the shtetl town Khaslavichy where Soloveitchik grew up, he and his family lived in constant fear for their lives at the hands of their non-Jewish neighbors and government. The situation was no better for Soloveitchik and his family when they moved to Warsaw Poland in 1920. They had to leave Russia both because of extreme poverty and because the introduction of Marxist educational programs created a new sort of Jewish youth, far removed from their traditional upbringing and bent on secularization. In Warsaw, Rabbi Moshe, Soloveitchik’s father became the teacher of Talmudic studies at the Tachkamoni Rabbinical Seminary, a religious academy established by leaders of the Mizrachi movement (religious Zionists) with the goal of providing an institution that stressed the importance of both Talmudic and secular scholarship.[70] Though he would ultimately leave this post, frustrated with the spiritual deterioration of the student body, his role at Tachkamoni would foreshadow his son’s religious destiny. The situation that Soloveitchik faced as leader of American Orthodoxy and spokesperson for traditional Talmudic Judaism was in many respects similar to but in most respects radically different from his ancestors’ predicament. Soloveitchik never had to worry about pogroms, military conscription, famine or oppression of Jews based on ethnic particularity. His greatest worry was the condition of the assimilated Jew, the Jew in passive spiritual dissipation, for whom the traditional world of religious practice no longer was appealing as a possible direction in which to orient the development of his/her religious subjectivity. As a most highly revered teacher of Talmud at New York’s Yeshiva University, in some ways the American equivalent of Poland’s Tachkamoni, he was continually confronted by the deleterious effects of the contemporary world on the viability of traditional Jewish communities and learning. Though he never advocated shunning secular education entirely and on the contrary spoke frequently of the absolute indispensability of participation in the non-Jewish world, a profound pessimism characterized his vision of Judaism’s future status. From Soloveitchik’s perspective, the statistical figures alone are enough to alarm one who has faith in the traditional covenental community. Intermarriage amongst third-generation post-emancipation Jews exceeds a rate of one in three, and the Jewish community erodes as only Jews who choose to ghettoize themselves and reject modern life entirely seem to have any success at maintaining their continuity.[71] The Second World War was also, of course, no less an important event in Soloveitchik’s life than it was for Tanabe. As a leader of American Orthodoxy, Soloveitchik was turned toward for reassurance and explanations in the face of perhaps the most tragic event in Judaism’s exceptionally dismal history. Like Tanabe, Soloveitchik had to accept the utter defeat of the Holocaust. The Holocaust as historical event brings into the religious consciousness a crisis in our understanding of suffering and the reasons for suffering. Genocide so close in proximity to our own time is the contradiction that makes us cognizant of the utter disparity between what is good and what is evil in world being. Facing the terrible stench of what is lowest in humankind, in light of our previous knowledge of the rosy fragrance of what is highest, we try to understand how the incommensurable opposites can be resolved one with the other. Yet it is really only after the suffering has passed that man is afforded the luxury of being able to strive after such imagined resolutions. In the midst of his tragedy, the sufferer is silent and only “after this psychic upheaval” does an intellectual curiosity follow. But then it is too late, for the sufferer has forgotten and “utilizes his capacity for intellectual abstraction… to the point of self-deception,” in order to affirm the resolvability of the evil that so plagued him.[72] For both Tanabe and Soloveitchik, the impossibility of overcoming the hideous facticity of evil does not allow philosophical-speculation an inroad to the dream of synthetic harmony. No matter the level of the abstraction, or how great the concentration of energies to eliminate it completely, the bare fact of human suffering as it transpires in our midst will not wait for or yield to the contrivance of explanation to hinder it in asserting its negativity. Defying explanation, the Holocaust represents for Soloveitchik the consummate expression of hester panim muchlat, absolute divine self-concealment—“Thou canst not see my face, for man shall not see me and live”[73]—galut, an exile from God’s midst without parallel in religious history.[74] The horror of the Holocaust was not simply the irrationality of its victimization of Jews. What exacerbates the tragedy to intolerable proportions for Soloveitchik was rather the silence of American Jewry during the war: Let us be frank: During the terrible Holocaust, when European Jewry was being systematically exterminated in the ovens and crematoria, the American Jewish community did not rise to the challenge, did not act as Jews possessing a properly developed consciousness of our shared fate and shared suffering, as well as the obligation of shared action that follows therefrom, [and] ought to have acted. We did not sufficiently empathize with the anguish of the people and did very little to save our afflicted brethren. It is hard to know how much we might have accomplished had we tried harder. Personally, I think we might have been able to save many. There is no doubt, however, that had we properly grieved over the affliction of our brothers, had we raised our voices and forcefully demanded that Roosevelt issue a sharp protest-warning, backed by concrete actions, we could have substantially slowed the process of mass murder. We were witnesses to the greatest and most terrible tragedy in our history and we were silent… We all sinned by our silence.[75] Tanabe too laments the collective sin of his own species, what Soloveitchik called his “camp-people,” and their inability to act responsibly in the tragic circumstances in which they could have prevented horrible mistakes. Further, like Tanabe, Soloveitchik will indict himself in the sinful crime in a powerful gesture of self-accusation. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean all of us—myself included.”[76] He asks openly of himself, why did I remain inactive during the atrocities? Why didn’t I do something? Where was I in the midst of the crisis— comfortable, unbothered, oblivious?![77] We know not the why of the Holocaust, says Soloveitchik; all we know is that we are guilty for our silence when it happened. But Soloveitchik will not allow imperfect knowledge and undeniable guilt, however, to impede action. We do not need to understand completely to respond appropriately. For Tanabe also, responding appropriately need not presuppose exhaustive knowledge—on the contrary, the fact that I do not know even the gravity of my sin or the extent of my confusion further confirms my need to repent. How much more am I sure of the lowly state into which I have sunk because I am unaware of the tragic proportions of just what has happened around me! Faced with this circumstance of unsurpassable confusion and decadence, Tanabe writes of the necessity for the action of complete submission in powerlessness and thorough spiritual transformation. From one perspective, however, Soloveitchik’s response differs radically from Tanabe’s. Soloveitchik tells us that if God has hidden himself from us in the Holocaust, He has just as clearly revealed himself in the emergence of the state of Israel. God has spoken in history by allowing for the formation of Israel, which, though Soloveitchik does not see it as intimating the impending arrival of the Jewish Messiah, is to his mind miraculous in every other imaginable respect.[78] Failing to hearken to God’s call in the emergence of Israel would be a missed moment perhaps equal in tragic proportions to the Holocaust itself. Not answering the voice of our beloved calling would leave an irreparable gap in the time consciousness of world Jewry’s existential community. Lest God leave as the Jew tarries, it is incumbent on the community to return to the land. More than simply a call to populate the land, however, Soloveitchik means this to be a call for a collective repentance. This sort of repentance is nothing foreign to the Jewish tradition, prophesied even in the Torah: And it shall come to pass, when all these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have put before you, and you shall have a turn of heart while still amongst the nations, whither the Lord your God has driven you. And you shall return unto the Lord your God and shall obey Him… then the Lord your God will turn your captivity, and have compassion upon you, and will gather you from among the nations, wither the Lord your God has scattered you. If any of you be driven out to the ends of the horizon, from thence will the Lord your God gather you, and from thence will He fetch you.[79] Settlement in Israel ultimately alludes to spiritual rebirth and redemption, and follows an era of blessings and curses, which, though inexplicable in themselves, indicate the necessity of communal transformation. III. Living with the Love of Wisdom: Biography of the Philosopher The aim of our study is penetration into the philosophical depths of these two thinkers. We have spent a great deal of time thus far contexualizing their respective philosophical projects. But our purpose in so doing has not been simply to provide background for our later discussion; understanding the historical subtleties that contribute to the formation of our thinkers’ theoretical approaches should alter considerably how we encounter their philosophical lives.[80] Though we have analyzed the significance of Tanabe and Soloveitchik as religious figures and historical subjects above, we know not yet the importance of the philosophical dimension of each man’s life. Interesting is the fact that both men treated the philosophical as somehow related to yet ultimately incommensurable with the religious. For both, philosophy could not aspire to the heights of explanation and understanding; it was somehow limited structurally, somehow inherently incapable of such a tremendous task. Yet Tanabe and Soloveitchik both exist in some capacity as philosophers—not theologians with some knowledge of philosophy or dabblers casually interested by the subject in passing, but as masters of the discipline who dedicate themselves to its study with the intention of grasping its core. The next chapter explains in detail why philosophy, particularly Western philosophy, falls short for both Tanabe and Soloveitchik in the endeavor to illuminate the depths of the human condition. What follows in this section are some very brief remarks about the history of their involvement in the grand enterprise of philosophy itself. Soloveitchik and Tanabe both began their careers not in departments of philosophy but rather as aspiring mathematicians. Though each would ultimately part roads with the discipline, opting in both cases to pursue the study of philosophy, there is a way in which mathematics or mathematical thinking becomes a predominant force throughout the rest of their work. Tanabe’s career in philosophy can be broken down into three or four major periods. Interested first in the philosophy of science, he earned a doctorate with a dissertation entitled “A study of Philosophy of Mathematics.”[81] His preoccupation here was with the problem of infinite continuity in mathematical systems, which he was already beginning to relate to social and cultural issues. What allowed him to make the connection between the two areas of philosophical inquiry was his fascination with Hermann Cohen’s idea of the infinitesimal and other topics in Cohen’s epistemology.[82] Tanabe’s second period begins when he succeeds Nishida as Professor of Philosophy at Kyoto University in 1927. During this time he begins forming his so-called “logic of species” —an articulation of what he believes was the ontological structure and existential experience of the relationship between the world, the state and the individual. The third period, with which we concern ourselves mostly in the following chapters, begins at the time of his retirement in 1945 when he declares a radical negation of philosophy and the adoption of the religious standpoint of metanoesis. Here, asserting the logic of absolute mediation, which is a kind of neither/nor approach to explaining the human subject’s relationship to the relative, on the one hand, and the Absolute, on the other, he is at his most volatile. The remaining stages of his philosophical development are not at all definite. Never exiting the realm of the religious, in his last days he makes a return to Zen but with a heavy emphasis on the bodhisattva ideal of one who returns to the world of the deluded to be an evil and ignorant being again but also for the sake of the salvation of the many. He also turns at this point back to his interests in the philosophy of mathematics and science, reaching for an all encompassing integration of the many fields of inquiry in which he took interest throughout his life. It is also here that Tanabe’s interest in Christianity becomes significant, with the publication of The Dialectic of Christianity in 1948.[83] Following his wife’s death in 1951, Tanabe also faces a period during which the philosophy of death, particularly the question of the correlation between life and death, as well as various issues in aesthetics become important to him.[84] The entire question of Soloveitchik’s involvement with philosophy was significant in his life even before his birth. The marriage of his parents—Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, well known for coming from a family with a strict aversion to all things secular, and Harabbanit Pesha Feinstein, from a family well known both for its great piety and its acceptance of secular learning—was thought to be an oddity destined for chaos.[85] This union of opposed approaches to life in fact led to much turmoil, resulting even in a period of separation early on in the marriage.[86] It, however, also led to many wonderful things, included amongst them the self-formation of a world religious leader known for his exceptional creativity. The decision to send Soloveitchik to Berlin to study Western philosophy was much disputed. In one sense, the union of his parents, both prominent heirs to the era’s most distinguished rabbinical dynasties, was engineered to produce a figure of unsurpassable learning and leadership qualities in the Jewish world.[87] Anything that threatened such a result was to be avoided like the plague. About her brother, Soloveitchik’s sister Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman remarks, “Ever since I can remember, our life centered around … Josef Dov.”[88] Not only members of his immediate family, but the entire community invested a great deal of hope in Soloveitchik’s ascent to greatness. Distinguished members of the community, as a result of their concern, even paid visits to Soloveitchik’s father expressing their worries about the propriety of his secular studies. [89] A man well versed in secular thought, they claimed, could never be embraced by the orthodox community. Indeed, later in his life Soloveitchik’s erudition made him a loner even amongst his most learned contemporaries. Yet what resulted from such a novel life path was a mind comparable in character and breath to that of Maimonedes. Soloveitchik did not progress from philosophy to religion, as did Tanabe, but, beginning in the world of religious thought and life, he picked up philosophy after having studied religion and always somehow kept the two relatively separate in his mind. Like Maimonedes, whose Mishneh Torah enjoys widespread adherence in the world of orthodoxy, but whose Guide for the Perplexed is popular mostly amongst those who live in the world outside of strict religious observance, Soloveitchik rarely mixed the content of his Talmud lessons with that of his speculative philosophy. This does not, however, preclude the possibility that his methodology of analysis from the one deeply influence the other, as I will later argue. Yet, as far as content is concerned, Soloveitchik often expressed his belief that all the philosophy in the world could not help one understand the unique intricacies of Talmudic disputes.[90] Given the stigma associated with secular thought, and the way in which Soloveitchik chose to separate philosophical speculation from traditional Jewish scholarship, we might ask—what was it that prompted him to undertake the project of philosophical investigation in the first place? Soloveitchik describes it as a need to turn to philosophy in order to speak in the language of the spirit of the time. Though he would fulfill the traditional role of a community leader, opening up the Maimonides Day School in 1937 as well as occupying countless official advisory posts in Boston and New York, he also believed he had to try very hard “to interpret Judaism in modern terms, for modern man.”[91] He makes it clear that such interpretations were not absolute, that whatever he says of Judaism are strictly his subjective impressions. He makes them not for the sake of definitive explanation, but more for the sake of reaching out to those who would listen with interest only if he spoke in the language that they understood. In this sense, philosophy is for Soloveitchik a kind of upâya (skillful means) for speaking to Jews who no longer find the tradition accessible when represented in the terms by which it was conventionally articulated. The principle of upâya, although I have borrowed the term from the Buddhist tradition, is actually not completely foreign to Jewish lore. There is a story in the Talmud which tells us that before God revealed the Torah He tarried and the angels asked what was taking Him so long. God replied that He had to add the tagim, the crowns on the letters, so as to make it attractive to Akiva ben Yosef. This is a reference to the great Rabbi Akiva who did not begin the study of Torah until he was forty and was drawn into the tradition, not at first by the words, but by the ornamental crowns drawn on the letters of those words. For Soloveitchik, then, we could say that philosophy came to represent the crowns on the letters of the singular enterprise of Torah study. Because Soloveitchik is far less systematic than even Tanabe in the formation of his philosophical world-view, it is difficult to schematize the progress of his interests in a coherent outline as we did for Tanabe. Out of a principle belief in the continuity and flexibility of interpretation as well as out of a concern for perfection, Soloveitchik published much less than did Tanabe. We can, however, detect a kind of philosophical transition between his two most seminal works—between the triumphant spirituality of the Talmudic Jew as articulated in Halakhic Man, published in 1944 and the exasperated confession of the defeated existential creature in The Lonely Man of Faith, published in 1965.[92] Though both Tanabe and Soloveitchik see themselves as first and foremost religious thinkers, each also has an affair with philosophy proper. Both become at one point or another enamored of the philosophical life but are later disenchanted. Neither regrets his detour into the philosophical side-streets, for each understands that process as somehow having been necessary in helping him arrive at his religious standpoint. Though they use it in vastly different ways, both Soloveitchik and Tanabe believe they have of necessity to exit the philosophical detour because it somehow fails to achieves its self-assigned goal. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]. As cited in George Feifer, Tennozan, p. 337. [2]. The details of Tanabe’s involvement in the war will be discussed below. By “Pacific War” I mean both Japan’s war with the United States initiated formally on December 8, 1941, and the war Japan was involved with in China from July 7, 1937. [3]. From a letter to his students dated August 27, 1945, as cited in Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. xxxviii. [4]. From a personal correspondence to Takeuchi Yoshinori dated July 7, 1944, as cited Ibid., p. xxxvii.. [5]. Ibid., p. 15. [6]. Ibid., p. 3. [7]. Ibid., p. 197. [8]. Ibid., p. 225. [9]. Ibid., p. 192. [10]. Ibid., p. 31. For further instances of self-effacement in Philosophy as Metanoetics see pp. 90, 91, 128, and 194. [11]. Shinran, Kyôgôshinshô , 4:11 as cited Ibid., p. 21. [12]. Ibid., p. 250. [13]. Ozaki Makoto, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 15. A more detailed explanation of this so-called “religious genius” comes in the conclusion of this paper. [14]. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 284. [15]. Ibid., p. 92–93. [16]. Ibid., p. 281. [17]. Ibid., p. 31, 20. [18]. Ibid., p. 221. [19]. Ibid., p. 21. [20]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 8. Zange is the Japanese term for repentance which the translator of Philosophy as Metanoetics leaves transliterated throughout the text. It is used interchangeably with the term “metanoetics.” [21]. This is one part of the shin-gyô-shô, “faith-action-witness” triad Tanabe uses to explain religious experience. This idea is a fairly complex one, and will start to unfold more clearly in our discussion of Tanabe’s view of repentance. [22]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 20. [23]. Ibid., p. 254. The specifics of this assertion are further developed in the following chapter on Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s respective reappropriations of Western philosophy. [24]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 1. [25]. Ibid., p. 3. [26]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Dual Aspects of Man” (taped lecture). [27]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 113. [28]. Though the distinction between “loneliness” and “aloneness,” a central topic in Soloveitchik’s thought and life, will not become the subject of major concern for us, it will receive some further treatment in subsequent chapters. [29]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 4. [30]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #1 (taped lecture). [31]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Unity of the Generations” (taped lecture). [32]. From an unpublished eulogy given by Rabbi Isadore Twersky z”l for Soloveitchik at Maimonedes School on May 31, 1993. [33]. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSan Francisco) 1962, p. 393. [34]. Jan Van Bragt, “Kyoto Philosophy—Intrinsically Nationalistic?” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 234. [35]. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 255. [36]. Tanabe Hajime, “The Dialectical Method of the Logic of Species,” Tanabe Hajime Zenshu [The Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], volume 7, p. 253, as cited in Kevin M. Doak, “Nationalism as Dialectics,” in Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 187. [37]. Tanabe’s logic of species is much more complicated than I have presented it here. Though it is a topic of considerable importance for understanding Tanabe’s religious thought, it is in many ways outside the scope of our current project. The ideas behind Tanabe’s “logic of species,” however, are integral to many other topics Tanabe addresses and will be further discussed below. [38]. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 265. [39]. Ibid., p. 266. [40]. Ibid., p. 265. [41]. Ôshima Yasumasa, “The Greater East Asia War and the Kyoto School,” as cited in Horio Tsutomu, “The Chûôkuron Discussions,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 303. [42]. Tanabe Hajime, Rekishiteki genjitsu [Historical Reality], in Tanabe Hajime Zenshu [The Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], volume 8, as cited in Heisig, Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 264. [43]. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 273. Tanabe’s break with Nishida revolved around the former’s accusations that the latter was too steeped in a philosophy centered around mystical intuition to face the exigencies of historical responsibility. Beginning as early as 1930, the clash reached its worst stages after Nishida’s retirement in 1945. So serious was the nature of the schism that the two men could not even stand to be in the same room together. [44]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 262. [45]. Tanabe Hajime, “Farewell words to students on the way to war: Realize the true meaning of conscription!” Tanabe Hajime Zenshu [The Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], as cited in James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 270. [46]. Jan Van Bragt, “Kyoto Philosophy—Intrinsically Nationalistic?” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 248. [47]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. l. [48]. Ibid., p. liv. [49]. Ibid., p. xxxvii. [50]. Ibid., p. 296. [51]. Ibid., p. 261. [52]. Ibid., p. 296. [53]. Ibid., p. xxxv. [54]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape # 5 (taped lecture). [55]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 88. [56]. Midrash Rabba (42:8). [57]. See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto. [58]. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Note autobiografiche (1833) (Florence, 1899), ed. R. Guastalla, pp. 85–86, as cited in Andrew Canepa, “Emancipation and Jewish Responses in Mid-Nineteenth Century Italy,” in European History Quarterly, 1986. [59]. Ira Katznelson, “Between Separation and Disappearance: Jews on the Margins of American Liberalism,” in Paths of Emancipation, p. 160. [60]. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire, translated by William F. Fleming (Akron, Ohio: Werner Co.) 1904, pp. 283–84. [61]. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, p. 257. [62]. Endleman, Radical Assimilation, p. 113. Endleman wrote this book based upon the suggestion of Soloveitchik’s brother, Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik. [63]. Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering, p. 20. [64]. Ibid., p. 22. [65]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 71. [66]. Ibid., p. 71. [67]. From an unpublished eulogy by Rabbi Yehuda Parnes given for Soloveit­chik at Yeshiva University on May 6, 1993. [68]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 27. [69]. Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, pp. 3-96. [70]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 203–4. [71]. See Arthur Hertzberg, “The Emancipation: A Reassessment after Two Centuries,” Modern Judaism 1, September 1981. This is, of course, only one reading of Judaism since emancipation. [72]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek—It is The Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh,” p. 53. [73]. Exodus (33:20). [74]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 63. [75]. Ibid., pp. 96–97. [76]. Ibid. [77]. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Dilemma of the American Jew” (taped lecture). [78]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 69. [79]. Deuteronomy (30:1-4). [80]. The reader may notice a kind of disequilibrium in my treatment of Tanabe’s versus Soloveitchik’s personal biographical life. Soloveitchik’s family history is more detailed, his personal character more vividly articulated and his singular personality more easily detectable. This disparity is due to a number of factors. Firstly, there are few sources which deal with Tanabe as a personality. He was an extremely private man, who was even reluctant to be photographed. His academic position did not demand that he address larger, more general audiences. Tanabe’s family history also seems not to bear too heavily on his own philosophical legacy. Though his father’s mastery of Confucian classics would influence his thought, Tanabe would never draw a direct correlation between his status as familial heir, on the one hand, and as philosophical heir, on the other. [81]. Suri tetsugaku kenkyu. [82]. Ozaki Makato, Introduction to the Philosophy Tanabe, p. 3. [83]. Kirisutokyô no benshô. Sections of this work have alternatively been translated as the Demonstratio of Christianity. [84]. Ozaki Makato, Introduction to the Philosophy Tanabe, p. 28. [85]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 2. [86]. Ibid., p. 24. [87]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 10. In trying to convince Soloveitchik’s grandfather of the propriety of the match between Rabbi Moshe and Harabbanit Pesha, Rabbi Menachem Krakowsky, a son-in-law of Rabbi Eliyahu Feinstein’s (Pesha’s father) exclaims “Their children will be geniuses.” [88]. Ibid., p. 152. [89]. Ibid., p. 226. [90]. From an unpublished eulogy by Rabbi Hershel Reichman given for Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University on May 10, 1993. [91]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape # 1 (taped lecture). [92]. In the interim between the publication of these essays Soloveitchik underwent cancer surgery (1959) and shortly after the publication of the latter lost his wife, his mother and his brother Samuel all within a ten-week period in 1967.