Chapter 4 TELOS How One Approaches Final Redemption He is both the lowest and the highest. In him we find both what cannot be surpassed as well as what has been lost beyond retrieval. Man is both the redeemer and the unredeemable. Who was so deceitful to suggest that he is only at best the redeemed? In Los Angeles, on the corner of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards, there is a popular shopping mall known as the Beverly Center. There many of the city’s wealthy, young, and attractive go to purchase everything from hand-towels to home movies, beauty oils and things made of brass—the superfluous adornments of lives lived in relative comfort. Those who walk its massive and expansive corridors move quickly but casually. Their eyes wander from window to window. Occasionally, one hears a laugh, perhaps a hardy guffaw from a teenager in a crowd of friends, perhaps an unrestrainable but gentle giggle that a couple share, holding hands as they walk from one end of the enormous air-conditioned hall to the other. Directly across the street from the Beverly Center is Cedars Sinai Hospital. Here people suffer in unspeakable ways from a variety of life’s most terrible illnesses. Most patients are old, though in a few exceptionally tragic cases young people also occupy the beds. Of course, there are births here, but mostly there is death. Presently, my great aunt is sitting in one of these beds. She is strapped in by her arms to the bed; if she were not constrained perhaps she would try to rip out the many tubes running into her body and walk around the room. Others like her also sit in their beds with catheter or bed pan and watch television or stare out the window, look upon the lively center of commercial activity positioned directly opposite them. So short a distance from each other, two universes coexist alongside one another. Walking from one building to the other, even very slowly, would take no more than a few minutes. But resolving how both can exist in the same world, whether ten feet or ten-thousand miles from each other, is perhaps one of life’s greatest problems. It is here that the true marriage of opposites to which we alluded as an introduction takes place—not between a Buddhist and a Jewish philosopher, or between the classical West and non-Western traditions, but rather between the extremes of the world of the happy, prosperous and beautiful, on the one hand, and the dejected, miserable and suffering on the other. The contrast of these two worlds, in part represented by the shopping center and the hospital juxtaposed one opposite the other on a busy urban street, is not an ideal analogy. Actually, opposites coexist without even the space between streets to separate them—many of the same people who wander casually through the shiny, varied, electric stores of the mall one day languish in the cold blue of hospital beds; and if it is not they who lie in those beds then it may be people they love. Such is the absurdity of human existence. Yet the intense paradox inherent in this peculiar coexistence of opposites in single beings often goes unacknowledged. To speak of suffering and joy, sickness and health, or vibrance and morbidity is one way we might understand the dialectical nature of human existence as our two thinkers conceived of it. In light of these contradictions, the goal of philosophy and religion, in Tanabe’s terms, is not only to seek “coexistence despite the tension of opposition,” but even to posit the possibility of contradictory opposites “collaborating for the sake of mutual enhancement.”[1] The endeavor to posit somehow a coherent world not despite but because of the extremity of the mutually opposed elements within it requires that the religious individual account both for what is highest and what is lowest in man. He must explain how the contradictory relationship between the extremes contributes to the resolution of contradictions. Always committed to answering questions of how seemingly incommensurable entities or categories can be resolved, religious-man lives in constant tension. “Existence takes, not self-identity, but contradiction, as its structure.”[2] The burden of religious life is proportional to an awareness of and sensitivity to the intensity of that contradiction. Thus the seeker’s quest, though he may be after harmony, ultimately is authenticated by his encounter with disruption and irrationality. What results from the encounter with contradiction is not exhausted by disorder and chaos. The dream of realizing harmony also plays a role in the life of religious- man. Longing for unadulterated purity, though its realization may not immediately be possible, persists nevertheless, even in light of immanent contradiction. “Inconsistency enriches existence, contradiction renews Creation, negation builds worlds and denial deepens and expands consciousness.”[3] The immediately realized ideal is not of the perfect saint, but of the penitent, who begins with acknowledgment of sin, and in that acknowledgment of radical disruption also begins the process of sin’s negation and elevation to new spiritual heights, new kinds of harmony and order. Religious-man looks forward to the “emergence of a personality shrouded in sanctity whose soul was purified in the smithy of perplexity and contradiction and refined in the fires of spiritual conflict.”[4] Man’s religious drive seeks acute awareness of the lowest in human existence— suffering, the ugliness of disorder and chaos—as well as of what is highest, undefiled, unspoiled, and unadulterated. It seeks the possibility of reconciling the two which exist paradoxically beside one another. But it also demands a reconciliation that does not detract from the irreducible and uncompromising nature of each. Ideally, this reconciliation will even explain the connection between the lowest and the highest, how one is predicated somehow on the necessary existence of the other. It wants what rationality will not allow it to have—to be both the lowest and the highest at once, indeed to be the highest because it is the lowest. Rationality, in general, is clumsy. As a tool for living, it fails in many regards. It is slow where time may not be wasted, demands precision where little can be had, and for the ignorant, suffering individual in need of immediate answers, tends often to be difficult to distinguish from casuistry. “Since our intellect must weigh pros and cons and is slow and deliberate in deciding, society starts to nibble away at the edges of marginal, borderline problems.”[5] In the project of resolving absolute contradictories, though man may periodically consider the council of reason, he cannot always depend upon what logic deems is conclusive. The wholly rational is not an option for the seeker in his quest. With reason as his only tool of inquiry, man-seeker faces only nihility and paralysis. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe identify the onset of nihilism after the failure of reason as a salient problem for the post-war era. The contemporary discourse on truth seems also to reflect that the problem of nihilism, i.e. - the abandonment of the possibility of any sort of overarching truth, is with us still. Terms like the so-called “end of ontology” or “death of metaphysics” in philosophy or turns toward poststructural theory and deconstruction, which have influenced numerous academic disciplines, ostensibly indicate an abandonment of the search for absolute truths about the nature of human being.[6] Theories which leave nothing unexplained, which profess in some way to apply to all facets of existence, have fallen severely out of fashion primarily because the contradictory nature of existence almost always in some way ultimately eludes them. Often such theories are unable to cope with life’s paradoxes because, as we have shown they are in the classical West, they are not dialectical. A non-dialectical approach to explanation leads invariably to privileging one dimension of human experience over its equally valid opposite and thus misconstruing unforgivably the story of human existence. For fear of committing such a harmful error, man-nihilist, perhaps even contemporary man, forsakes his “metaphysical inclination” and chooses to travel other paths that are in some ways less, and in some ways more precarious. Claims to absolute knowledge and truth that the militarized Japanese state maintained imbued life with meaning for the Japanese people. Surrender meant an end to the truth-claims of the militaristic imperial regime, a revelation of the falsehood which plagued the state in the guise of absolute truth. It also meant, however, the spiritual deterioration of the Japanese people. Even with extremely rapid material recovery in Japan, the spiritual condition of the Japanese people, at least according to Tanabe, continued to dissipate after the war. The Japanese sunk into a mood of despair, and disbelief in the face of the events of the previous fifteen years. Little of the life of tremendous, perhaps even orgiastic meaning remained for them to embrace. All that was once true—the divinity of the Emperor, the unique destiny of the Japanese people, the promise of unstoppable triumph in the war—crumbled for the Japanese. And with it crumbled their spiritual fortitude. In fact, Tanabe seems to hint that the success of the material recovery and that of the spiritual recovery attempted after the war may have been inversely proportional in relation to each other. “Spiritual recovery declined rapidly in direct proportion to the recovery of material prosperity.”[7] Once defeated, post-war Japanese man knew very well how to build his economic base again, but he did not know how to recover from the equally harmful spiritual damage he suffered in the defeat. The same is true, says Soloveitchik, of Jewry in the contemporary world, particularly in America. Often materially prosperous, the American Jew lacks no modern convenience. After the Holocaust and in light of his larger history of persecution and suffering, however, he can no longer understand with clarity his tradition’s claims to absolute truth. The historical contradictions of the war brought with them great frustration with the idea of truth altogether for many people. With the anguish of the body and the soul, the mind ceased to see the point in questioning to find truth. Unable to settle contradictions, the Jew gave up the struggle. Having suffered so terrible a loss, he no longer wanted to participate in the search. “Modern man and basically the frustration of modern man, his perplexity … [exists] because he is committed to only one morality. The morality of victory… He cannot take defeat… [Yet] man must lose someday. There is no total victory. Defeat is built into the very structure of victory. Man is finite, so is his victory.”[8] The modern Jew suffered his greatest defeat in World War II. He was and still is at a complete loss as to how to respond to such a miserable fall. If man cannot somehow work defeat, finitude, and sin into his self-understanding, into his more ambitious quest for the Absolute, when he is finally forced to retreat then no recovery will be possible for him and he falls into nihilism. Man-nihilist exists in the meaningless world of mechanical processes, the world of nature which has little to offer in the way of moral guidance.[9] Believing everything is open and known to him, but finding nothing of substance wherever he may look, he despairs. He is embarrassed by little and reveres nothing. He does not countenance belief in essences, in depth where it cannot be estimated. All things immeasurable do not exist, is his motto. Life lived thusly, though perhaps more bleak, is easier and can be lived without the fear of making false estimations. Man- nihilist is all exterior, without inwardness, defining himself only in relation to entities that can be detected by measuring-instruments. He will turn his analytic mind only to things that do not exist with inherent contradiction. Where there are parts of him that feel displaced in the external world, he fights to ignore them.[10] He will not validate the existence of what he cannot understand rationally. The project of man-nihilist, his self-appointed purpose, is to build and polish the only world he believes is real—the world of surfaces. He is characterized often by an intoxication with progress.[11] Even in the world of material production he also does not handle defeat well and when he fails at his task and is shattered he grudgingly retreats back to his proverbial drawing board, sometimes with resolve to triumph again, sometimes with fatigue and in exhaustion.[12] What drives man-nihilist to his deplorable condition is an inability to suffer the defeat of irresolvable contradiction. When affirmation without also a substantial negation is no longer a possibility, he forsakes the projects of final explanation and understanding as unworthy of pursuit. Claims of normative truth, of ground and things Absolute are no longer palatable once pure affirmation becomes an impossibility. Tanabe and Soloveitchik, both of whom somehow incorporate failure, contradiction and adulteration of purity into their conceptions of totalizing wholes, reply to man-nihilist that he has mistaken the indirect nature of truth—its paradoxical and dialectic status—with its non-existence. Truth, the Absolute, is not absent. It is complex, hidden and requires effort in the finding. It requires man to travel through mazes and take detours, which are frustrating but necessary, to attain it. Yet the nihilist’s eye is not sensitive to know truth’s occlusion from its absence.[13] Soloveitchik and Tanabe’s respective attempts at salvaging the possibility of overarching Absolutes are valuable because they do not completely discount the concerns of man-nihilist. Belief in and pursuit of the Absolute are possibilities for the seeker, without his having to ignore the nihilist’s historicism and relativism, or even his simple despair. To achieve this end man-seeker must dialectically ground the Absolute in something Tanabe might call a “negative mediation”[14]— something that creatively integrates moments of negation into affirmation, a sort of blindness necessary to the act of seeing, a sin, as Soloveitchik might frame it, by virtue of which man is elevated to otherwise unattainable heights. *     *     *     *     * Our investigation has led us from the irrationality of history, through the self-power attempt of philosophy to resolve that irration­ality, to the death-and-rebirth of man- subject in religion. Both of our thinkers participate in the modernist project of overarching explan­ation, particularizing that task to address the needs of their specific religious community. Both suffer historical crisis which provokes confrontation with radical contradictions. Their philosophical ambitions made it necessary for them to master the corpus of Western philosophy from the pre- Socratics to Heidegger and use that mastery toward the task of explaining history and its irrational elements. The non-conclusive, egoistic nature of the philosophical project leads finally to their entry into the religious. Religion provides answers for them which self-driven philosophy could not. Religion makes humility, the confession of vulnerability and weakness a possibility. Because they choose to engage religion from a standpoint of negation and finitude, looking for revival from within that negation, neither Tanabe nor Soloveichik has to pay the price of a violently enforced dogmatism for the ultimacy of his religious convictions. Their final standpoint with regard to the Absolute is informed by an intense religious experience of humility. From this perspective purity, triumph, expiation and recognition of totalizing truths in religion comes piece- meal, interspersed throughout the dialectical process of defeat, confusion and retreat. Neither the confession of finitude nor the dream of perfection is forsaken by our thinkers. Though these concerns are contradictory opposites, as two salient sides of the philosophical endeavor they both call out loudly and they both must be heeded. Clearly, man must recognize that existence abounds with contradiction. Man’s craving for final transcendent truth—whole, perfect, and pure—however, also cannot be denied him. Moments of clarity are not negated by the long stretches of confusion. Though no unifying theory holds within it the explanation of all possible modes of existence, still an attempt at somehow catching a glimpse of the Absolute, even if it is predicated upon losing sight of it a second thereafter, should not be abandoned. To identify solely with the limited and worldly, to claim that finitude exhausts human existence is to look past the dialectical nature of man.[15] Recognition of that dialectical nature allows man to retain both his vision of the Absolute as well as an acknowledgment of his limited capacity. Man’s sinful nature makes him unable to create totalizing philosophies. Yet it is also this very sinful dejection which motivates man to seek the highest perfection. Shifting continually from redeemed- man to man-sinner, the penitent individual is privy to the vast spectrum of religious existence. The inexorable transformation of repentance, however, leaves one crucial question unanswered. Even after we are freed from the deadlock of philosophy by the possibility of a dialectical repentance, we still face the question of final redemption. How real is the aspiration for rebirth in the Pure Land according to Tanabe? And Soloveitchik’s Messianic hope? What might a rebirth or a resurrection mean? Is it anything beyond one side of the dialectical movement of repentance? Is it always to be negated by defeat? Can it in some way promise an end to the tension, a conclusion of the struggle? Pure Land Buddhist eschatology speaks of a process of decline from shôbô, the Age of the Right Dharma, to zôbô, the Age of Semblance Dharma, to our present age, which is called mappô, the Age of Decadent Dharma. Implied is a hope for complete salvation from suffering for beings who travel the easy path of saying nembutsu, the praise of the Buddha’s name, during this latter age. Tanabe does not adopt this sort of eschatology specifically. Though he claims to travel the easy path of the foolish being, attaining salvation by invoking the Buddha’s name, he does not look toward the Pure Land as an eschatological dream in the way a more conventional Shin Buddhist might. Tanabe’s view of a final redemptive movement entails a grand vision of the synthesis of major world religious traditions.[16] He projects there will be a religious genius born sometime in the future who will complete the modernist project in a “Second Religious Reformation”—the synthesis and consolidation of human wisdom into a single path.[17] Most conspicuously, Tanabe expects the final redeemer to be a tensai, “genius.” He does not call him a savior or a holy man, but specifically points to the magnitude of his intellectual prowess. This tensai, not unlike Tanabe himself, will undertake a grand synchronistic project—the intellectual and experiential consolidation of world-religions. Though he never articulates this vision fully, Tanabe seems to suggest that this genius will carry out something like the final step in a world-historical process of religious progression. He will be master of reconciling opposites. As Tanabe began to value various aspects of competing religious traditions, he saw the necessity for an all-embracing philosophical resolution of major world religions. The tensai is destined to work toward that end and eventually attain it. The final abstract move from disparate trends in religion will require someone of extremely uncommon, perhaps even unprecedented clarity and discernment. The tensai will of necessity have to be an individual of both uncommon analytic intelligence as well as extraordinary religious sensibility—possessed both of great cognitive prowess, enabling him to learn languages and texts at an extremely fast rate, as well as of a soul sensitive enough that he could potentially have access to the myriad religious experiences contained within the parameters of world spirituality. In his breadth of knowledge, he will be scholarly or even academic and in his emotional life he will be capable of understanding and appropriating the most tempestuous and profound of religious experiences. He will also understand what about institutional religions hinder them from fulfilling their true spiritual mission. Indeed, he will be able to integrate world-religions philosophically in such a way that those shortcomings will be corrected in the process. Not so much a final redeemer as a compelling thinker, he will change mankind’s subjectivity by salvaging what is true within the major religions, and by extricating what is false or undesirable. By demythologizing Christianity via the Buddhist conception of Nothingness and ethicizing Buddhism using Christian notions of charity and history, this genius will strike a truly universal balance, addressing the needs of both Eastern and Western man.[18] Though Tanabe here speaks in the language of future redemption, there is a sense in which he does not take his own teleological vision as seriously as he might. In his description of his synchronistic dream, he does not focus too heavily on the details of the so-called tensai, nor on the specificity of his mission. The tensai remains almost a suggestion, something that looms more like a shadow in Tanabe’s abstract world, a shadow perhaps of the more grandiose expression of Tanabe’s own project. What seems to matter to Tanabe is that there be an element of futurity, of closure in the religious consciousness, more than that this element be an immanent possibility. We cannot believe Tanabe is too earnest about the prospects of an “end” to the struggle of the seeker. His insistence on the inexorably continuous nature of metanoetics would seem to make teleological principles antithetical to his world-view. Tanabe’s principle of negation aspires to no final resting place. There is an essential way in which ideas of telos are undermined by Tanabe’s emphasis on immediacy and despair. Philosophically, this means that the Absolute is always mediated in its encounter with the relative, excluding the possibility that any revealed, harmonious or altogether direct self-identification could take place between Absolute and relative. This means the necessity of a rupture, an oblique turn, a blindness—or, speaking theologically, suffering distance from the divine is a necessary ingredient in man’s encounter with the divine. So grave is man’s sinfulness that redemption, in any immediate sense, is too far off a distant dream to consider substantively. Tanabe grounds himself most firmly in the process of envisioning and aspiring toward redemption, not in the genuine hope for the fulfillment of that vision. He seems to be pragmatically committed to the idea of telos, especially for the role it plays in the psychology and religious experience of the seeker. The messianic ideal coupled with the redemptive vision is an extremely powerful one. Its great promise draws the aspirant to it, for it is the promise of eternal beatitude, of the cessation of suffering and of ushering in God’s kingdom. Its suggestive potential can be so great that it is at times utterly intoxicating. Tanabe seems to understand how such ideals move and stir men, how they inevitably are incorporated into man’ s religious experience and must be utilized or at the least accounted for. Thus he invokes the categories of redemption, conclusion and perfect resolution of opposites as terms phenomenolgically corresponding to certain modes of futurity man experiences in the oblique encounter with the Absolute—not because he, in faith, awaits their realization. In Tanabe’s world, not only can we not imagine the end of the dialectical tension between Absolute and relative, saint and sinner, infinite and finite—no such end in fact exists. “Even the infinitely absolute is absolute only when it is related to the relative; it comes to self-consciousness as absolute only through the mediation of the relative.”[19] By its very nature, the Absolute does not exist if not for the negative presence of the finite, destructive, sinful relative. Dreams of perfection and beauty are forever linked to sin and relativity. From such an orientation, no final, harmonious end ever comes clearly into view. Soloveitchik’s conception of telos, of a final redemption, is, conversely, a real possibility. In fact, he argues that it is Judaism’s unique sort of messianism that distinguishes it from other religions.[20] Both memory of what God commanded the Jews to do and anticipation of the fulfillment of His promise of messianic redemption has been and still is very prominent in Jewish consciousness. According to Soloveitchik, Jews live both with the “pale image” of what things were like in the times of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, and with a dream of the “full and complete realization of the ideal world in the very nub of concrete reality,” to come in the future.[21] In the present era the resolution of all contradiction occurs only within the divine itself. In the firmament where He dwells, there is no conflict but only a confluence of opposites, the merging of incommensurable ideas and qualities—kindness and severity, judgment and compassion. On the passionately desired but patiently awaited day of redemption that harmony will be extended by God to the beings who inhabit this world. In prayerful anticipation of that day, Jews invoke the plea “He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace for us.”[22] Soloveitchik dreams literally of “the establishment of God’s kingdom, resurrection of the dead, and eternal life for man.”[23] He restlessly awaits the day on which contradictions are reconciled—b’yom hahu, on that day, which is slow in coming but will arrive. God is synonymous with the coincidence of opposites—“In Him all opposites are reconciled. In Him all contradictions are resolved. In Him thesis and anti-thesis merge into one. In Him there is only harmony.”[24] Of Him Jews say, ata ead v’ shimkha ead “You are One and your name is One.” Man awaits the day when he himself will be witness to this mizukh hamidot, this reconciliation of attributes, this coincientia oppositorum. *     *     *     *     * We began by proposing that truth might be something more akin to a marriage. Comparison, and ultimately contradiction was our point of departure; our goal was a fecund matrimony of contradictories. In this regard, we may indeed have come close to beginning a Buddhist-Jewish dialogue. If nothing else, the unlikely pairing of Tanabe and Soloveitchik has demonstrated that there is a great deal for non-Christian religious traditions to discuss with each other. We took figures who, prima facie, were so different from each other that a proposal for comparison may have seemed absurd. We discovered that we could trace both similarities and differences, gaining insight into the independent thought of each thinker in the process. Much of our energy was spent in assessing the impact of the classical Christian West on non-Christian traditions. The inevitable encounter with the West, both historically by non-Western peoples and philosophically by non-Western thinkers, has lead to responses to and extraordinarily creative critiques by the latter directed toward the former. Particularly, we were consumed with the issue of tracing the history of dialectics in Western philosophy. Our thinkers point to the shortcomings in Western philosophy’s self-assigned project of arriving at an authentic dialectic. They present what they believe might be viable roads toward the fulfillment of that desired yet hitherto unattained end—Tanabe in his dialectics of absolute negation and Soloveitchik with his proposal of “cognitive pluralism.” We began with a study of history, the contradictions and suffering of historical circumstances. We moved to and through a philosophical discourse and ended in the language of theology. Connecting, by way of philosophy, history to abstract theology, is not conventionally practiced. We have attempted such a novel pursuit in our study of Soloveitchik and Tanabe perhaps because for them also making such connections was imperative. We have presented contradiction and resolution—the historical categories of oppression and freedom, war and peace; philosophically, using the language of nineteenth century phenomenology, we called them relative and Absolute; theologically, they became sin, suffering and spiritual dejection, on the one hand, and righteousness, redemption and repentance, on the other. In this process we investigated the depths of the historical, phenomenological, and theological worlds of many major religious and philosophical traditions. We have invoked a great many subtle ideas as well as varied explanations of our numerous themes of discussion; we have also mentioned important names. This has been a very complex marriage; a marriage perhaps of many. The inter-faith and inter-disciplinary comparisons, however, have been secondary to the main work. Although ostensibly we at first hinted at a kind of marriage between Soloveitchik, the Jewish thinker, and Tanabe, the Buddhist thinker, what has really driven our project is an interest in a different kind of matrimony, perhaps a more abstract sort. Soloveitchik and Tanabe encounter the problems of historical crisis, of ethical finitude, of extremes in human exaltation and suffering. To solve these so seldom addressed difficulties, they turn to philosophy but are disappointed by its poor yield. In desperation they make their way to religion, in the hope that it might have something more decisive to offer, something directly germane to their pressing needs. Understanding suffering, elevating the degradation of historical being, the possibility of truth in the dialectical interplay of opposites are the lofty heights to which their more virulent sensibilities drive them. Tanabe and Soloveitchik are working from what we might identify today as a modernist perspective. The project of the modern intellectual, which we summarized as an attempt to discover over-arching truths about the nature of human life and propose greater theoretical narratives through which human beings can understand themselves, has discouragingly few proponents in our postmodern age. Of course, because Tanabe and Soloveitchik were not ever exposed to the postmodern perspective, which challenges the viability of modernism based on linguistic and historicist grounds, the validity of their all- embracing endeavor was never in question for them in this way. We do, however, face the challenge of such forceful critiques. And there is a case to be made for us in favor of not forgetting the modernist approach, even in our own era. It seems that the modernist dream—the quest for a coherent, compelling and all- encompassing explanation of human existence—has not disappeared or even dissipated significantly because we have simply not lost interest in these sorts of questions. The “metaphysical inclination” did not die; it was stifled by historical tragedies which seemed to arise from the dogmatism associated with modernist theories of life. But a modernist perspective that also takes into account the inevitability of negation, imperfection, evil and sin—which is conscious of and somehow integrates into itself an understanding of its own finite nature—may be an option for the contemporary seeker. It may in fact be the seeker’s only option, lest he be forced to resign himself to the life of man-nihilist. From Tanabe and Soloveitchik, we have derived a new conception of truth—the proposed marriage of opposites. Though essentially modernist, this sort of approach to truth is perhaps relevant in a postmodern age. This new paradigm has at least given us a hitherto unlikely alternative. With it, we need neither shun the drive to complete knowledge altogether, nor become insensitive to the dangers of traveling the modernist path. Perhaps it is possible now to be comfortable with man’s drive toward the Absolute even, or maybe especially in light of all that limits him from attaining that millennial dream. Perhaps now we are not compelled to renounce the modernist project of total understanding—to psychologize and dismiss it—and we may pursue it again while still being aware of the dangers inherent in such an endeavor. Perhaps now whatever normative tendencies we discover within ourselves need not be shamefully repressed, but rather engaged and developed toward a richer understanding of the experience of human existence. Perhaps now the sophistication of a dialectical approach toward comprehending complex reality—an approach which both affirms and denies in the same movement—is within our reach. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 290. [2]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, p. 280. [3]. Pinchas Peli, “Introduction,” to Joseph Soloveitchik’s On Repentance citing Halakhic Mind, p. 13. [4]. Ibid. [5]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 104. [6]. This is true particularly of the contemporary inheritors of philosophy in the so- called “continental tradition.” [7]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. xxxix. [8]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Man and the Judaic Approach to Man” (taped lecture). [9]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #5 (taped lecture). [10]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Dual Aspects of Man,” (taped lecture). [11]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Man of Faith in the Modern World, p. 78. [12]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #6 (taped lecture). [13]. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe identify nihilism with secularism. The terms are almost synonymous for both in many contexts. They are thus able to connect their assessment of the post-war spiritual malaise in which their respective peoples existed to a more general, more universal trend that has a historical significance extending back to times far earlier than our own. [14]. See Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 213, for how Tanabe develops this idea. [15]. See Soloveitchik’s Adam typology in The Lonely Man of Faith, pp. 104–5. [16]. For Tanabe, these include only Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity. [17]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 18. [18]. Ibid., p. 46. [19]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 159. [20]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 173. [21]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 29. [22]. Zecharia (14:9). [23]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 123. [24]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #6 (taped lecture).