Philosophy as Metanoetics

A book by Tanabe Hajime of the Kyoto School, developed from lectures given in 1944 and published in 1946. Written as Japan faced defeat, it begins with a confession: Tanabe felt that philosophy, and he himself, had been powerless to speak against the state, and that reason had reached its limit. Rather than abandon philosophy he turns this failure into a method, metanoesis (zange), a repentance in which the self gives up its own power and is renewed by an Other-power it cannot produce. The result, he says, is a philosophy that is no longer philosophy in the old sense. He extends Kant's critique of reason into an absolute critique, in which reason breaks down on its own contradictions, and recasts absolute nothingness as absolute mediation, lived as death and resurrection. The argument draws on Shinran's Pure Land Buddhism and engages Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Readers still debate how far it reckons with Tanabe's earlier support for the wartime state.

It is a rare work in which a major philosopher builds a method out of admitting failure, and it raises hard questions about guilt, self-reliance and what thinking can do after catastrophe.