CHAPTER 2 Legitimacy and Succession: The Role of the Classical West Generally speaking, the imperfection in everything human is that its aspirations are achieved only by way of their opposites. I shall not discuss the variety of formations, which can give a psychologist plenty to do (the melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the most opulent have the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, the doubter often the best sense of the religious), but merely call to mind that it is through sin that one gains a first glimpse of salvation. —Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or The philosophical mood history creates for Tanabe and Soloveitchik is one of irrationality. The predominant motif in the chaotic house of post-war philosophy is crisis. Emotions are not easily assuaged and often patience for rational explanations runs exceedingly thin. If under ordinary circumstances the philosopher imagines he is afforded the luxury of contemplative eternity, allowing him the infinite time and boundless expansive space to ponder systematically the weightier of life’s questions, wartime irrationalities thrust him suddenly into a veritable emergency room of philosophical investigation, where explanation is demanded incessantly and from loud and nagging voices. If crisis is a sudden rupture of what was once whole or an unexpected instability where there was once stability, it is as important to understand what precedes the event of crisis as it is to understand how the crisis might itself be resolved. We have already investigated the historical underpinnings of the crisis in question, but it is important to note that Tanabe and Soloveitchik also face a crisis of explanation. It is not simply explanation in the general sense which becomes a problem for these thinkers. They are burdened with the problem of the failure of a particular tradition of explanation¾a Western, philosophical and largely Christian tradition that dates back to the primordial era of pre-Socratic thought.[1] Characteristic of a large portion of this tradition, they both believe, is an almost indefatigable reliance on the faculty of rational thought, both in its adoption of the schema of formal logic introduced in Aristotelian philosophy and also in its intimate relationship with the mathematical sciences since the revolution of Newton. Equally as important to Soloveitchik and Tanabe are reactionary traditions to these prominent currents of Western thought. Our thinkers deem romanticism, existential philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics important both in their own right and as responses to the aforementioned rationalism. Yet, in the eyes of Tanabe and Soloveitchik, none of these reactionary intellectual movements lived up to the critical task which wartime irrationality had precipitated. This fact leave our thinkers with a two-fold problematic in their respective encounters with the West¾both that of the failure of rationalism and that of the failure of irrationalism. An understanding of history, both national and intellectual, brings into greater relief the numerous sets of abstract contradictories which make up the corpus of classical Western philosophy. Eternity and time, Absolute and relative, transcendence and immanence, universal and individual, other and self, Nothingness and Being are all dichotomies with which our thinkers are concerned. Abstract resolutions of these opposites have to answer the test of historical authenticity. Tanabe and Soloveitchik both ask, do our proposed answers really account for concrete historical circumstances? Are we satisfied with the theories presented thus far in light of history? Has philosophy even yet begun to ease our minds with regard to our histories—has anything really been explained at all? Our thinkers can afford only very few positive answers to these questions. As individual and collective histories continually destroy the perceived perfection of proposed reconciliations of these opposites, the challenge to encounter them arises again. Tanabe claims that “every aporia of philosophy has the form of an antinomy.”[2] Antinomy in every case denotes a crisis of contradictories which make competing claims on our philosophical consciences. The rupture inherent therein is actually the essence of what is called suffering. Calling into question that suffering in the form of “why does this antinomy exist instead of not exist,” indeed “why must it exist?!” is the primal cry that agitates us to the tragic reflection of religious inquiry. Soloveitchik tells us that “religious experience is born in crisis.”[3] Nauseated disbelief in the face of antinomies is the physiology and psychology of the philosopher in religious crisis. The confrontation with antinomy and a life of philosophical crisis is not usually demanded of the philosopher, for essentially such a disposition of despair is non- philosophical. This is not because the problem of crisis, which is discouraging and rather commonplace, is not worthy of philosophy, which is lofty and special¾but more because philosophy, according to Tanabe and Soloveitchik, too often forgets the antinomy by resolving contradictories in a synthesis, an artificial unity that softens the opposition in the contradiction and destroys the eternally adversarial nature of competing truths as it exists in true dialectics. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe dedicated themselves to the search for the authentic dialectic that wills no such superficial resolution, and also to the characteristically disparaging religious disposition that often accompanies such a commitment. Tanabe Tanabe imagines himself to be the heir of both Western and Eastern philosophical and religious thought.[4] To legitimate this claim he speaks of his metanoetics as the natural progression of the historical sciences. To demonstrate this, Tanabe’s first task was to establish the necessity of the move beyond (meta) knowing (noetics) given the history of Western philosophy. To this end, he embarks upon a thorough rereading of Western thought focusing on significant turning points in the history of philosophy. His conclusion?¾having failed its self-assigned task of resolving dialectically the historical antinomies, reason in the modern West has been categorically “cast into a pit of contradictions” and “torn to pieces” in the “absolute disruption” of all the dreams of the classical West.[5] Each progressive stage in the history of philosophy is a partial metanoetical movement, and for this Tanabe feels “unbounded respect and love” toward the philosophers of whom he is highly critical.[6] Tanabe believes, however, that Western philosophy, structurally inhibited by its insistence on conceiving of the Absolute in terms of Being, and thereby sacrificing the perspective of Nothingness, cannot ultimately reach its goal of true dialectics. He claims that it is only in his metanoetics that dialectics receives its complete articulation.[7] Ancient Philosophy Tanabe and Soloveitchik both focus heavily on the significance of Aristotle’s logic of identity as the grounding for much of the rest of Western philosophy. By this logic, a=a and if a=a then a¹-a. Significant for Tanabe is that here there is an either/or built a priori into the philosophical sensibility: affirmation and negation are mutually exclusive.[8] As philosophy later develops with the Hegelian idealists, this logic becomes extremely important. Aristotle’s logic solidifies the stagnation of many dichotomies with which the Western philosophical tradition would go on to grapple. For instance, it is this logic which forces the opposition of being and thinking as a necessary correlate to the opposition of individual relative existence, which as finite is negation, and Absolute existence of the Infinite, which is affirmation as Being. Difficulties arising in the intractability of dichotomies like these will be central to Tanabe’s critique of the West.[9] The problems of this logic intensify when employed in the forum of speculative religious thought, essentially making impossible the classical religious paradox.[10] The contradiction of affirmation and negation from a Buddhist perspective is the opposition of samsara (the world of blind passion and ignorance) and nirvana (enlightenment). Aristotelian logic makes impossible the resolution of these realms. According to the logic of identity, one cannot be in both realms simultaneously, for the two are in polar opposition to each other; what the one is, the other is not. But because this is ultimately too far removed from Tanabe’s religious sensibility, which tells him that sentient beings gain enlightenment though they remain ignorant and blind, the goal of Tanabe’s conception of dialectics will be to resolve the difficulty of the coexistence of opposites established by Aristotelian ontology. Also crucial for Tanabe, as well as for Soloveitchik, is the Platonic innovation of distinction between the universal realm of ideas, which is true reality for Plato, and the sense experience of the particular individual, which is nothing but peculiar and fleeting.[11] Plato as he exists in his body and as he experiences the world corporeally cannot attain the Absolute. The freedom to comprehend certain reality toward which man-philosopher aspires cannot be attained by way of his flawed sense apparata. Only upon his exit from the cave of shadows can man-seeker discover truth. Plato’s distinction further contributes to the exacerbation of tension between contradictory opposites, the mediation of which would become the core of Tanabe’s religious philosophy. A final note of compelling importance for Tanabe on the topic of ancient thought and how it influenced later philosophical currents is the lack of concern for freedom as a subjective category in the existential self-consciousness of historical being in Greek philosophy.[12] Plotinus’ extraction of spirit from Aristotelian substance, dubbing that spirit emanation, ensured that the strictly contemplative model and not a dialectical process of interaction between the immaterial and actual would become the legacy of Ancient thought.[13] That history as a philosophical category never becomes important for Greek thinkers is crucial for Tanabe, who has a deep concern for action, both in self-consciousness and in the world of concrete historical development. Kant Tanabe delved into the thought of Immanuel Kant in 1924 upon returning to Japan after his travels in Europe. He was to deliver a series of lectures in honor of Kant’s 200th birthday. These talks mark the beginning of Tanabe’s radical departure from critical idealism by means of a thoroughgoing application of its own methods of critique to critique itself. The use of reason to penetrate critically its own ground, borrowed from Kant, was Tanabe’s method for demonstrating the radically limited capacity of reason to grasp reality in its totality. Kant was important to Tanabe, therefore, because it was by taking his cue from Kant that Tanabe was able to establish a “true” dialectic that uses reason to transcend itself. Tanabe sees Kant as the first of Western philosophers to use reciprocal logic, as opposed to ordinary methods of logical inference, to work through epistemological and metaphysical dilemmas. Transcendental deduction is reciprocal in that it does not merely serve to derive directly the particular from a self-determining universal. The transcendental inquiry begins with factual knowledge of the particular. Kant claims that so-called “deduction of the particular” is foremost a “justification”—it establishes a theoretical ground for a factually given synthesis (particular). The particular serves as a necessary point of entry for inquiry without imposing itself as an ontological ground. Here Kant recognizes the relative impossibility of purely deductive knowledge and points to the fact that reality contains a contingency that factors into deduction but cannot be deduced formally in abstraction. By categorically drawing a distinction between universal and particular, and then suggesting a method whereby concrete particulars can be deductively inferred from the transcendental thesis in such a way that particular reality always mediates in some capacity the process of inference, Kant moves away from the Aristotelian logic of self-identity and becomes the precursor to dialectical philosophy.[14] Even at its most abstract, the reciprocity of Kant’s dialectics necessarily implicates the subject non-deductively in the transcendental inquiry. It is not an unmediated logic that moves from abstract universal to concrete particular in direct accordance with reason. “It is particular historical facts that prompt us regarding the concrete use of deduction. The particular historical fact cannot be deduced from universal principles. This is its absolute contingency.”[15] Subjective particularity as the starting point of epistemological inquiry must be recognized “simply because it is.” [16] Or, more practically, the abstract hypothesis arises from experience necessarily and necessarily returns again to the realm of experience in the realm of experimentation. In this sense, even something as ahistorical as “nature[,] is in fact historical.”[17] Objects of a historical character are constantly in flux, sometimes revealing, sometimes concealing themselves depending on positionality. They do not yield themselves fully to theory, ahistorical abstraction, or to being subsumed in the otherwise overpowering sea of transcendental ontology. Thus, with Kant, the latter realm of abstraction no longer has a sole claim on reality. Tanabe argues that even as theoretical knowledge, transcendental categories conform to history. Specifically, they are bounded by the history of science. This is in fact true for all scientific discoveries that supposedly take place in the realm of pure inquiry. The concept of number discovered by Arabians was not so much a triumph of the pure intellect as it was a function of the existence of a system of symbolic mathematical deduction in that area at that time. The Greeks, with all their conceptual might and intellectual brawn, failed to arrive at such a discovery for lack of historical positioning. Similarly, Kant’s defense of notions of causality under the threat of Humean skepticism was not a simple or arbitrary theoretical exercise but was tailored primarily to ensure the possibility of Newtonian physics.[18] Kantian premonitions of dialectical theory coincided with the popularization of notions of “energy” over Aristotelian “substance” in the world of physics. Today, moreover, with the emergence of quantum theory, we see the inadequacy of even causality as a conceptual tool to explain certain phenomena—perhaps another philosophical revolution is in order to parallel the empirical need that has arisen. In noting the relevance of these issues Tanabe hopes to question abstract reason’s claim to total or pure knowledge. At the least, he wishes to challenge the idea that theory operates on a plane unaffected by particular, contingent reality. Though he may here appear to be, Tanabe is not a historicist in the sense that he wants to deconstruct phenomena historically. He is simply pointing to the necessary relevance of history even in the formulation of abstract absolutes.[19] As an earnest student of Kant and Neo-Kantian philosophy for a good portion of his early philosophical development, Tanabe never allows particularity to be dissolved into a transcendental unity; nor does he conversely, as Soloveitchik also would never do, relinquish the necessity of positing a transcendental reality. Mediating these opposite values introduces a problem for Tanabe which is never resolved. Absolute retention of difference in the mediation of subject and object, immediate and transcendent, infinite and finite would inexorably persist as a theme for Tanabe through the end of his philosophical career.[20] What ultimately prevents Kant from moving beyond simply reciprocal thinking, which recognizes the inter-relatedness of concrete historical particulars and abstract ahistorical absolutes, to dialectics, which investigates the intimate interdependence, interpenetration and indeed mutual creation of the former and the latter, is his location of the ground of objectivity in subjectivity.[21] The failure to recognize the dialectical nature of the subject-object relationship by suggesting that one is the ground of the other, however, betrays a failure to carry out the critique of reason to its absolute ends. In Tanabe’s absolute critique and in his turn to Pure Land Buddhism, the negation- quality of the absolute difference between the subject and object, the infinite and finite, instead of the subjectivity of the individual knower, becomes a dialectical “ground” as what Tanabe calls Absolute Nothingness.[22] Instead of siding with either subjectivity or objectivity as the basis for reality, Tanabe sees the origin and source of self-consciousness in the very tension and difference between the two. Neither subject nor object is responsible for the other’s existence as a primary point of origin; for they both exist by virtue of the rupture, or difference between them. That rupture, or rift between subjective and objective, being of a wholly negative character, is Nothingness. Nothingness, more than simply negation, is absolute in the sense that all reality—subjective and objective—originates from within it. Nothingness, not simply a denial of Being, is the name given to mutual self-negation of subject and object and the reality created therefrom. Though it may seem that subject or object must exist as Being before we might even begin to speak of its negation, the perspective of Nothingness claims that it is only by virtue of negation that “subject” exists. Without the negative movement of the subject against it, no object is conceivable and vice-versa. In maintaining tension in subject-object dichotomies, however, Tanabe does not fail to see the necessity of finding a way to overcome the dualism of Kant’s “two-world” theory; indeed, as I hinted above, he goes on to do just this and proposes a groundless ground for both subjectivity and objectivity which is however also beyond them both as Absolute Nothingness. The novelty of Tanabe’s critique of Kant is that it claims to remain wholly within the framework established by Kant and to demonstrate how the radical turn inward of the critique of reason in a movement of self-critique itself leads to the breakdown of rational categories without departing from those very categories. The rational separation between worlds, Tanabe demonstrates, discloses at its logical limits the ultimate unacceptability of reason itself. The process of this radical self-criticism by reason of itself is what Tanabe calls the absolute critique. The logic of Tanabe’s absolute critique takes simply reason’s hypothetical critique of itself as its theme. Philosophy is based on reason, Tanabe says, and begins from a position of what he calls self-power. It aspires to resolve all problems by affirming the universality and resilience of itself and its powers to critique. But, when the subject of critique who uses reason to carry out his inquiry, makes himself the object of critique¾that is, when subject-knower turns toward himself and sees himself as object-known¾can reason as Kant understands it sustain the contradictions that inherently arise in the confrontation? Can the invincibility of reason withstand a critique of itself? Tanabe claims that “in the pursuit of full autonomy, reason must finally break down.” [23] Why? What leads him to such a shattering conclusion? The logic is actually quite simple. First we must consider the necessary fragmentation inherent in the self-critique of reason. “When reason criticizes reason, does the reason doing the criticizing stand outside of the critique as a criticizing subject, without becoming an object of criticism?”[24] If this were in fact the case, two things would be true. First, this could not be a thorough critique of reason. The reason criticizing is itself never subject to criticism, thus leaving the critique incomplete. We must also recognize that the reason which criticizes reason seeks to find flaws in reason; but if it already is possessed of those very flaws, being identical to the subject of its own criticism, no criticism, regardless of how extensive, will detect those flaws—because the tool of investigation is itself defective. Second, if the self-critique of reason is actually carried through, as Tanabe puts it, “reason and criticizing subject is later to become the object of criticism, then we end up in an infinite regress where each critique gives rise to a critique of itself.”[25] This also is an unacceptable position. Analytical logic is unable to cope with the antinomies inherent in the necessary process of self- critique. Tanabe’s absolute critique demonstrates the ultimately flawed nature of attempts by reason to achieve totalizing knowledge. Although critical philosophy was intended to do what classical metaphysics and religion could not¾i.e., capture certain knowledge of the Absolute¾it never exposed criticism itself to criticism, reason never became an object for its own criticism. This is its great failing. This means that Kant can establish no independent foundation for the autonomy of reason. Tanabe believes that Kant is at some level aware of the limited nature of rational speculation. The failure of self-power as philosophy to attain exhaustively the Absolute push Kant to allow for the category of faith. Kant recognizes the limits of reason, admitting to the ultimate unknowability of the “thing-in-itself” [Ding-an-sich], assigns belief in its existence to faith, and distinguishes it from the realm of empirical inquiry. This limitation is also indicative of what Kant calls man’s “radical evil.” By admitting the importance of man’s ontological limitation, Kant’s conception of “radical evil” allows man to question the extent of reason’s validity. The problem of such a distinction, as with the many dualities of Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, lies in the impossibility of mutual, reciprocal mediation between these realms, so that neither affects nor transforms the other at its limits. The simple separation of spheres, without an intimation of their dialectical reintegration, may be commendable in that it admits to a failure to attain the Absolute as exhaustive knowledge of Being in thinking. It is, however, deplorable in that it snuffs man’s “metaphysical inclination,” as Kant himself puts it, leaving us ultimately with few options in the way of coming to more profound levels of self- understanding—and it is these very heights of self-knowledge for which we grow increasingly more impatient in the case of confrontation with historical irrationalities. Kant is forced to negate metaphysics as a science because of its limited scope of knowledge beyond the realm of human experience and reason.[26] Fear of the emergence of the critical antinomy inherent in the absolute critique restricts Kant’s interest in what might lie beyond relative rational inquiry.[27] What intimation of “infinity” we have from Kant is either apparent in the non-empirical concept [Begriff] or in the unknowable thing-in-itself [Ding-an-sich]. Both the limited extent of our versatility with the former and our inherently sparse familiarity with the latter, as well as the vague status of the relationship in which either is dialectically connected to concrete reality, leaves us with little in the way of hope for the resolution of impending contradictions and the attainment of the Absolute. Any religious transformation to which Kant might lay claim cannot become ontologically meaningful, but amounts only to a revolution of feeling [Gesinnung] but otherwise nothing certain or concrete.[28] The project of philosophy after Kant should have been to recast and reappropriate the unreachable realm of conceptual abstraction or transcendent reality which analytical logic must necessarily posit. Western philosophy—in its rationalist, modernist phase—Tanabe believes however, defined by this critical framework established by Kant, never finishes the task of absolute critique but only develops various, less fundamental aspects of Kant’s critique from the perspective of self- power (reason). Hegel, Marx and Dialectics Tanabe spent fifteen years mastering Hegel. During the first two years, Tanabe read Hegel’s Encyclopedia; in the final thirteen he was absorbed in the Phenomenology of Spirit.[29] Hegel became extremely important to many philosophers in the Kyoto School, because few other Western thinkers offered anything in the way of a phenomenology of the state.[30] For Tanabe and other thinkers, Hegel offered a way to understand how religion could absolutize the relativity of history as a partial realization of and participation in the activity of the Absolute.[31] Hegel’s ideological elevation of the Protestant Church and his absolutization of the state of Prussia affirms the absolute circularity of history, which realizes the Absolute only through mediation by the relative. With this orientation, Tanabe believes Hegel marks the beginning of an authentic dialectic. Hegel’s major shortcoming, however, is that he absolutizes his own philosophy, and thereby loses sight of the “historicity that mediates the movement of ideas.”[32] Philosophy with Hegel becomes eternal and divine, making the historical mediation of absolute knowledge external. Though Tanabe shares Hegel’s vision of the formation of self-consciousness in the negation of relative particulars, he does not ultimately assent to the belief that it is a providential force moving forward as absolute Reason responsible for that negation.[33] Nor does negation of particulars mean transcendence of relative being in thinking for Tanabe.[34] Any notion of a concrete universal that Tanabe has is not, as it is for Hegel, a transcendence of being in reason. Rather it was the negative mediation of distinctions in the absolute negation of Absolute Nothingness, a reality which requires no affirmation of any ideal ground or synthesis in reason. Tanabe seems to see in the Hegelian approach to dialectics a fundamental lack of thoroughness. Hegel clings to the ontological unity of Absolute Spirit, claiming that human evil is resolved not personally but only rationally and formally.[35] The existence of evil cannot be a failure of the intractability of human subjectivity but only of the limits of rationality. Though Hegel imagines he has resolved the opposition of subject and object, the subject, Tanabe thinks, remains unimplicated in the original self-identity captured in the synthetic Begriff. Hegel does recognize the breakdown of reason which Kant handles only tangentially and unsatisfactorily; he even claims to have resolved it by proposing a return to a primordial unity in the Logic of Absolute Spirit, transforming the death of the absolute critique into a new wellspring of life.[36] But Hegel’s attempt at resolution fails because the self appealed to as the seat of unity is the same self as the Kantian self facing the absolute critique. Because he is never implicated in the discourse or, more directly, transformed by it, the subject never dies, and only the apparent contradiction in abstract speculation is challenged. The concrete self, originally caught up in irresolvable antinomies, is preserved and in fact remains unchanged. Hegel’s departure from the contradictions of concrete subjectivity in favor of a grand resolution in abstract universality disqualifies him, in Tanabe’s eyes, from candidacy for bearer of the authentic dialectic.[37] Hegel’s identification of the Absolute as God’s wholly immediate will means that he abandons dialectics and loses his critical edge in exchange for the comfort of abstract resolution, affirming only his position of the Logic of Absolute Spirit and refusing to mediate the positions of others.[38] Though he is a boon to philosophy in that he improves on Kant’s “bad dialectic,”[39] which is only a reciprocity, he is but another curse for the aspirant to authentic dialectics in that he proposes the consumption of the concrete antinomy in his own version of abstract thought as the resolution of the rupture of crisis. The coincidence of opposites as the unity of abstract cognition and individual intuition in so-called absolute reflection is not a serious option for the masses of sufferers, nor even for the weak individual who cannot hope to aspire to the heights of philosophical speculation. Thus Hegel neglects the subjectivity of the masses and of the finite individual seeker. In so doing, he does not really reach the famed “coincidence of opposites.” Hegel’s desire for the harmony of logos with reality is no comfort to the sufferer who has only to look forward to an abstract resolution of opposites and tension in a future wholly unknown to him. For Hegel “reality is a puppet of reason.”[40] Instead of a co-originating in a dialectical mutuality, the universal, abstract order is given priority over the concrete individual. The particular is simply a special case of the universal. The importance of the particular, even of the particular man, wanes in direct proportion to the extent to which he identifies with his own particular subjectivity. Hegel robs the individual of his freedom of self-determination by locating the individual ideally, in the order of the whole as part of God’s ideal providential plan. [41] He therefore posits no necessary change of reality mediated by practice. Room for practical action initiated by the individual does not exist, for the particular is subsumed in the universal order. Thus, most significant, Tanabe tells us, is that with the equation of being and thinking and the denial of individual self- determination, morality becomes an impossibility. The opposition between the Absolute and the relative is not in fact resolved, but only dissolved in Hegelian dialectics. “His ideal dialectics falls into an abstraction which betrays the true spirit of dialectics.”[42] Hegel does not solve the problem of dialectics when he reduces being to an idea. He simply makes it vanish. As such, Hegel fails to resolve the basic problem Tanabe designates as having originated in the ancient Aristotelian a=a philosophy of self-identity.[43] Furthermore, he also dispenses with the necessity of historical action in the process of the realization of the coincidence of opposites. Finally, he ignores the practical transformation of the self in order to substantialize the abstract object. Attempts to correct these tragic shortcomings of Hegelian idealism come with Marxism and existentialism.[44] What is known in Japan as “Tanabe philosophy” is in fact sometimes described as a middle ground between Marxism and existentialism. He borrows much from the critique each offers of their Hegelian precursor. He would, however, go on to negate them both. Marxism, Tanabe tells us, suffers from the converse problem of Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s dialectics precludes the individual and centers too heavily on the mechanical economic apparatuses of the state, opening up the possibility for a totalitarian universal that cruelly denies the importance of human subjectivity.[45] Hegel’s tendency to rely exclusively on rational principles of identity, however, makes materialism a necessary consequence of the nausea which results when the sensitive soul becomes aware of his historical agency. Marx proposes the priority of being to thinking and esteems action.[46] In fact, Marx asserts that all things correspond to productive relations in an economic structure. The contradiction between being and thought is simply reduced to the “contradiction between productive forces and productive relations.” The idea in thought, if anything, is nothing more than a “reflection of matter on the brain.”[47] Tanabe does not see anything philosophical as such in the materialist enterprise. The philosophical quest for absolute consciousness is meaningless to Marx. Not only is the dream of the resolution of the opposition between the subject-knower and the object-known dismissed by Marx, the existence of the spiritual subject himself is negated. All that which is real is the “uniformity of matter.”[48] All discrepancies and incommensurables are discussed in terms of the deviation of matter in a product system¾the contradiction between lower and upper in the class base becomes the source of the ideal-material dichotomy.[49] The material is privileged as the primary cause, and the material system alone, being the originary source of all things, exists.[50] Read in this light, little can be said in favor of Marx’s atheism and material dialectics over Hegelian pseudo-theology and ideal dialectics. According to Tanabe, Marx arrives at the same place as did Hegel, the denial of an authentic dialectic, if only by its logical converse. In short, “Dialectics cannot exist in mere matter … as it cannot exist in mere mind.…”[51] In true dialectics the real existence of either subject or object always implicates the real existence of the other. Dialectics is authenticated in its being both material and immaterial, in the direct unification and absolute separation of the two.[52] As such, dialectics is unalterably paradoxical and anti-Aristotelian. And only as such can dialectics be a possible way of addressing the weighty antinomies that arise when philosophy and history collide. The issue of action is as problematic with Marx as it was with Hegel. Though action is assured according to the Marxist promise of political and economic revolution, this action is determined by the course of development in the productive system. For Marx, “The problem of the revolution in history is not the problem of good and evil.”[53] Seeing the ideal contradiction as merely a reflection of the dissonance in a material process also eliminates the moral contingency. Practice becomes mechanical movement and as such denies freedom and spontaneity in action. This amounts to a complete denial of morality and, accordingly, another denial of philosophy. For Tanabe understood the principle of morality as the very essence and core of philosophy.[54] The materialist negation of the individual, no less than in Hegelian thought, results in the deproblematization of morality, and in fact its obliteration. From Tanabe’s angle, however, the problem of evil, or sin, is synonymous with the infinite distance between finite and Absolute being and cannot be eliminated without also eliminating that distance. That is, to make infinite and finite identical by dissolving the category of sin—to eliminate the negation of one by the other in the way that both Marx and Hegel ultimately do—would also mean an elimination of dialectics. True dialectics, according to Tanabe, is the “direct unity of opposites which cannot be reduced to each other and cannot be mediated in a genus,”¾a union akin to marriage which neither dissolves opposites in a synthesis that eliminates distinctions, nor sides in favor of one opposite over the other.[55] Dialectic resolution cannot be reversion to an original pre-conscious split, nor can it be the triumph of one side over the other.[56] It must somehow bring opposites closer as it keeps them apart, affirm opposites as it denies them. The union of history and logic must neither detract from the impervious irrationality of the former nor compromise the perfect harmony of the latter. At the same time, the two must be dialectically interdependent so that “abstract assertion transcends itself naturally, into the concrete position.”[57] One must indeed remain severed irreparably from the other and at the same time attached seamlessly. Dialectics in its authentic articulation and understanding cannot be a simple unity of two opposites. It is not two extremes of the same continuum that are opposed in the dialectical disjuncture; it is the opposition of things utterly incommensurable, things so different that they cannot be measured on the same scale, but rather are in categories of their very own¾the very opposition of unity and opposition, of what is both unity and its polar opposite, opposition, at once.[58] This dialectical principle, so relentless and pervasive, even eludes the very logic of dialectics itself. A true dialectic is a dialectic that sometimes is and sometimes is not dialectical. “Indeed dialectical logic is both logic and a denial of logic…. Dialectical logic must be paradoxical.”[59] Dialectical logic must be thoroughly dialectical, which means it at some point must not be a logic at all, so that it might contain its opposite within itself. “The fact that it is not a logic is the reason that it is a logic.” [60] In this way, the logic of dialectics itself becomes dialectical, and dialectics unfolds dialectically. Simple unity cannot resolve such a stubborn rupture as that created by the crisis of history. Unity is just one side of the equation, as is opposition. Dialectics therefore cannot remain forever entangled in the web of opposition either. What remains? What recourse are we allowed? To what dimension may we turn to resolve our existential quagmire? There is seemingly no unfettered path. Even after much thought and agony, absolutely none presents itself. This paralysis, this philosophical asphyxiation is the torment of true dialectics according to Tanabe. As we will explore, however, Tanabe is not ultimately paralyzed by this dilemma. In fact, he finds the possibility of resurrection from the very death of true dialectics in the “absolute no” he has reached here. The principle of negation will be central for Tanabe as he tries to correct Western dialectics in the hope of establishing an authentic dialectic. Though Tanabe ultimately rejects Schelling on other grounds, he is an ardent admirer of this German philosopher for his idea that negation [Ungrund] lies at the ground of Existenz and that being realizes itself in the mediation of self-negation, not in immanent affirmation of itself.[61] Tanabe argues that Schelling’s theory of freedom comes closest to his own understanding of authentic dialectics. This is because in it negation exists as radical evil and is regenerated continuously at the innermost ground of Being so that its transformation might ultimately become the ground of divine love.[62] In this way radical evil is never transcended, even in discussions of absolute freedom. Hegel’s idea that the identity of reason is the definition of freedom is the starting point of Schelling’s critique. With this, he ultimately arrives at a formal negation of the affirmative methodology of metaphysics in his concept of Ungrund. Tanabe’s critique of Schelling, however, is that Schelling accomplishes this negation only conceptually; the negation of the concept of an ontological ground never becomes real for Schelling, as it does for Tanabe, in the subjectivity of existential self-consciousness. Tanabe understands that the problem of dialectics must always be approached in a double exposure, keeping simultaneously in mind an idea of affirmation and one of negation. In true dialectics, one must be at once sighted and blinded. While such a position might seem impossible by the logic of identity, Tanabe notes that formal logic also dictates that the affirmation of the unity of the whole is itself a negation. Logic thereby provides for the possible simultaneity of affirmation and negation. Here Tanabe invokes Spinoza’s declaration “Omnis determinato est nagatio,” all determination is negation.[63] In no case can affirmation alone remain to establish its own ground, but affirmation must be approached by the principle of negation. The religious expression of such abstraction means for Tanabe that enlightenment can be approached through ignorance only, and that foolish being is inextricably interwoven into the fabric of transcendental wisdom relentlessly, at every point. Western man is too steeped in the logic of identity, established in ancient Greek thought, to embrace the flexibility required to confront the unrelenting reality of dialectics. “Existence takes, not self identity, but contradiction as its structure.[64] The self contradiction of existence … cannot be expressed, still less described, identically in terms of the logic of identity which takes the law of identity and contradiction as fundamental principles.”[65] Western thought, Tanabe believes, is not to be dismissed wholly, however. It helps deliver Tanabe to the standpoint of metanoetics. In dialectics all things that precede the systematized and complete dialectic are still valuable as contributing forces.[66] Yet, Tanabe tells us, that the West’s failure to achieve an adequate level of philosophical elegance makes life as it is lived by the sufferer (in history and personally) exceedingly difficult. For the sufferer knows two truths. What is good and pleasing in life calls out to him and says, “Delight in my rosy fragrance! In your intoxication declare that I am indeed Absolute!” The awful and lowly is equally as compelling: “Suffer in this terrible stench! In your disillusionment declare nothing exists, all is vanity, but suffering only is real!” Each voice contradicts the other and neither yields to fusion with or domination by its opposite. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger The existentialist interpretation of the parameters of being as contained within individual subjectivity ignores the exigency of social praxis and therefore necessitates that it be mediated by a Marxist perspective.[67] Singular to the existential approach to reality, however, is its profound penetration into the highly peculiar contradictories of human subjectivity, its restless fascination with the contours of the “I,” and its almost obsessive preoccupation with the structure of Being from the perspective of the experience of the self¾topics ignored for their obscurity and indeterminacy in the history of conceptual metaphysics. Though invaluable for the discoveries it has made in the exploration of the self, the position of the affirmation of the self to which Tanabe believes all Western existentialism finally arrives, seems directly opposed to Tanabe’s metanoetics. Metanoetics speaks only of a death of the self, the negation of the self, and the self- abandonment of the self. Tanabe decries the West, particularly Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the “Northern European spirit” in general as clinging “to a kind of self-centered elitism.”[68] Yet, at the same time, Tanabe feels himself indebted to the existentialists, specifically to Nietzsche for his revelatory philosophical insight. Why the peculiar fascination with Nietzsche? Is not Nietzsche’s affirmation of life as the “will to Power” the consummate example of what Tanabe philosophizes against? [69] Tanabe suggests that a deeper understanding of both metanoetics and Nietzsche’s philosophy reveals the affirmation inherent in his own absolute negation and the negation of even Nietzsche’s affirmation. As absolute negation, Tanabe believes the absolute critique of reason is a negation of negation. The self, in negating itself, really negates its limitation, which is by nature a negation. That is, the self negates the negation that is its self. It renounces itself because it is itself limited by the inability of reason to establish itself on its own grounds. In casting itself off, it negates the negation of reason, and thus, by the principles of formal logic (which indicate to us that the opposite of negation is affirmation and thus that any negation of negation must itself mean affirmation) the negation in which the self denounces itself is absolute affirmation. We contrast this absolute affirmation in utter self-negation with the relative affirmation of self-affirmation because, in the former, negation no longer threatens the self nor is its enemy. Rather negation is used to induce affirmation as the negation that negates negation, thereby becoming an ally to affirmation. The more authentically it is negation, the more authentically it is also affirmation. The hallmark of a truly absolute affirmation, according to Tanabe, is that it is not intimidated but only strengthened by the prospect of impending negation. This is the singularity of Tanabe’s dialectics. It is also this unique quality that hints to the beginnings of the structure of a true dialectics. Nietzsche as the grandfather of existentialist dialectics, which admittedly sides with an affirmation of the self, is still not precluded ultimately from gaining Tanabe’s gratitude. Tanabe’s absolute affirmation, which is also the shadow of his absolute negation, can be recognized in the absolute affirmation of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Authentic “will to power,” Tanabe claims, is an ultimate negation and mastery of the self: It is the “process of regaining dominion over the self that has been negatively determined by others, and totally negating it.”[70] Mediated by the relative negation of its own uncontrollable fate, the Nietzschean self overcomes this provisional barrier to freedom by choosing that fate for itself in a movement of amor fati, love of fate. The self places its own hand in the action of self-negation and thereby creates an inroad into a greater affirmation that is itself absolute for being predicated upon the existence of a lesser yet inevitable negation. This really means “making negation impossible” by affirming even negation by way of the will.[71] The existence of negation ensures the affirmation, and defeat of the self is its victory. Loosely speaking, this Nietzschean move would suffice as a possible description of the structure of Tanabe’s absolute negation, though on the surface the two might seem incommensurable. Of course, Nietzsche never arrives at anything like a standpoint of nothingness, characterized by complete and utter negation. Though this is true, it is also important to note that he does not deny nothingness as a possibility or displace it with an overarching structure of metaphysical being and therefore, in his refusal to do so, approximates more closely Tanabe’s movement of self-negation than other modern Western thinkers.[72] Of all the philosophers he engages, Tanabe speaks most tenderly of Nietzsche. He seems to have felt a deep resonance with him despite their surface differences.[73] Tanabe attributes these differences to the fact that Nietzsche’s Dionysian spirit approaches existence from the standpoint of being and Tanabe’s absolute transformation in the dialectics of negation approaches existence from the standpoint of nothingness. Nietzsche was historically not permitted to arrive at the standpoint of nothingness because it was his mission to save Europe from the decadence of the normative “ought.” This “ought” restricted the activity of life and resulted in the denial of vitality and the passive nihilism of Christian morality. In this respect, Nietzsche’s orientation is more or less identical to Tanabe’s critique of the abstraction of speculative metaphysics. To reinvigorate decadent European society Nietzsche called for a reversion to the tragic Greek spirit.[74] Tanabe’s opposition to the exclusive dominance of reason in Western thought was directed toward impacting a different historical phenomenon. Tanabe did not face the problem of passive nihilism. He instead called for a national religious conversion in absolute negation because of the relative self-affirmation of hubris and nationalistic intoxication that afflicted the Japanese government and people during the war. Nietzsche’s apparent distaste for negation, however, ultimately points to a critical difference between his philosophy and Tanabe’s. His aversion to abstraction in any form make him an empiricist through and through in Tanabe’s eyes.[75] He fails to see the dialectical structure of abstraction and immediate reality. He does not understand how the sterility of metaphysics and the negation of abstraction play a crucial role in the rebirth of vitality. “Life attains clarity of cognition only when it mediates the abstraction of the very thought that negates life in its immediacy.”[76] Insistence that mere becoming exhausts the essence of human existence is misguided; the stagnancy of abstraction (negation) cannot be escaped but must be engaged if the desire to revel in the emotion and chaos of immediacy (affirmation) is also to be captured. Tanabe’s discussion of Nietzsche is important as he attempts to create a coherent intellectual narrative of Western philosophy. The critique of Hegel in the West, however, does not find its most eloquent and prolific spokesperson in Nietzsche. Only with Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel for believing reason has the capability of resolving absolute contradictories is there a breakthrough in Western philosophy away from Hegelian pseudo-dialectics. Kierkegaard’s work and faith revolve around the salvation of the self as it stands in defiance of the vain efforts of speculative totality to relieve its suffering.[77] Tanabe compares Kierkegaard’s movement of religious faith, informed by a keen awareness of the absolute contradictories of ethical existence, to the structure of the Zen kôan.[78] The kôan is “constructed from elements in reality that serve to point out the sharp contradiction within reality and disclose its marked paradoxical character.”[79] The structure of the kôan approximates the absolute paradox of Absolute and relative as Kierkegaard envisions it exists at the turning point from ethical existence into religiousness. In the same way the logic of the kôan is impossible to resolve in the rational sphere, the task of the ethical is impossible to resolve if one remains in ethical existence. The impossibility of both leads to a breakdown, a death of the provisional self, but also a rebirth in a more expansive and profound religiosity. Metanoetics coincides with Kierkegaard’s “faith” in that it approaches existence from the standpoint of the relative particular that is not afforded even momentary self-identification with the Absolute.[80] Kierkegaard earns Tanabe’s praise for his attack on Hegelian abstraction from the perspective of the incoherent and absurd particular. Yet Kierkegaard is vulnerable to Tanabe’s criticism because he seems to lack the movement of return to the world of ethical antinomies.[81] The movement out of the ethical must be accompanied with a movement back into the realm of ethical doing, however impossible that move may seem. Kierkegaard’s excessive emphasis on subjectivity, on becoming individual is not ethically oriented enough to the world-historical for Tanabe’s Marxist sympathies.[82] Tanabe’s comments on Kierkegaard, though significant, are brief and few. He is more interested in the strain of philosophy that (one could argue) began with Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism but was further developed in Heideggarian hermeneutic existentialism. He credits the latter for having recognized simultaneously the contingency of historical future as project [Entwurf der Sich- vorweg-Sein] as well as the facticity of historical past as thrownness [Geworfenheit der Schon-sein-in-der-Welt], and having mediated the two dialectically in the thrown- project [geworfener Entwurf]. In Heideggerian existential thought awareness of the stubborn “as it is” nature of history is coupled with the freedom inherent in the recognition of the absolute contingency of historical being.[83] Tanabe points out that this recognition of contingency allows for the possibility of temporal being. According to Heidegger, were it to be absent, all things would necessarily obtain immediately and time would cease to pass. Radically unknown possibility must be uncertain in order to open up the possibility of future. It follows that reason cannot explain things from beginning to end, for in so doing it would eliminate both beginning and end. Contingency is the very essence of history itself. [84] Philosophical innovations such as these gave Tanabe great hope that Heidegger could offer a possible combination of a philosophy of life and a philosophy of the humanistic sciences.[85] Not until Heidegger, Tanabe believes, is temporality freed from mechanistic strictures. Establishing time as an existential category constructed phenomenologically from a psychological and emotional structure is indispensable to understanding religious experience. Heidegger stands out as the flag-bearer of the philosophy of qualitative time structures. Even Augustine’s splendid inauguration of a phenomenological account of time as the unifying principle of temporality in the “eternal now” leaves past and future as properly ontological, not existential categories, according to Tanabe.[86] Though Augustine interprets time in terms of an intentionality of consciousness, time structures for him remain symmetrical and linear. Only Heidegger maneuvers skillfully enough to secure a more spontaneous and phenomenologically compelling understanding of temporality. Even modes of being as philosophically well nuanced as Heidegger’s geworfener Entwurf do not, however, fully implicate the subject “religiously.” The self, not dying to itself, never experiences an actual transformation or conversion in its paradoxical awareness of futurity and historical termination. It is never ultimately defeated, but conceivably subsists eternally in its originary form, never becoming dialectically informed. The self never breaks through the self and the geworfener Entwurf could potentially be understood to mean a change occurring in a self which remains basically the same. Heidegger “acknowledges the ground of the historical subject who confronts the future by appropriating the past, [and] by embracing historical facticity as its destiny, freely resolves to accept the finitude of the self.”[87] For this Tanabe is grateful to him. But Heidegger’s orientation is one of understanding and interpretation only and not explicitly associated with action, either in the phenomenon of self-consciousness or in the world historically. Resolution [Entschlossenheit] in the face of death is just a radical self-awareness of finitude. The self does not actually ever die to itself, but only affirms its awareness of itself in the awareness of the possibility of its ownmost death. It never actually frees itself from the transient identity of relative being by completely letting go of itself.[88] Thus, when Heidegger speaks of Nothing [Nichts] or Nothingness [Nichtigkeit] as the abysmal ground of human existence, the awareness of which liberates Dasein to the freedom of the geworfener Entwurf,[89] he does not mean absolute Nothingness, but only a being that is nothingness or the being of a “nothingness” in the static awareness of the subject-knower.[90] Nothingness cannot remain an idea in potentiality. Confrontation with such Nothingness is nothingness from the standpoint of being, a death from the standpoint of life.[91] For Heidegger, the subject confronts but never breaks through the Nothing. He never understands himself as anything other than a being-of-nothingness—his own negativity is out there, to be confronted. For him nothingness does not extend to the very ground upon which he himself believes he immediately stands. As a ground for itself in actuality not at all actually threatened by a distant Nothingness, the self remains undefeated again, perhaps even eternally so. Even in Heidegger, the attempt to complete Kant’s project and formulate an authentic dialectic fails miserably. “He [Heidegger] does not probe Kant’s critique of reason deeply enough to arrive at the standpoint of absolute criticism, wherein the criticizing subject is itself abandoned to ‘absolute disruption.’”[92] With Heidegger nothingness is beyond the human and there is no hope for total transformation. While he tries to resolve a Kierkegaardian anxiety with a Nietzschean will, he only exacerbates the former by failing to grasp the dialectical essence of the latter.[93] Another of his tragic flaws is his failure, like Kierkegaard, to admit the importance of historical existence, or more directly ethical existence. Heidegger recognizes neither ethical being’s delicacy nor the descent into hell characteristic of its finitude.[94] Thus he never deals adequately with the problem of evil, particularly that of human evil,[95] but keeps the self completely intact and thereby misses earning any significant merit as a dialectician, contributing little to the resolution of the fragmentation and crisis of the self that invited our inquiry from the beginning. The Meaning of Science for the Philosophy of Religion Tanabe posits modern rationalistic philosophy as the mediator between science and religion. Modern philosophy, perhaps starting with Descartes, began as a justification for the possibility of certainty in scientific knowledge, but necessarily also came into contact with the possibility of a transcendental non-empirical Absolute. Neither Kant nor any of his successors could avoid developing a transcendental idealism; to stop at immanent reality would mean jeopardizing the very ground upon which scientific knowledge exists. Science, in searching for a ground on which to establish its most basic empirical assumptions, cannot ground itself in reason. It searches to find something on which it might base reason itself. The inevitable encounter of science and history implicates religion in the path of scientific progress. Science cannot be self-justifying but must appeal to new and other possibilities of conceptual wholeness and historical identity that would independently confirm its validity. Only religion, declares Tanabe, is prepared to offer such conceptual possibilities. But can science make the jump to religion freely and without reservations? Can we hope that science is equipped with the theoretical apparata which would enable it comfortably to transform the profundity of religious insight into a form suitable to its sensitive theoretical palette? Only the aid of philosophy, which operates, more or less, in the same rational universe as science, but allows for the transcendental ideal, can provide the flexibility needed to open up the discourse which would allow for the mutual benefit of science and religion.[96] Philosophy appears at the point of the transformation of science to religion.[97] Tanabe says, however, that a critique of science cannot come from a philosophical but only from a more strictly religious orientation. The philosophical negation of the position of the mathematical sciences is bound to suffer from hypocrisy given philosophy’s ultimate identification with the laws of reason, the same laws that govern scientific research. The case of Bergson will illustrate. Bergson speaks of an elan vital that works against matter in the process of evolution. He establishes it as a separate category from quantitative or geometric explanations of the world. This primordial life impulse that precipitates free creative activity can only be grasped by intuition, says Bergson.[98] Tanabe points out, however, that Bergson’s vitalism loses sight of the fact that it too uses scientific concepts and abstract constructs in its philosophy to further its critique from a consciousness-experience perspective of those same categories (scientific concepts and abstract thought) when they are used in the mathematical sciences.[99] Bergson makes a thoroughly rational critique of rationalism and therefore suffers from the same problems in his critique which he claims burden the very object of his critique. The totalizing dream of the seamless unification of all humanistic and mathematical sciences is characteristic of the world philosopher. Tanabe begins as a student of mathematics. The drive to resolve the relationship of the infinite mathematical series with the discrete finite series continued to burden him long after he left the Department of Mathematics for the Department of Philosophy as an undergraduate. His research in the mathematical sciences indeed becomes a source of philosophical inspiration for Tanabe, as he conflates the logic that resolves infinite and finite series in mathematics with the logic of the mediation of Absolute Nothingness and finite human being.[100] The Bounds of Reason All of Tanabe’s reflection on speculative philosophy revolves around his initial assumption that all philosophy has as its foundation “the autonomy of reason.”[101] In this respect philosophy is not unlike science, which is grounded in the seemingly firm soil of rationality. Unlike science, however, philosophy aspires to the Absolute immediately.[102] Speaking generally, science may also strive for the Absolute, but it is willing to delay the gratification of immediate acquisition of the Absolute and work piecemeal toward its elucidation. Philosophy, as Tanabe knows it, almost never concedes to the inertia of historical progress—each philosopher will “have arrived” at what is essential, what is unsurpassable. This perhaps is the philosopher’ s arrogance, as well as his greatness. Equally as prominent a component of the philosophical approach to reality is the classical skeptical doubt. “Doubt is a philosophical constant.”[103] With reason and the dubito as its tools, philosophy aspires to the Absolute. In so doing, it does not recognize that it is finite but indeed must believe in its own boundlessness. In its visionary yearning for infinity and faith in its own indestructibility, however, philosophy fails to acknowledge its all too painfully debilitating limitations. It will not see the lines it cannot cross, and in crossing them blindly, it loses itself as well as the hope of attaining the truth to which it so ardently aspires. Forced into this dilemma, philosophy and the persona of the philosopher in the psyche of the archetypal seeker is left no choice but, in its deadlock, to abandon itself.[104] The action of self-abandonment (death) and the subsequent total transformation (resurrection) of philosophy into religion is what Tanabe calls “metanoetics.” To reground philosophy, not in a new ground but in a non-ground, Tanabe will need to move dialectically both behind and beyond reason. The dubito cannot simply remain a potentiality, as a “what if?” as it did for Descartes.[105] It must become a doubt in actuality. It impresses itself upon the structure of the philosophical self as inescapable finitude. Actualizing doubt, for Tanabe, means admitting directly the impossibility of philosophy given the philosopher’s immediate aspiration to the Absolute. This, accordingly, means that only philosophy which in desperate confession ultimately denies itself is true philosophy.[106] This action of self-negation Tanabe associates ultimately with the penitential act to which the philosopher must ultimately himself submit. Repentance, though it exists as a Western religious category, has not yet truly become a real possibility for Western man because he has yet to engage in the absolute critique of reason as Tanabe envisions it. “The critique of reason needs to be pressed to the point of an absolute critique… which constitutes the self-abandonment of reason.”[107] Perhaps from negligence, but more probably from insensitivity to the problems that arise in the philosophy of crisis, the West has not allowed an inroad for the absolute disruption that could make philosophical penitence a real possibility. Tanabe’s willingness to engage in such a critique leads him to the paradoxical “philosophy that is not a philosophy” of metanoetics.[108] It remains a philosophy because it still employs the logic of reason. It marks philosophical progress by the quality of its discoveries in the endeavor to explain the nature of self-consciousness in the ideal language of philosophy. It is, however, no longer a philosophy because it has realized that, at its outer limits, logic negates itself, using itself to destroy itself. Thus, strangely enough, it is not just that philosophy must repent—philosophy is the only discipline and the philosopher is the only person that may attain repentance. Affirmation in the rebirth of repentance is predicated directly and solely upon negation in the action of renouncing philosophy, thus making philosophy a necessary detour on the way from history to religion. The philosophy of reason retains its importance as a provisional entity. It is something provisional which is also absolutely necessary, or something necessary precisely for its very provisional character. Without the limitations of the philosophical endeavor, awakening to the metanoetical truth would be an impossibility. Tanabe dubs the status of being which philosophy retains “being-as-emptiness,” alluding to the Buddhist notion of upâya or hôben, skillful means.[109] The greatness of reason is measured by its necessary utility in the more all-encompassing action of repentance in the religious awakening to faith, where reason dies to itself and is reborn to faith as provisional reality. Tanabe’s theory about the fate of Western philosophy is not a theory which wholly dismisses reason. The circular interplay of history, theory, and critique is relentless and does not ever side with any one player in this trio. Theories of historicity, which take into account the implications of historical conditions, will never replace history as such. This is because they cannot avoid being historicized themselves. They are disrupted by historical contingencies by which they themselves as theories peculiar to a particular era are historicized.[110] Thus, to capture the whole and not fall into any one of the above categories, Tanabe’s absolute critique cannot displace history and critique in favor of theory. Rather, it must posit the Absolute in the movements of negation that determine the tripartite relationship of history, theory, and critique—i.e., the negation in the movement to one from another in the trio. Tanabe interprets the ultimate indispensability of philosophy, which is paradoxically directly proportional to the necessary renunciation of philosophy, religiously as “radical evil.” Man is incapable of fully escaping philosophy. He has to confront the impossible combination of both its limited nature and its overarching project. Thus he is forced to admit the necessary fragmentation of the seeking self and resign himself to the foolish being that makes up the core of his nature. This resignation means the necessity of personal repentance of the subject-seeker, not only the propositional possibility of repentance in the abstract, but the immediate self- accusation of the concrete existential-historical “I”—it is I, I who cannot do what I must! “Pure self-identity is possible only for the absolute,”[111] I am finite, and live eternally with contradiction—without the possibility of being one thing but not also at the same time its opposite.[112] Soloveitchik Tanabe is a religious philosopher before he is a religious leader. Thus his reading of the Western tradition tends to be more technical and exhaustive. He engages religious terminology and doctrine to deepen the profundity of his philosophical innovation. Soloveitchik subscribes to a converse methodology. Though trained as a philosopher, he is first a religious thinker, tied more inflexibly to a tradition and community which converses primarily in religious versus philosophical language. Insofar as it is helpful as a means of elucidating the relevance of religious themes, Soloveitchik also engages the philosophical discourse. But his critique is more scattered and less easily represented than Tanabe’s. Differences in their relationships to philosophy do not overshadow the fact that for both Tanabe and Soloveitchik the purpose of undertaking a critique of the tradition of classical Western philosophical thought is to create possible paths of exit from the limits of its current parameters into new, equally valid if not superior realms of human inquiry. The object for both thinkers is to establish the possibility, perhaps even the necessity of non-philosophical (i.e. - non-rational) approaches to reality. Not only are there alternatives to the current set of approaches to understanding reality, but, say our thinkers, the character of modern Western self-driven rationalism itself necessitates that at certain points in our investigation we turn to new alternatives as the only way to explain the world to ourselves. To this end, Tanabe points to the inherent self-defeat of philosophy, to its self- consuming limits. Soloveitchik pursues the same end by tracing the development of and necessity for further support for what he calls “cognitive pluralism” in the West. [113] “Cognitive pluralism” denotes the multiplicity of approaches to explaining reality developed in the Western mathematical and humanistic sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]. The actual approaches themselves, though important, do not matter as much as that there are a multiplicity of them, revealing the many valid forms which critical inquiry may take. The variety of approaches to reality necessary for explaining phenomena in the natural sciences as well as necessary for explaining otherwise mysterious aspects of reality en toto in the humanistic sciences, allow Soloveitchik to posit religious inquiry as a singular and unique method of investigation not confined to the limitations of formal logical inquiry. Ancient Philosophy Soloveitchik selects two central motifs in Greek philosophy from which to begin his critique of Western thought. Greek philosophy, he argues, is characterized by the problem of development from relative nothingness to perfect existence.[114] Here Soloveitchik invokes the pre-Socratic conflict between Parmenides and Heraclitus who argue about whether being is a perpetual development or a fixed constant, whether it is essentially chaos or order, fragmentation or union, irrational or logically resolvable. Soloveitchik claims that this opposition continues in Aristotle’s thesis of the fourfold nature of existence—two parts perfect and complete being, and two parts potential reality, prime hylic matter. Assuming this, Aristotle then explains existence as a movement of development from incomplete possibility to perfect actuality. The opposition in this movement is for Soloveitchik as well as for Tanabe the central philosophical undercurrent in the formation of dialectical logic. In his critique, Tanabe emphasizes the failure of the West to acknowledge order and perfection’s (affirmation) dependence on and interpenetration with chaos and imperfection (negation). Soloveitchik also critiques the West on similar grounds. For his equation of reality with volatility and flux, Soloveitchik sees Heraclitus as the father of the homo religiosus who lives in the world of colors, sounds, sense experience and unordered variety. Parmenides, on the other hand, who posits the world as order, is the progenitor of the mathematical sciences.[115] By reifying each extreme of the dichotomy and compartmentalizing mathematical sciences as over and against the ecstatic humanistic exploration of reality, the West has failed to mark the complexity of the dialectical relationship between the two. The tendency to ignore the dialectic inherent in this pre-Socratic dichotomy extends to the West’s inability to conceive of the integration of the life of the cognitive knower and mechanistic producer, on the one hand, with that of the sentimental believer and charismatic dreamer, on the other. The second motif in Greek thought to which Soloveitchik pays careful attention is, as it was for Tanabe, Aristotle’s law of identity and contradiction. Soloveitchik argues that this principle continues as the unchallenged basis for logical inquiry in the West until the present day. Interesting is how Soloveitchik frames his critique. Tanabe’s approach was to demonstrate how, at its extreme, Aristotle’s logic cannot sustain itself. The absolute critique of reason necessitates the simultaneity of opposite truths and the acceptance of a logic which is both dialectical and paradoxical. Soloveitchik’s refutation of the logic of contradiction, instead of destroying logic through logic, seeks to establish the variety of singular logics necessary for understanding reality—only one of which is grounded in the Aristotelian logic of identity. Judaism, he claims, has never accepted the concept of the excluded middle, as has much of the classical West. “Judaism has operated many times with two theses which are mutually exclusive and still accepts both. This … logic by Aristotle, that if there is a contradiction it means that either the first thesis or the second thesis is untrue, was not accepted by Judaism.”[116] Because of their insistence on the logic of identity and contradiction, the Greeks were forced to come down on one side of the dichotomy or the other; they could not live with contradiction. The result was a devaluation of the particular and an orientation toward abstraction—toward the goal of attaining ultimate union with the abstract universal through the ultimate obliteration of the individual particular.[117] Aristotle’s logic of contradiction and identity makes metaphysical prejudice imperative. Within its parameters one is bound to side with one or the other extreme of a given dichotomy. The possibility of an authentic dialectic, which relentlessly invokes both sides of the dichotomy in every case, never allows the one extreme to exist apart from the other. Indeed, in dialectical logic, the greater an object affirms itself, the more strongly it also affirms its opposite. The logic of identity, however, makes the coincidence of opposites in dialectics an impossibility. What results from such tenacious dependence on the logic of identity in the West? Soloveitchik traces a history of dualistic thinking in the West, which, though not inherently negative, insists on always devaluing one side of the dichotomy in favor of its opposite. Plato’s distinction between body (soma) and mind (nous) in the Phaedus is coupled with the portrayal of death as an act of liberation from the cave of shadows into the realm of ideas.[118] This dichotomy extends into Christian thinking as the opposition between body and soul—worldly and spiritual affairs— and becomes the center of Christianity’s theological anthropology. What is noteworthy about this Christian dualism to Soloveitchik is that the Christian does not recognize internal contradiction as a source of creative resolution in man but rather as a curse which resulted from man’s disobedience to God’s will. This dualism is something that will plague man until his entry into the heavenly kingdom, instead of the aspect within man which bespeaks his essence and which ultimately elevates him most. Kant The abstraction of Kantian metaphysics, according to Soloveitchik, emerges basically in a mood of a deep skepticism. Soloveitchik identifies Kant’s skepticism as transcendental, as opposed to the analytical skepticism of the Greeks. The latter is healthy but the former can be intoxicating, tending, where it doubts actual existence, to posit a transcendental unity far removed from particularity. Kant’s thing-in-itself [Ding-an-sich] is a mystical category which destroys the possibility of dialectics by introducing an idealistic skepticism that beckons the philosopher to travel where he cannot: If there be a mysterious ‘thing in itself,’ however unintelligible it may prove to be, the philosopher is challenged to grasp it. Speculative philosophy was born the very moment Kant discovered the incomprehensible ‘thing in itself.’[119] Kant begins a discourse of confusion by giving names to things he does not know truly exist. Soloveitchik sees Kant as more than a transcendental skeptic. He, like Tanabe, believes Kant is looking to justify the perspective of Newtonian physics from within a philosophical universe. “Kant considered it his philosophical mission to find an adequate metaphysical frame for Newton’s Principia.”[120] Kant mirrors a similar process of justification in his moral philosophy where he seeks a rational basis for ethical behavior which corresponds roughly to the tenets of particular religious beliefs. In so doing, Kant wishes to subordinate religion and ultimately even philosophy to scientific and formal rational measures of truth. In his quest to do this Kant begins the process which Soloveitchik ultimately set out himself partially to correct—the process of depriving religious thought and experience of its singular and irreducible logic. In his critique of Kant, Soloveitchik does not intend to disassociate reason from religious experience. Though he may believe Kant unduly limits himself to the realm of the strictly rational and therefore compromises many other unique aspects of religious life, Soloveitchik sees religious experience as largely, perhaps even fundamentally cognitive in nature. The religious seeker, man-subject, seeks a sort of knowledge. Homo religiosus cannot be understood apart from the cognitive gesture in which he engages. Religious man is not of course only homo theoreticus, but he must be at least this. Homo theoreticus is interested primarily in the enterprise of resolution by way of theoretical inquiry—his method is not aesthetic, experiential or even, strictly speaking, ethical. He dominates a particular realm of human intellectual investigation called the religious.[121] Soloveitchik makes a critique of Western conceptions of religion which in some way subordinate the religious as such to what those critiques claim is some other more primary mode of existence. These theories, Soloveitchik claims, would have us believe that religion entails no unique cognitive gesture at all, thereby robbing it of its singular and independent logic. The Kantian approach to religiosity reduces religion to ethical action. Kant ethicizes religion to avoid reversion to irrational mythology and to allow for the predominance of a practical reason grounded in universal rules of logic. On the other hand, the tradition of emotionalism beginning with Schleiermacher, says Soloveitchik, sentimentalizes religion. Religious life is equated with a certain affect, a feeling of absolute dependence. Outside of his emotional singularity, there is nothing unique about religious man. He is what he feels, and whatever he understands of the divine, he understands by experiencing certain emotions. According to Schleiermacher, only man’s internal, emotional life is divine. Soloveitchik believes that both Kant and Schleiermacher hit upon central aspects of the religious experience, but neither allows for the drive to know and think—to satisfy the so-called “metaphysical inclination”—to play a critical role in religious experience.[122] “The religious person is a person who seeks knowledge,”[123] says Soloveitchik. For Schleiermacher religion is a feeling, much as for Kant religion is action in accordance with certain ethical imperatives. To these Soloveitchik would not only add that religion is a kind of knowledge but that it is indeed a method of acquiring knowledge. Religion is a kind of learning, a process in the appropriation of knowledge which allows for exponential depth and growth. Most importantly, it is possessed of its own singular logic that distinguishes it from all other sciences and which does not allow it to be equated with or reduced to any other discipline.[124] The homo religiosus is transcending the charted plains of an orderly reality, arranged cosmos or universe and venturing into the unknown, into a strange, puzzling and baffling world which can neither be mathematized nor interpreted in abstract constructs and concepts.[125] Homo theoreticus differs from homo religiosus not in that the one seeks to know and the other does not, but in that the methodology and bounds of the latter’s scope of inquiry are not comparable to those of the former. Soloveitchik is similar to Tanabe in that neither man seeks necessarily to refute the role of reason in religious life, nor devalue the significance of either the emotional or the ethical. Rather, each in his own way is trying to establish the ultimate incommensurability of religion with any other human science, to demonstrate that religion operates outside the limits of conventional spheres of experience and action, yet also at the same time has universal significance, implicated at some level in all other major fields of human inquiry. When faced with the project of understanding his world philosophically, the physicist can no longer travel the path of the Kantian apologia for science. Kant sought to establish the indispensability of the postulated world for understanding experience which science already regulates. Religion and religious philosophy cannot in this sense continue to function as a handmaiden to the mathematical sciences, working vigorously to establish their certainty.[126] Science must face the borders of rational inquiry, and the scientist must relinquish his exclusive province over understanding to mystics and religious thinkers. He must perhaps even allow something completely different to take the place of what science understands as “logic” when this term is used in the context of religious inquiry. The limits of science and reason demand such a humble act of him. Neo-Kantian Thought and the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen The rebirth of Kantian thought in Neo-Kantian philosophy had to recognize the contradiction between the mathematical-scientific world of causality and man’s inner life in which the characteristics of freedom and self-consciousness predominate. Neo-Kantian philosophy acknowledged the apparent singularity of each side of this contradiction and made the discrepancy between them a problem for itself. Instead of attempting a more profound dialectical explanation of these competing aspects of man, many figures in the Neo-Kantian tradition, (particularly the subject of Soloveitchik’s doctoral dissertation, Hermann Cohen), fought to establish the ideality of “pure thought” as exclusively unaffected by other of man’s characteristics. “Pure thought,” according to Cohen, originates not in imagination or intuition—nor is it affected by them or their likes—but inheres in itself only. Pure thought becomes the common ground of philosophy that allows for the unity of all sciences under its exclusive dominance. In this way “pure thought” would, as Cohen imagined it, be the idea that secures all thinking.[127] Soloveitchik critiques Cohen, claiming that his suggestion of the suspension of sensible and intuitive actuality in thought necessarily implies the deficiency of thought in comprehending reality.[128] “It would be no exaggeration if we were to say that we find no interpretation of Being in Cohen. The Cohenian version of reality depicts everything but true Being.”[129] According to Cohen’s interpretation, thought is superior to or at least ontologically precedes being instead of entering into a dialectical relationship with it. Cohen says, “We begin first with thinking.”[130] That is, strictly rational thought, unadulterated by emotion, determines the fruit of cognitive exploration. Because Cohen does not see the nature of pure thought as subject-bound, Soloveitchik’s critique begins by raising the problem of the relationship between logic and psychology.[131] Not unlike Tanabe’s critique of Hegel, Soloveitchik points to the lack of what would appear to be a necessary dialectic in Cohen’s thought. The dichotomy in Cohen’s thought toward which Soloveitchik gears his critique for not being dialectically developed is the one between abstract consciousness of ideas and self-consciousness, which includes subjective traits such as perception and emotion. Soloveitchik claims that, “A consciousness without self-consciousness is inconceivable.”[132] Particular objects are mediated epistemologically by perception—a perception which is chaotic, brilliant and irrational. For Cohen, however, “The world of colors, sounds, [and] smells which we are able to imagine is not real—[reality is] rather a world of complex atoms, quantum energy and motion.”[133] Soloveitchik says that the project of understanding such irrational elements, which dialectically subsist at the base of logic and thinking, lies in the province of psychology, not logic.[134] Because Cohen refuses to acknowledge the interpenetration of the two, or even the ultimate validity of the former, his account of existence misses something crucial. Though each has its own singular mode of inquiry, the psychological and logical are not unrelated. Soloveitchik’s critique of Cohen demonstrates how Cohen fails to identify the properly dialectical relationship between perception and logic. Cohen, for instance, proposes that thought proceeds in two distinct phases, the naive and critical. Naive thought is the initial phase of thinking. It operates on the order of pure thought, as in mathematics. In the critical phase, pure thought is compared or correlated with actuality, though, according to Cohen, it still has not exited the realm of logic into that of perception, which is defined as reflection on both naive thought and reality. Soloveitchik sees here a contradiction and asks how thought can be at once a unity and critical of itself.[135] The duality in Cohen’s epistemology suggests to Soloveitchik a dishonesty about the mutually implicating natures of thought and perception. Thought cannot be an originary principle, but at most a partial reconstruction from a base of both logic and perception. For the imagined wholeness and unity of the former, Cohen sacrifices theoretical rigor and philosophical commitment to a truer dialectic, much as Tanabe accuses Hegel and Marx of doing. Cohen, in order to save pure thinking from the pollution of intuition, emotion or beyond, gives up its actuality. The so-called “infinitesimal” becomes reality which, as the “carrier of being,” only contains perceptions but does not consist essentially of them. Soloveitchik, objecting, points out that perception’s [Empfindung] incoherence is no reason to disparage its reality or potentiality as an originary source of knowledge. Can any account of reality that does not consider the phenomenon of perception come close to actuality? Soloveitchik answers emphatically in the negative. But if Soloveitchik decides he will have both perception and logic at the core of reality, he must make sense of their being alongside yet opposed to each other. To resolve the role of accidental chaotic perception in relation to rational and harmonious logic, Soloveitchik rules that a necessary transcendental quality must be assigned to being which will save being’s connection to actuality.[136] In the transcendental adheres the coincidence of opposites which allows for the perfect resolution of the apparent non-identity of the logical and perceptual. Just what that transcendental might be, or what we might understand of it, becomes the problematic in Soloveitchik’s philosophical endeavor. Hegel The only kind of philosopher capable of rising to the challenge of positively developing the transcendental imperative Kant left behind, in Soloveitchik’s mind, is the metaphysician. Neither the critical idealist (Neo-Kantian) nor the pragmatist (James) could be creative in light of the peculiar state of affairs in which Kantian philosophy had left things. Only the metaphysician, for whom the totalizing understanding of the absolute was indispensable and who also took seriously the dilemma of resolving particular, phenomenal, finite existence with the transcendental and infinite could move forward at all. Though Hegel seems to qualify as the ideal metaphysician, Soloveitchik does not see in him a dialectical alternative. Hegel is unacceptable not for his “thesis” and “antithesis” but more for his particular kind of synthesis—perhaps even for positing the actuality of immediate synthesis at all. “Judaism’s dialectic, unlike the Hegelian dialectic is irreconcilable and hence [an] interminable dialectic consisting only of thesis and anti-thesis. There is no synthesis in Judaism.…” Or, more properly, Soloveitchik argues, the reconciliation of Hegel’s third stage is missing in Jewish thought. Only “God knows how to reconcile,” and thus “complete reconciliation to us is an eschatological vision,” not an immediate possibility. For Hegel, abstraction and being never really come into a dialectical relationship, leaving history and the human individual in the realm of abstraction. Thus, synthesis is easy for him. For tragic man, man who could not be more particular and who stubbornly resists abstraction, “reconciliation of opposites is almost an impossibility.” All that is immediately apprehended by this histrionic man is the incommensurability of opposites, the disruption of reality, and suffocating dialectical tension. “The Jew knows the thesis—affirmation. The Jew knows the antithesis—negation. He does not know of reconciliation.”[137] Kierkegaard and Existentialism Soloveitchik claims that as a result of the Hegelian acceptance of the immediacy of “wholeness” and “Primal Unity,” decadent philosophy has emerged in the West. [138] Totalizing belief in the imminent possibility of a realized whole led to the reign of “subjective gods.”[139] The mad search to locate the Absolute in the present has resulted in the deification of all things immediate and sensible. This sort of feeling- worship, argues Soloveitchik, is a kind of modern day idolatry. The case of Kierkegaard is Soloveitchik’s primary object of critique. Having brilliantly denounced the exceeding abstraction of Hegelian synthesis, Kierkegaard is to be hailed as a guarantor of the primacy of human subjectivity. For this Soloveitchik is indebted to him. But Kierkegaard’s faith comes only in the ruin of the world of ethical majesty, the destruction of the possibility for perfect moral prosperity as the conscience of the naively optimistic imagines it exists. Though Soloveitchik does not wish to completely deny the tremendously problematic character of the ethical, he cannot but think of the mediation (rather than the denunciation) of such a majestic ethical ideal. Soloveitchik, like Tanabe but (he argues) unlike Kierkegaard, emphasizes the importance of, and perhaps even demands a return to the ethical.[140] To remain dialectical, the return to ethical life, too, must enter into an intimate relationship with its opposite, the world of impending moral failure. How can it? How can ethics be at once both impossible and imperative? It may achieve this only by the singular and singularly paradoxical logic of religious thinking, in particular Jewish religiosity, which sees no easy resolution in a turn to either side of the dialectic, or even in a synthesis of the opposite sides. Kierkegaard, as a result of his movement of exiting the ethical by entering it completely and experiencing the tragic paradox of ethical failure, can never engage in action. The Halakhah, on the other hand, objectifies emotion, injecting it into the hidden places of a normative code of law, requiring action and engaging the world despite the contradiction inherent in its determination to do so.[141] It is “‘terribly’ articulate, ‘unpardonably’ dynamic, and ‘foolishly’ consistent, insisting that feeling become thought, and that experience be acted out and transformed into an objective event.”[142] On the other hand, says Soloveitchik, “Kierkegaard’s existential world … is a place of silence and passivity, far removed from the complex array of historical events, not hungering for action or movement.”[143] The subjectivism of Christian existentialism, and existential religion in general, destroys what should be the essentially exoteric character of religion.[144] Instead of the religious act being primary, faith philosophers like Kierkegaard, according to Soloveitchik, create “temples of inwardness and mental craving.”[145] The religious ‘act’ becomes one of uncommonly deep intuition or profound realization, and thereby makes the meeting of the religious and the mundane completely impossible. According to Soloveitchik, religion, and particularly the religious act, “must be accessible to every member of the human race.”[146] What this means ultimately is that Kierkegaard falls far short of arriving at a true dialectic, passing over the peculiar and particular, the obscure and individual, though this is ostensibly exactly what he is trying to avoid. A subjectivity as rarefied as Kierkegaard’s, the achievement of which is itself an ‘act’ so unattainable by the individual of common religious sensibilities as to make it indeed abstract, is by its nature esoteric. When Soloveitchik talks of the “subjective school” of religious philosophy he is not referring exclusively to Kierkegaard. Others who find their sources in traditions slightly more tangential to the Hegelian—Schleiermacher who stems from romanticism, Willhelm Hermann who has his origins in Ritschlian views—all “hope to find quiescence in subjectivism,” and thereby fail the task of philosophy—i.e., to dialectically juggle extremes as they arise, answering the insistent cries of the importance of both ends, subjective and objective.[147] Subjectivists too—as much as the rationalists, positivists or idealists—continue the tyranny of the one sided, non-dialectical cognitive model in accounting for human experience and prescribing normative behavior. They thereby radically constrict the inevitable and necessary growth of Soloveitchik’s cherished “cognitive pluralism.” The doctrine of the subjectivist fails further on several other points for more practical reasons are also intimately connected to its dialectical shortcomings. Subjectivism cannot hope to fulfill all religious needs. Having no norms, it does not answer the question “How should I act in daily life?” It speaks only of mental heights and individual transcendence, sacrificing also the charismatic social ego of religious man, who seeks to communion and frolic with his fellow beings. The subjectivist thus negates the Aristotelian dictum that man has a necessary social dimension. It is he who perhaps is even responsible for the historical abuse of religion, spiritualism often being the purported thrust of the enterprise of world domination. [148] That is, romantic religion, with its “wilderness of intuition” leads in an unacceptable number of cases to the elimination of the ethical “right” and opens up the way for moral corruption.[149] Subjectivism of this variety, thus, must be judged unworthy as a philosophical orientation because of its sometimes horrendous ethical implications, the ethical being a category which both Tanabe and Soloveitchik agree rests at the core of the entire enterprise of religion and philosophy. Thus, though Soloveitchik seeks to critique rationalism as the exclusive venue for acquiring knowledge, he is also highly critical of the subjective aspirant who seeks escape from the domain of rational knowledge, leaving behind him only a trail of “Wahn, Wille, [und] Wehe.”[150] Like Tanabe, Soloveitchik does not wish to destroy or abandon reason. Soloveitchik instead imagines the rational in a dialectical relationship with the anti-rational, the latter as incessantly invoking the former as the limits of the former necessitate the latter. To forsake dialectics, as Soloveitchik believes Nietzsche, Bergson, Spengler, and Heidegger do in their veneration of instinct, sanctification of vitalism, desire for power, and glorification of affect, in a very real way leads to the sort of self-driven thinking which does not acknowledge human finitude (as Tanabe points out) and results in historical tragedy. Soloveitchik even seems to hint at the idea that such thinkers may have contributed to the ideology that fueled the fascist violence of the Holocaust.[151] Not volitional accounts themselves of the essence of human experience as contained in the will, but the lack of a dialectical approach to understanding the true role of subjectivity— and instead its blind exaltation—is what Soloveitchik posits as the horrible philosophical heresy of subjectivism.[152] That religious awakening and the emotion associated with it is changeable, volatile and transient, does not devalue its importance. On the contrary, it highlights its uniqueness and its resistance to articulation—particularly to standardization and to the making of any one individual’s religious experience into a normative measure for all aspirants. If subjectivity were to be normalized, as Soloveitchik believes it has been in the subjectivism of religious and non-religious existential philosophy, it would mean a tyranny of emotion and experience. “Each individual experiences God, man and world at the religious level in a unique fashion.”[153] According to Soloveitchik, to hypostatize that experience and make the emotional flux experienced during religious awakening the explicit object of exaltation and worship is idolatry. Soloveitchik argues that the cause for greatest concern is the difficulty of determining the nature of properly religious emotion and awakening versus, for instance, that of the hedonic or orgiastic variety. Soloveitchik carefully spells out the danger of misidentification in making such differentiations, securing a place for the singularity of religious experience over and against what might undermine and reduce it to something other than its unique self: We know of the many hedonic emotions that are provided with enormous power. They are hypnotic and at first glance redemptive. One may easily confuse the religious drive with the love impulse. It is quite easy to replace the religious ecstatic craving with the ecstatic yearning of the artist. There are common characteristics in both of them. The quest for exaltedness and infinity is typical of both, of the experience of beauty and the religious experience. To substitute secular for religious emotions is … [however] an idolatrous method. The pagans of old used to indulge in hypnotic orgiastic ceremonials, mistakenly identifying them with religious experience … The rousing of the religious experience by conflating it with the powerful hypnosis of the aesthetic experience, such as music, plastic arts, architecture is alien to halakhic Judaism.[154] Soloveitchik offers the examples of the church organ and the architecture of Gothic cathedrals as instances of where the religious and aesthetic may be intermingled so that the latter might somehow invoke the experience of the former, in some way preparing a mood. “Judaism,” conversely, “wanted the religious experience to be born in a world of its own,”[155] for to center worship around anything else would be idolatrous. “The Gothic cathedral wanted to arouse in the human personality the experience of infinity, of boundlessness, of questing up into the heavens. Of course it may induce such a quest. But it is an artistic quest. It is not a religious quest and to substitute an artistic quest for a religious quest is idolatrous.”[156] Soloveitchik emphasizes the irreplicability of the religious experience, it “is autonomous, free and original, moves at its own tempo, moves within its own unique orbit.”[157] By emphasizing this he actually develops a notion that was not at all foreign to thinkers like Kierkegaard, who also distinguishes religious from aesthetic experience as such. The problem with the latter figure, and the schools of subjectivism with which he is associated is not that they do not adhere to the rigorous conditions of maintaining this distinction. It is rather that in defining the subjectivity of religious-man so esoterically they simply make it extremely difficult to distinguish the religious from its antithetical counterparts in the aesthetic. The subjectivist thereby problematizes the religious act beyond what is acceptable and takes it out of the hands of so-called “ordinary people.”[158] The Philosophy of Science As is the case with Tanabe, Soloveitchik, too, uses the rational constructs he hopes to invert, working within them to find a means by which, by their own logic, they are forced to admit options, alternatives and even imperatives other than themselves when operating in certain realms of human inquiry. Tanabe’s method is to demonstrate how the logic of Kant’s critique of reason, when taken to its radical ends in an absolute critique of itself necessitates the breakdown and death of reason and its rebirth in the mediation of negation (Absolute Nothingness). Soloveitchik’s approach is to look to the mathematical sciences themselves for an indication of the necessity of his “cognitive pluralism.” Soloveitchik begins with a study of the singularity of Bergson’s vitalism as a starting point for the valid departure of his own thought away from the tyranny of formal logic. Bergson is the first to notice that biology and psychology resist purely mechanical explanation and thus call into question the hitherto unexamined limitations of traditional science.[159] As the world broadens, science also matures, positing a multiplicity of cognitive models for moving forward toward knowledge of the world. The real challenge to the exclusivity of strictly rational constructs in philosophy and physics, however, does not come from the life sciences. Soloveitchik argues that it is physics itself which does the most to champion the cause of cognitive pluralism. The revolution of non-Euclidean geometry and quantum theory necessitates that science revise itself and radically so, admitting the relative unimportance of Newtonian physics when physical matter shrinks or expands to a certain size. The same type of transformation has not taken place in the humanistic sciences, however. “Newtonian physics found its philosophical apostle in Kant; modern physics is still awaiting its philosophical expounder.”[160] On the one hand this means that philosophy has still not reinvented itself to suit the scientific climate. On the other, there is something more profound in what Soloveitchik says. Philosophy too must take precedence over science as a whole— like quantum theory does over Newtonian physics—under certain conditions where science, reason and formal logic are no longer the appropriate tools by which we can gain insight into human experience and the world. Differences abound within science itself. The various conceptions of mathematical versus physical space, the dualism of spatio-temporal and causal approaches to reality, among other things, open the way for the entrance and credibility of other methodologies, i.e., those of the humanistic sciences in the project of understanding.[161] The humanistic sciences must in fact accept responsibility for what the mathematical sciences cannot explain. Whereas the latter are based around knowledge of single elements, measures of formal surface continuity, a concern for “how” in causal relations, purely ideal constructions, and a denial of change in its abstract laws, the former must account for knowledge where wholeness is hinted, where there is an intuition of a primitive configuration, where the “what,” even the “why,” of the meaningful whole is at stake, and the uniqueness of continually changing particulars are in question.[162] Humanistic sciences must take responsibility for this, reality’s other face. It is ultimately also science’s wish to grasp the whole and resolve it with the particular. Science is not deprived of a sixth sense sensitive to wholeness and aspires, for instance in quantum and Gestalt theories as well as wave mechanics, to structural knowledge.[163] Yet science cannot have the whole for the whole is necessarily qualitative. Science cannot measure it, for all modes of measurement are themselves included in the whole and all quantitative strictures must be stepped outside of so that absolute perspective might be gained. That is, the self can, in grasping the whole, never stand outside with a yard stick to scientifically measure what it seeks, for no place exists outside the infinite, which is without boundaries, from where one can make exact measurements.[164] Science moves from part to whole, it begins with the particle and creates the whole largely through an act of reconstruction, a duplication of the whole in an ideal realm of abstraction. What it does not recognize is that it presupposes the whole it aspires to reconstruct. “To conceive of a particle … requires a process of abstraction, since all our perceptions are related to extended bodies, so that the idea of a whole that is in our consciousness at a given instant is perhaps as primitive an idea as that of any individual thing.”[165] What Soloveitchik hints at here in his explanation of the interaction between part and whole in science is again the dialectic which the classical, especially the scientific, West has failed to grasp at the base of its own logic—the dialectic which necessitates an integrative though perhaps contradictory consideration of opposite extremes at once in the explanation of any one end of a spectrum; that is, a dialectic that necessarily invokes both mathematical and humanistic sciences in the exhaustive enterprise of understanding. The Turn toward Pluralism The urge for totality and finality leads to the abandonment of science and reason as the sole sources of knowledge. Philosophy’s necessary turn toward methodological and cognitive pluralism is in a sense, as it is for Tanabe, an abandonment or only provisional maintenance of rational philosophy. Soloveitchik realizes that before the modern era there were attempts at establishing new methods of inquiry, but it is only with modern pluralism, he argues, that the hierarchy of knowledge governing the relationship of those methodologies to each other can be dissolved.[166] Soloveitchik does not deny the validity of logic in his epistemological pluralism. In fact, he claims, as does Tanabe, that “logic itself leads … to a pluralism of viewpoints,” as was demonstrated.[167] Logic itself is not homogeneous.[168] Humanistic science does not claim to know mathematical science better than does mathematics; it claims only the right to assert that mathematical knowledge is (1) not exhaustive and (2) not homogeneous.[169] Soloveitchik points to the plurality of possible logical orders, each of which carries its own approach and internal workings that are perhaps even incommensurable with the others. Thus, he does not so much disparage the limits of pure reason, like those metaphysicians who turn to irrationalism and emotionalism. He rather rejoices in its self-transcendence and self-surpassing. There remains for man an unexplored qualitative universe that is very well worth investigating. Epistemological pluralism says that “the physical aspect is but one of many.”[170] This does not deny an existence of the Absolute, as some would argue does the relativism of some contemporary intellectual movements—it only claims that the Absolute can be revealed in a multiplicity of ways. And some ways lend themselves to developing certain understandings better than others. In the case of the “concrete world full of sound and color,”[171] in which the homo religiosus lives, a logically/scientifically driven logic could not hope to live up to the task of revealing the nature and essence of that qualitative environment exhaustively. Religion within the Bounds of Religion Alone It is only in the conflict between mathematical sciences (reason) and the logic of religion that the latter might avail itself of an autonomous perspective.[172] Otherwise, if the rational proof of, for instance, the existence of God were able to achieve its aim—a demonstration of divine reality divorced from lived actuality in experience—religion would, by virtue of this achievement, lose what makes it singular.[173] In order for religion as such to maintain its claim to a unique existence, the problem of rational certainty must never be resolved. “The believer does not miss philosophical legitimization; the skeptic will never be satisfied with any cognitive demonstration.”[174] The crisis of fragmentation and irrationality in the religious consciousness must ensue indefinitely for the sake of religion. That logic and reason leave one with no recourse in the quest for exhaustive understanding within their own bounds necessitates that a unique philosophical method, not simply something akin to a handmaiden to the mathematical sciences, be developed.[175] So it might grasp the singularity of religious thought and experience, philosophy of this sort must have a methodology independent of its mathematical counterpart. Though philosophy may have begun as a single methodology seeking knowledge of a seemingly infinite number of objects of observation, when it approaches the religious it has encountered an object whose very nature changes the theoretical and interpretive enterprises employed to comprehend it. Soloveitchik argues that the popular trend of reducing religious life and experience to other factors so as to make it more comprehensible to those not used to its unique logic is indicative of the epistemological dearth of our age. Trying to psychologize the unique logic of religion, which for Soloveitchik ultimately means the unique logic of the Halakhah, is like trying to psychologize mathematics— though contingent conditions might be observed in the development of mathematics, and perhaps may resemble causes for certain conclusions arrived at by mathematicians, ultimately the logic of mathematical constructs would be misunderstood if seen exclusively or even primarily through the lens of those contingent factors. Thus historically or rationally causal, psychological or psychoanalytical approaches to understanding religious phenomena at best distort and at worst destroy the integrity of spiritual events.[176] This is also true even of ethical reductionism. According to Soloveitchik. “Religion prefers the cult to the ethos.”[177] Contemporary Talmudic scholars and religious leaders ignore the Maimonides who tried to rationalize the commandments by describing their crucial ethical import. Maimonides tried desperately but alas in vain to draw necessary causal corollaries between religious norms which were reconstructed in an ideal order removed from sensuous reality and common sense ethical intuitionism.[178] The Sabbath is observed, according to the Maimonides of the Guide to the Perplexed, so that man might live a seventh of his life in rest and comfort. This explanation fails to captivate generations of his followers. “Maimonides, the halakhic scholar, came nearer to the core of philosophical truth than Maimonides the speculative philosopher.”[179] The latter operated within an utterly unique religious logic, while the former lived narrowly in the shadow of another discipline’s interpretive logos. In any search for the causal dimensions of religious experience, religion must necessarily relinquish its autonomy, transcend itself and appeal to elements foreign to it. When it does so it becomes an orderly for ethics, biology, or social ideals[180] —all of which have their place but none of which could hope ever to replace religion as such. The unique character of religion demands a logic and autonomy almost exclusively its own. It is not that Soloveitchik denounces religion’s ethical component. On the contrary, he believes Judaism’s singular contribution to religion is that it was the first to suggest that the needs of the divine address also the quality of interaction between man and his fellow human beings.[181] That is, the God of Judaism was the first to care about how man treated his fellow man. However, though religion without ethics is paganism, ethical humanism in the guise of religion stripped of all aspects of cultic ritual is simply a morality embedded in mundane culture and not religion at all. Thus, proposes Soloveitchik, “A mishpat even when it is based on reason, must be accepted as a hok.”[182] Commitment to religion that originates not in rational conviction but in a mysterious will endures and does greater justice to the singularity of the religious act as such. The act of faith must be aboriginal, itself even necessarily absurd.[183] “No matter how impressive the similarities are, the act of faith is unique and cannot be fully translated into cultural categories.”[184] Even in an age when nothing sacred remains, it must remain untranslatable into the language of reason or culture, for any such translation would necessarily at best be a false translation, and at worst a desecration of the original. If religion is to survive unto and for itself, removed from the vicious circle of rationalization, the philosopher must allow for the independence of religious cognition.[185] The conflict of science and religion, contemporaneous for Soloveitchik, marked the possibility of great innovation in the humanistic sciences.[186] It is unlike the other revolutionary eras of man’s intellectual history—for instance that marked by Aristotle’s achievements in the natural sciences or Galileo and Newton’s mathematics and physics, when philosophy remained a “satellite of science”[187] and borrowed only “finished products from the scientist’s laboratory” but could not “participate in their fabrication.”[188] Those eras witnessed the height of the ridiculous and tragic as the crucial “world comprising the sum total of our consciousness, the world of the senses, with which our very being is integrated, was rejected … as relativistic, subjective and ephemeral.”[189] Both Tanabe and Soloveitchik, coming from traditions in which religion was unimaginable without the affective and spiritual categories of human experience, but who also valued highly the intellectual endeavor, had to find some escape from the limitations of rationalism without abandoning it altogether. The rational scientific logos, which denies any unique cognitive component to religious experience, has also to deny the intentional character of the religious act. Is there no predication, no valuation, no emotional orientation toward the religious as a singular and unparalleled event in life, asks Soloveitchik?[190] According to the rational conscience, the answer to this question is no. Or, if modern scientific pluralism does assign some unique substance to religion as a cognitive category it also demoted it to axiology or ontology, instead of reserving for it a place within phenomenal reality. Religion, losing its claim to immediacy, therefore becomes increasingly abstract and intangible, the province of only pedantic scholasticism and thus forfeits its “prime theme,” which is, according to Soloveitchik, “not theosophy or theology but the understanding of the sensible world.”[191] By “sensible world” Soloveitchik means both the corporeal world and the world of the emotions, as well as the world of how man explains the order or flux of the latter two worlds, that is, the world of cognition. Science cannot stand to have religion study the very same object that is the center of its own inquiry—the physical world—and claim that it knows it in an entirely different, although not exclusive, but singular manner. Yet it will ultimately have to accept this reality. The religious personality, especially from the Judaic viewpoint, cannot conceive of God apart from the world. The aboriginal religious experience … always perceives [God] from the purview of His relation to reality. The white light of divinity is always refracted through reality’s ‘dome of many-coloured glass.[192] Religious man will always intrude on what man-scientist believes to be his exclusive domain of cognitive inquiry—the immediate world of concrete sensation and perception. It is true that for philosophy and religion proper a degree of otherness, of non- identity with anything else in existence is necessary. “Anything that can simply be reduced to a principle of identity is not a problem for philosophy. For a problem to belong to philosophy there must be something inconceivable in it.” Yet there must also be a way in which religion permeates all existence and is in no sense other- worldly, in no way unrelated to all other things in existence. That is, “something altogether inconceivable and mysterious cannot become a problem for philosophy.” [193] Tanabe wishes to agree with Soloveitchik that religion can never be contained within the limits of reason alone.[194] For him, as it was for Soloveitchik, genuine faith inheres precisely in a radical negation of reason or, more appropriately, a radical recognition of its limitations. Anything like a “rational faith” has validity only insofar as it mediates the emergence of irrational faith through the death of reason in the absolute crisis. Only in that sense can faith be said to be based in rationality. Moreover Soloveitchik’s methodology is similar to Tanabe’s; both work first from within the tradition of the classical West outward to an alternative, indeed an imperative alternative for understanding reality exhaustively which they formulate from a logic unique to the religious traditions particular to them as historical individuals. In this sense, they overlap as radical critiques of Western metaphysics and rationalism which begin actually from within the latter traditions and exit it somehow through embracing it. This means that for Tanabe and Soloveitchik the West of modern philosophy and theology is a point of negative dialectical mediation for their own religious traditions.[195] Yet “religion … comes about only in a trans­formation or conversion of the self that is based on an absolute critique of reason itself.”[196] Religion also maintains its own autonomy even as it makes use of things other than itself to reach itself. Though faith established on any other basis besides itself is not strictly faith but something else, faith which does not confront and overcome reason to return to its original self also does not capture the essence of religious life. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]. Although Tanabe was Japanese, I think it is fair to argue that he felt the burden of the classical West as strongly as did Soloveitchik, if not more so in some senses. Tanabe identified himself first as a philosopher at a time when Western philosophy was becoming an extremely powerful force in Japanese intellectual life. The fact that Japan had an “intellectual elite” at all, in fact, is a result of their appropriation of Western academic structures. Much of Tanabe’s life, both practically and theoretically, was driven by Western thinking and his relatively isolated position as professor of philosophy at an imperial university allowed him the luxury of engrossing himself in Western thought to such an extent that it no longer was really a terribly foreign curiosity for him. Soloveitchik, on the other hand, was much more at home as a scholar of classical Jewish sources than as a Western intellectual. Unlike Tanabe, his life’s main work was not occupied with mastering and teaching the classics of Western thought, though he was extraordinarily well versed in them. In this sense, Tanabe was even more invested in the project of resolving the antinomies of Western philosophy than was Soloveitchik. [2]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 81. [3]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 1. [4]. Johannes Laube, Dialektik der absolute Vermittelung, p. 8. [5]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, pp. 27-28. [6]. Ibid., p. 115. [7]. What follows is a discussion of how Tanabe and Soloveitchik read specific philosophers in the history of Western thought. I do not mean to accurately represent or critique the philosophers which Tanabe and Soloveitchik engage. My purpose is only to offer a clear picture of how our thinkers read these philosophers. In many cases Tanabe and Soloveitchik are careless and sweeping with their generalizations about the thinkers they critique. This does not make their critiques any less interesting. Most often their hope is to use Western philosophy as a launch-pad from which they might creatively introduce some original thought on classical themes. In their frantic, all-encompassing exposition of Western thinkers, nuances in the thought of many philosophers are often inaccurately presented. Where this happens most obviously, I have tried to address the specious interpretation in a footnote, offering other possible readings. One could argue that the history of philosophy, Western and Eastern, is a series of misinterpretations. Philos­ophers, particularly those who seem to be most important to and esteemed by the tradition, often grossly misrepresent their predecessors as they try to explain or critique them. We do not turn to Nietzsche or Hegel for an accurate reading of Kant. Nor do we turn to Kierkegaard for an accurate reading of Hegel. Likewise, in explaining Soloveitchik’s and Tanabe’s readings of certain Western philosophers, we are not looking for a better account of what those philosophers were actually saying. We are looking for traces of fresh insight as well as possible indications of the structure of Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s own creative thought as it comes through in their critique of others. [8]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 160. [9]. Tanabe is not opposed to the dichotomy as such. In fact, unlike many Buddhist thinkers, he sees dichotomies as necessary for and beneficial to gaining philosophical insight and engaging in creative expression. He is uninterested in entering the “dharma door of nonduality” and being free of the burdens of difference in a mystical unity. His problem is not with duality but with interpretations of dualities which he claims are not authentically dialectic. [10]. According to this logic the religious “paradox” is really just a plain contradiction. Here we assume that the difference between a paradox and a contradiction is that the latter is irresolvable but the former, though it appears contradictory prima facie, somehow makes sense upon closer inspection, or when viewed from an alternative perspective. At a deeper level, we could actually say that it is because of the logic of identity that the religious paradox is a paradox to begin with. If not for the strictures of Aristotelian logic, the simultaneous expression of affirmation and negation would not appear to be contradictory. [11]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 16. [12]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, pp. 116–17. [13]. Ibid., p. 283. [14]. Ibid., p. 61. [15]. Ibid., p. 64. [16]. Ibid. [17]. Ibid., p. 34. [18]. Ibid., p. 59. This move in turn also insured the universality of theoretical knowledge, which itself insured the universality of practical knowledge. [19]. Ibid., p. 60. [20]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 9. [21]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 34. [22]. Absolute Nothingness as a philosophical imperative will be further discussed in chapter three. [23]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 39. [24]. Ibid., p. 38. [25]. Ibid. [26]. Ibid., p. 32. [27]. Ibid., p. 107. [28]. Ibid., p. 180. One could argue against Tanabe that this applies only to a religious transformation in human subjectivity. If religious transformation with a significant ethical component is in question, Kant’s postulates of practical reason clearly amount to more than a “revolution of feeling” and imply significant pragmatic and even ontological consequences for religious-man. [29]. Ibid., p. xii. Because of Tanabe’s limited exposure to Hegel, he does not incorporate into his critique Hegel’s notions of intuitionism, and of the unity of particular and universal. Had Tanabe studied some of Hegel’s later works in depth, his understanding of Hegel may have differed significantly. [30]. Jan Van Bragt, “Kyoto Philosophy—Intrinsically Nationalistic?,” in Rude Awakenings, ed. James Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 250. [31]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 99. [32]. Ibid., p. 100. [33]. James Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and Nationalism,” in Rude Awakenings, ed. James Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 276. [34]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. xvi. [35]. Ibid., p. 267. [36]. Ibid., p. 45. [37]. Ibid., p. 93. [38]. Ibid., p. 98. [39]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 17. [40]. Ibid., p. 29. [41]. Ibid., p. 30. [42]. Ibid., p. 37. [43]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 57. [44]. A discussion of Tanabe’s reading of Marx follows. His view of existentialism, both nineteenth century religious and contemporary hermeneutic, will be considered in the next section. [45]. James Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and Nationalism,” in Rude Awakenings, ed. James Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 260. One could argue that Hegel suffers also from an overbearing emphasis on the state. Hegel’s absolutization of the state, however, differs from Marx’s in that the former’s amounts more to a mythological nationalism dealing primarily with questions of national identity, character and the destiny of the particular Prussia on behalf of which Hegel philosophized. Marx’s nationalistic ideals do not seem to have been conceived of with any one, exclusive, historical state in mind. [46]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 38. [47]. Ibid., p. 38. [48]. Ibid., p. 44. [49]. Ibid., p. 46. [50]. Though Tanabe reads Marx in this way, one could argue that Marx does not negate subjectivity, but rather claims that authentic subjectivity is realized only in light of the framework of material objectivity. This is another instance in which Tanabe’s reading of Western philosophy might be somewhat unbalanced. [51]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 44. [52]. Ibid., p. 46. [53]. Ibid., p. 50. [54]. Ibid. [55]. Ibid., p. 31. [56]. Ibid., p. 52. [57]. Ibid., p. 55. [58]. Ibid., p. 69. [59]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, pp. 279–80. [60]. Ibid., p. 280. [61]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 144. [62]. Ibid., pp. 134–36. [63]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 18. Tanabe is citing Baruch Spinoza, Letters to Friend and Foe (New York: Philosophical Library, 1966), 50th letter. [64]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, p. 280. [65]. Ibid., p. 279. [66]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 20. [67]. When Tanabe writes of “existentialism” he is referring mostly to Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism and Heidegger’s hermeneutic “existentialism.” [68]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 114. [69]. Ibid., p. 102. [70]. Ibid., p. 112. [71]. Ibid., p. 112. [72]. See the chapter on Nietzsche in Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, for further insight into this point. [73]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 105. [74]. Ibid., pp. 103, 105. [75]. Ibid., p. 108. [76]. Ibid., p. 108. [77]. Ibid., p. 51. [78]. A kôan is a riddle or question the Zen master asks his disciple but which has no rational answer. The purpose of asking the question is to push the aspirant to the limits of rational inquiry until he is utterly unable to make sense of the problem by use of logic alone. He must look for the resolution of the problem on a non- rational plane of consciousness. Having done this, he is said to have “awakened” or achieved “enlightenment.” [79]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 126. [80]. Ibid., p. 115. [81]. Ibid., p. xlv. As we shall see is also the case with Soloveitchik, Tanabe seems to have ignored or not to have known about Kierkegaard’s discussion of the movement of return to ethical life in Fear and Trembling. Tanabe might also have been well advised to look at Kierkegaard’s later writings, particularly his Works of Love in which he, as himself and not pseudonymously, discusses the importance of concrete action in the world of history. [82]. Tanabe’s most powerful critique of Kierkegaard comes in his Existenz, Love and Praxis, 1947. [83]. Heidegger is, of course, indebted to Kierkegaard for much of the thought articulated here. [84]. Tanabe’s view of history as a philosophical category and his critique of historicism is more complex than I have presented it here but also too weighty a topic to examine thoroughly in this context. [85]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. xi. [86]. Ibid., p. 70. [87]. Ibid., p. 91. [88]. Ibid., p. 91. [89]. Ibid., p. 87. [90]. Ibid., p. 92. [91]. Ibid., p. 79. [92]. Ibid., p. 79. [93]. Ibid., p. 90. See the discussion of affirmation and negation in Nietzsche above. [94]. Ibid., p. 93. [95]. Ibid., p. 149. [96]. Ibid., p. 227. [97]. Ibid., p. 41. [98] Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, pp. 192–193. [99]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 109. Tanabe here compares this to Nietzsche’s failure to appreciate the importance and necessity of abstraction in the dialectical process of self-consciousness awakening to the immediate, unordered Dionysian side of being. [100]. “Absolute Nothingness” is Tanabe’s new formulation of the classical Western Absolute. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, pp. 4–5. For a brief overview of Tanabe’s relationship to the history of Western philosophy in his own terms, see the Preface to Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. lvii. [101]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 26, 32. [102]. We could also argue that religion’s aspiration toward the Absolute is more immediate than that of either science or philosophy. [103]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 32. [104]. Ibid., pp. 26-27. [105]. Ibid., p. 12. [106]. Johannes Laube, “The meaning of gyô (practice) according to the Buddhist theologian Shinran and the philosopher Tanabe,” p. 108. [107]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 20. [108]. Ibid., p. l. [109]. Ibid., p. 39. [110]. Ibid., p. 97. Here Tanabe uses the same reasoning to make an argument for the logical converse of this point. [111]. Ibid., p. 44. [112]. In formulating this explanation, it would seem that Tanabe relies heavily on thought if not from Kierkegaard himself at least from the tradition of Kierkegaardian existentialism. [113]. Soloveitchik details his conception of “cognitive pluralism” in his Halakhic Mind. We will study this concept in greater detail below in this section. [114]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 133. [115]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, p. 86. [116]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #4 (taped lecture). [117]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 133–34. [118]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Dual Aspects of Man” (taped lecture). [119]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 121. The rest of the passage reads, “Schelling’s artistic intuition, Schopenhauer’s voluntaristic metaphysics, Hegel’s excessive idealism … are characteristic of the daring mood of the philosopher who undertakes to solve the insoluble. The net result of these metaphysical acrobatics were philosophical confusion and logical bewilderment … Transcendental skepticism often leads to metaphysical perplexities and mysticism.” [120]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 105. [121]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #1, (taped lecture). [122]. Of course, the rational gesture is crucial for Kant, but not as a necessary part of the religious experience. The cognitive drive is not by its nature religious in character for Kant, though it could be employed as a tool to facilitate religious life. It remains distinct from the category of faith, which is essentially religious for Kant. Soloveitchik, as we will see in the next chapter, explains that the experience of cognition itself as religious. [123]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #1 (taped lecture). [124]. Ibid. [125]. Ibid. [126]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 27. [127]. Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, p. 38. [128]. Reiner Munk, “Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” p. 148. [129]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Das reine Denken und Seinskonstitueirung bei Hermann Cohen, p. 86. Translation mine. [130]. “Wir fangen mit dem Denken an.” Soloveithcik cited in Reiner Munk, “Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” p. 153. [131]. Reiner Munk, “Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” p. 152. [132]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Das reine Denken und Seinskonstitueirung bei Hermann Cohen, p. 56. “Eine Bewußtsein ohne Selbstbewußtsein ist nicht zu begreifen.” [133]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Das reine Denken und Seinskonstitueirung bei Hermann Cohen, p. 108. Translation mine. [134]. Reiner Munk, “Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” p. 160. [135]. Ibid., p. 150. [136]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Das reine Denken und Seinskonstitueirung bei Hermann Cohen, p. 90. “Um das Sein, ist das Postulat einer transzendenten Komponente unumgäglich.” [137]. All quotations cited in this paragraph cited from Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Man and the Judaic Approach to Man,” (taped lecture). What is important to note here is the way in which Soloveitchik makes use of Western philosophical categories to interpret Jewish tradition. The language of affirmation and negation in the sense that Soloveitchik uses it here does not really resonate with any terminology native to the Jewish textual tradition as such. [138]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 53. [139]. Ibid., p. 53. [140]. One could argue that Soloveitchik seriously misreads Kierkegaard, especially in relation to the latter’s commitment to the ethical ideal. There are indications in many of Kierkegaard’s writings, e.g. - Works of Love, Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, and Attack on Christendom, that the ethical as a category is of prime importance. Soloveitchik seems to be aware that for Kierkegaard the religious is only accessible through the ethical. What Soloveitchik does not acknowledge as explicitly about Kierkegaard’s thought is that it is also through the religious that man can recover his ethical being according to Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, ethics based on purely discursive rationale may never endure the irrationalities of history—but an ethics based in divine love may. Thus, there very well may be a return to the ethical from the religious in Kierkegaard’s view, one which may even have significant historical ramifications. [141]. The term ‘Halakhah,’ strictly speaking, means Jewish law and legal discourse. For Soloveitchik it has many different connotations, many various nuances. Soloveitchik sees Halakhah as a methodology, an orientation toward the world, an approach to engaging reality in all its complex components. Its character, nature and function I hope will become more obvious in chapter three. [142]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 108. [143]. Ibid., Soloveitchik also contrasts the world of the Halakhah with “Schleiermacher’s pietistic world.” [144]. That religion be open and accessible to all, even the foolish and imperfect, is a central theme for Tanabe as well. In Philosophy as Metanoetics, Tanabe says that “As the sole self-mediating realization of philosophy, it seems to me that metanoesis is, therefore, open to everyone.” For Tanabe, however, there is a hint of irony in his abstraction and inaccessability when he asserts such a point. This irony has to do with the deeper philosophical/religious orientation of Tanabe and his recognition of human finitude in the facticity of sinfulness. [145]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 77. [146]. Ibid., p. 80. [147]. Ibid., p. 77. [148]. Ibid., p. 79–80. [149]. Ibid., p. 52–53. [150]. Ibid., p. 53. “Insanity, will and woe.” [151]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 141. [152]. Ibid., p. 152. [153]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Rebellion of Korach” (taped lecture). [154]. Ibid. [155]. Ibid. [156]. Ibid. [157]. Ibid. [158]. Alternatively, one could argue against Soloveitchik that Kierkegaard does not make it difficult to distinguish the aesthetic from the religious, and that he does indeed clearly demarcate the realm of the ethical-historical from those of the aesthetic and religious. Kierkegaard, however, speaks of an indirect approach to entering the authentically ethical through what he calls the ethical-religious. He also describes an intricate movement from the aesthetic to the ethical. Soloveitchik may be mistaking complexity in the movements from realm to realm for ambiguity as to the precise boundaries or lack of emphasis on the importance of the ethical or religious spheres as such. [159]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 8. [160]. Ibid., p. 12. [161]. Ibid., pp. 23–24. [162]. Ibid., pp. 30–36. [163]. Ibid., p. 58. [164]. Ibid. [165]. Ibid., p. 123. [166]. Ibid., p. 107. [167]. Ibid., p. 56. [168]. Ibid., p. 13. [169]. Ibid., p. 5. [170]. Ibid., p. 13. [171]. Ibid., p. 40. [172]. Ibid., p. 4. [173]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 51. [174]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 118. [175]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Das reine Denken und Seinskonstitueirung bei Hermann Cohen, p. 12f, 19–31. [176]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 132. “In general, the negating and destructive force of genetics reaches its high-point in the psychoanalytic interpretation of spiritual phenomena.” [177]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 69. [178]. Ibid., pp. 86, 92. [179]. Ibid., p. 92. [180]. Ibid., p. 93. [181]. Discussion of this point becomes crucial in the following chapter. [182]. A mishpat is a commandment which seems to have some rational basis. A hok is a commandment lacking an obvious rational foundation. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, p. 110. [183]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Lonely Man of Faith, p. 99. [184]. Ibid., p. 101. [185]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 50. Soloveitchik will argue that even each separate faith, and faith community—and this is where Tanabe and Soloveitchik differ drastically—has a language and logic unique to itself. See Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav, p. 176. [186]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 1. [187]. Ibid., p. 6. [188]. Ibid., p. 12. [189]. Ibid., p. 7. [190]. Ibid., p. 41. [191]. Ibid., p. 45. [192]. Ibid., p. 46. [193]. Ibid., p. 13. [194]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 50. [195]. Of course, “tradition” means something different to Soloveitchik than it does to Tanabe. Tanabe is not beholden to any particular tradition, as is Soloveitchik. Though Tanabe is wont to identify with certain traditions, he never commits to any one of them. Yet he, like Soloveitchik, feels intensely the tension between the traditions with which he identifies and the tradition of classical Western thought. [196].  Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 149.