Reading Hajime Tanabe’s ‘Philosophy as Metanoetics’

As a preface, I should say that I continue to the first page I read intelligible, and later pages much harder going. This blog post is long, and rambling, and clearer probably because of inaccurate summarising.

I think I have now read enough to begin to try to summarise or restate the thesis.  

Taking Kant as a reasonably adequate treatment of the problem of reality, perception and reason he follows the critique of pure reason up to the antinomies of pure reason, which Kant felt defined the barrier of the soul. Tanabe argues that honesty should have driven Kant to ‘absolute critique’, not trying to preserve the self against the critique of pure reason. Exposure to ‘absolute critique’ throws the soul into ‘absolute disruption.’ It confronts nothingness.  Psychologically, this is experienced as a profound consciousness of ruin.  ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.’  It is awareness that your awareness, so proud of itself, so full of plans and intentions, master of so many abilities, is incoherent, unable to sustain itself in the presence of pure reason.  This moment, squarely confronted, leads the self to see (to become) (its) nothingness. If faced, in the aftermath, there is a silence, and a continuing. I have ruined my life and I am sorry, one says and then stops. This is the end of self-power (jiriki). But something continues, the emptied self, expecting to be rolled up once and for all.  There is only what he calls (from Shin Buddhism I think) the Great Nay-qua-Great Compassion, the silence of nothingness. Encountering this silence transforms the self to other-power.

In the later chapter (3) on historicity, he gives the example of science under this pattern.  Confronted with inexplicable phenomena, science sees its own incoherence.  Everything is up for grabs.  The new ‘world’ is not made until the old ‘world’ is given up.  Until you abandon the geocentric model, the heliocentric model appears as a terrible sword of judgment, the very fire of hell – incomprehensibly alien and opposed implacably to everything familiar. Go through that fire, let the old world die, and the new world is bright and limpid and perspicuous.

So much for the first little bit.

The question I know you’re all asking is ‘what kind of nothingness is it? Big? Little? Partial?’ He is glad you asked, he has a lot to say about that, and you will not be surprised to learn the answer: it is ‘absolute nothingness’.  But I am going too fast and skipping over vital steps like absolute mediation, absolute disruption and absolute transformation.

The point of absolute nothingness is that it is not just the denial or absence of something, or even of everything.  It is absolute nothingness, the nothingness against which God maintains existence. But for Tanabe, the encounter with absolute nothingness, or the realisation of absolute nothingness, causes absolute disruption in the process of understanding the real. Absolute disruption seems to mean fundamental and complete disconnection.  Absolute transformation to ‘other-power’ is the only way to get over the gap of the disruption.

He takes up Heidegger’s account of being a ‘thrown-project’, of having come into existence with a position and also a trajectory, a direction, and hence an expected future.  Heidegger’s resoluteness sees the highest good of a person as responding authentically to who they are and exactly the present situation.  Tanabe believes that unless you are a great sage or genius, your authentic response has to begin with metanoetics, with repentance acknowledging that nothing in you can answer the reality of the situation.  And if once begun with repentance, with a transformative encounter with absolute nothingness, there are more possibilities.  Heidegger sees ‘dying’ as a way of life that responds to the anxiety of the uncanniness of being what we are, and of death looming as a possibility not to be out-stripped. Dying means acting authentically and surrendering all the benefits of inauthenticity, moment by moment by moment.  Tanabe wants to confront the ungroundedness of even authenticity with the challenge of absolute nothingness, grounding the self not in self-power, but in ‘other-power’. Confronted not just by its own nothingness, but by absolute nothingness, the self is transformed to no-self, and in the negation of the negation of the finite self, the possibilities are endless.  He (Tanabe) is not shy of calling this a ‘death and resurrection’.

As I read Nietzsche, something similar is going on.  The self, with its tricks and pandering and manipulation, is to be reduced to its legitimate function, as an engine of will-to-power that is contiguous with the will-to-power of life in you.  Nietzsche might therefore recognize other-power in the work of life in the body of an individual.

Tanabe though, seems to be able to find the classic, straightforward virtues in other-power.  The life of dependence on other-power sees through the nothingness of self, and of others, and yet this initiates compassion.  Nothingness is the Great Nay-qua-Great Compassion. I don’t know how this is to be justified philosophically, and I suspect Tanabe is OK with the religious ascription of this character to absolute nothingness.  To me, this would make more sense as revealing a deep innate character that was obscured by ego.  But for him, the move into religious understandings is necessary to gives room to understand the given world, the present real.

In the course of chapter 3, he gives a reading of important philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) through his new system of metanoetics.  The last of them all is Nietzsche, who, in affirming will-to-power, the commanding, in-control individual over and against weakness, falseness and ressentiment.  He admits to difficulty reconciling this with metanoetics, and yet a great enjoyment of the temper and truth in Nietzsche.  He concludes, in the end, that Nietzsche is probably a great sage, but one who points out the all important truth that Dionysian life exists only against a background of tragedy and self-emptying in death. From end of ch3:

“Nietzsche’s view [of time and historicity] has close affinities with the Kierkegaardian “moment,” the point where eternity touches time, in the sense that it forms the ground of a death-and-resurrection.  The fact that Heidegger’s notion of the “present,” which takes a stance close to both of these, establishes the existence of free self-consciousness in the nothingness of Nietzsche rather than in the eternal faith of Kierkegaard is an expression of the German people’s worship of the sage and the hero, which stems from a convergence of his character with the spirit of the age.  Conversely, the fact that my metanoetics coincides with Kierkegaard’s faith may be said to be an inevitable consequence of the standpoint of the ordinary, ignorant individual, which also is ordained by individual character and the spirit of the age.  That metanoetics, despite its opposing orientation, should be able to open a way to the understanding of Nietzsche is hardly surprising when considered from the standpoint of absolute transformation.  It shows us the dialectic of paradox.  It would not be going to far to say that the only way for old fools like me to become disciples of Nietzsche is to walk the way of metanoetics."