NECESSARY
DETOURS

From History, Through Philosophy,
To Religion, in the Lives and Thought of
Tanabe Hajime and Joseph B. Soloveitchik

v

A Senior Thesis by
JUBIN MERAJ


















B R O W N U N I V E R S I T Y
P R O V I D E N C E, R H O D E I S L A N D
A SENIOR HONORS THESIS
1998 SERIES

Published by Wayland Press
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island 02912

First Edition

© 1998 Jubin Meraj

Printed and made in the United States of America


Acknowledgments

I owe a great debt to my teachers and mentors for their loving guidance. Without the care and effort of Professors Mark Unno, Sumner B. Twiss, Susan Harvey, Wendell Dietrich, Harold Roth, Maud Mandel and Stanley Stowers no such study would have been possible. Professor Dore Levy is to be thanked for her wise advice and supportive mentorship. Josh Brahman, Randy Friedman, and my father meticulously read an entire draft of this work and contributed significantly to its improvement. John Alex rescued this manuscript from a seemingly fatal computer virus. Kathleen Pappas and Gail Tetreault were also very important for their kindness. I thank everyone who took a genuine interest in me or my work over the past four years.


Contents


Introduction: Three Weddings
7


Chapter 1: Formation of the Religious Thinker
20


Chapter 2: Legitimacy and Succession: The Role of the Classical West

59


Chapter 3: Return along the Way of Repentence: Zangedo and T’shuva

120


Telos: How One Approaches Final Redemption
170


Bibliography
185




INTRODUCTION

Three Weddings

“It is not good for man to be alone.”
—Genesis 2:18

“Only a Buddha with a Buddha can fathom the reality of All Existence.”
—The Lotus Sutra

I.

What if truth were a marriage? What if the great height to which the philosophical seeker so zealously aspires were not so much a kind of knowledge, but more a kind of matrimony? After all, is the claim that “truth is known,” any less of an analogy? Truth as an object of knowledge is the more familiar metaphor, but now I suggest that we make the discovered object of our longing (truth as knowledge) into a kind of existential relationship or acting subject (truth as marriage). Truth is no longer a single knowable proposition, but rather the successful cohabitation of two opposing propositions—both extremely valuable, but each of which is possessed of a claim that competes with the other (individual freedom vs. communal solidarity, religious faith vs. scientific rationalism, pure knowledge vs. action in the world).
Yet, if it be the case that truth is something of a marriage, what is there to say about the seeker of this hitherto much exalted pursuit of unsurpassable bliss? Now his goal is to mediate opposites, not unlike the attempt that people who are often utterly different make to live together—in such a way that neither denies the other, but indeed so that the “union” of the two yields new life.
But, we ask, if truth is matrimony, who is the seeker of truth? What is his character? What is his virtue? The impassioned seeker is a master of the method by which seemingly inescapable antinomies are skillfully resolved. Decidedly not a dialectician who synthesizes difference into unity, he is an advocate of the possibility that difference can stand while at the same time fruitful negotiation ensues unimpeded. He has created a methodology whereby the level and productivity of discourse is actually elevated by that distasteful quality which seems to hinder it most—conflict. This transformation of conflict from an obstacle into a catalyst becomes his hallmark—in it tension bears fruit, discord fuels creative capacity. The singular artistry of the seeker in the enterprise of mediating truth can ensure the momentous arbitration of an unusual paradox—this marriage of opposites.

II.

This is meant to be the wedding canopy. Here we witness three attempts at veritable matrimonial unions. What such matrimony might entail is for now ambiguous. However, let us begin by making introductions.
In the fall of 1922 a promising student of Western philosophy from Japan, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), traveled to Europe under the auspices of the Japanese Ministry of Education. He was granted a two-year research sabbatical from his position as associate professor of Philosophy at Kyoto University where he was teaching under the tutelage of the well-known Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945), founder of Japan’s Kyoto School of Philosophy. Tanabe shared his mentor’s vision, which, in its most grandiose articulation, amounted to nothing less than a totalizing attempt to synthesize Western and Eastern religious and philosophical thought. With a mastery of English, German and French, a background in classical Chinese thought, and an intimate familiarity with Nishida’s unique expression of traditional Japanese Zen intuitionism, Tanabe suffered from no lack of preparation for this journey. Though he did not arrive in Europe on time to study with the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen,[1] which was Tanabe’s original desire, he did have the opportunity to pursue his newfound interest in phenomenology at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg under the mentorship of philosophers like Martin Heidegger.
After returning from Europe, Tanabe, like Nishida, would be instrumental in the process of introducing Western philosophy to Japan. Not until the late nineteenth century was Japan exposed heavily to Western thought. As Japan entered modernity the issue of how important Western philosophy should be in the Japanese consciousness was fiercely debated. Tanabe would lay much of the groundwork for that highly controversial debate. He also lived with the tensions and inconsistencies this controversy created. What is more, the way he resolved those tensions—his creative integration of Western and Eastern thought—would contribute enormously to the formation of Japan’s own unique philosophical tradition.
Had Tanabe stayed at the University of Berlin another year or so, he may have had occasion to pass another student of Western philosophy in the university hallways. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) z”l, matriculated to the University in 1925, ultimately pursuing a doctorate in Philosophy.[2] Also studying with philosophers such as Heidegger, Soloveitchik would go on to focus on Neo-Kantian thought and write a dissertation entitled The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Hermann Cohen.[3] Though he was just embarking on his intensive study of Western philosophical thought when he entered the university, Soloveitchik had already mastered much of traditional Jewish scholarship.
Soloveitchik’s education prior to entering the secular academy was primarily geared toward preparing him to inherit the leadership of an eminent family of Eastern European Torah scholars from his father. He would be the scion of the great Brisker line of rabbis, known since the days of Soloveitchik’s grandfather, Rabbi Chaim, for their rigorous analysis of sacred texts and uncompromising dedication to Jewish life. As it did for Tanabe, the study of classical Western philosophy would present a formidable problem for Soloveitchik. Entering the academy would mean a notable departure from the traditional training of his forefathers. Having exposure to and pursuing mastery of non-Jewish thought in any serious capacity was not expected of Soloveitchik; nor was it accepted without suspicions of its inherent difference and possible dangers. The compatibility (or lack thereof) of secular and Judaic thought was a much debated topic at the highest levels of Torah scholarship at that time. The great tensions built up in those debates, as they did for Tanabe when he faced similar difficulties, necessitated that Soloveitchik attempt a creative resolution of these contrasting worlds as he continued his self-formation. Though he would struggle a great deal in his life because of it, Soloveitchik’s decision to pursue training in Western philosophy stands out as one that would alter the character of Judaic thought in the coming century.
Pursuing the possible outcomes of a hypothetical encounter between two aspiring young philosophers from such undeniably different points of reference is but one purpose of our undertaking—one of our proposed marriages. The second is the way each man proposed to marry a non-Western world view with the tradition of thought emerging from the classical West. Our third and final marriage is somewhat independent of our comparison of Tanabe and Soloveitchik. There the proposed union is between what is lowest and what is highest in life—failure and triumph, sinfulness and sainthood, suffering and exaltation. Using our thinkers as sources of philosophical insight, we will investigate how the marriage of such contradictories unfolds in and as human life. Though the chapters are not organized according to them, these three matrimonial unions will be the general themes driving our philosophical exploration.

* * * * *

Before immersing ourselves in the philosophical subtleties of our proposed marriages, the larger religious implications at hand in our project should be recognized and discussed. Though this was neither the motivation behind this study, nor even one of its central themes, the dimension of inter-faith dialogue inherent within it should be acknowledged. Perhaps none may have existed when Soloveitchik and Tanabe were studying in Berlin, but there is today substantial justification for embarking upon a journey into the many religious and philosophical dimensions of a Buddhist-Jewish dialogue. At the most basic level, over the past twenty-five years a surprising number of people with a Jewish background have investigated Buddhist spirituality as an alternative or complement to the religion into which they were born. Though a sociological study remains to be done on the topic of Jewish born Buddhists, at a cursory glance one notes that a significant number of these individuals have aspired to and attained positions as teachers, scholars and spiritual leaders within the Buddhist community.[4] An intensive study of salient thinkers and ideas from these radically different traditions, which are however in reality intermingling more and more with each other, might be interesting for the so-called “Jewish Buddhist.”
The more serious incentives to begin laying the groundwork for a meaningful mediation of Buddhist and Jewish religiosity are philosophical and theological in nature. What is at stake philosophically in such an encounter may be illustrated by a statement made by one of the most highly esteemed members of Japan’s Kyoto School, Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), in his seminal work, Religion and Nothingness:

In his book An Historian’s Approach to Religion, Arnold Toynbee argues against the view that the gap between liberalism and communism represents the greatest cultural gap of our times. While the opposition between them is highly conspicuous in our day, it cannot be regarded as fundamentally determining the future course of mankind. When we look into the source of these two movements, Toynbee goes on, we find that both of them belong to the same cluster of religious ideologies stemming from Western Judaic traditions… The confrontation that is deep enough to determine the problems of the whole of mankind, Toynbee asserts, is to be seen in the gap between Buddhaic thought and Western Judaic thought.[5]

This distinction between Judaic and “Buddhaic” thought comes at a crucial point in Nishitani’s text. It is followed by an outline of Toynbee’s thesis, which entails what the latter believes are the chief characteristics of these two religious traditions and an explanation of why they stand in such critical conflict. Nishitani’s summary of Toynbee is followed by his own statement: “This, in rough outline, is Toynbee’s thesis. And it seems to me to put its finger on the core of the matter.”[6] In his assertion that the difference between the Jewish and Buddhist world views is the pivotal issue of our era, Toynbee enjoys the support of arguably the most important philosopher in modern Japanese history.
A substantive exchange between Buddhism and Judaism at any level, in any language has been virtually non-existent. There are very few publications that pursue the possibility of a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. Two volumes have been published under the auspices of Kyoto School philosopher Abe Masao with the intention of providing a forum for fruitful exchange between a variety of Jewish, Buddhist and Christian thinkers.[7] In each edition, Abe proffers an essay dealing with central ideas from Mahayana Buddhism such as ‘sûnyatâ, and then addresses relevant points of interest for both Christians and Jews. Abe finds his main point of departure for dialogue with Christians in the mystical idea of kenosis. Dealing with Judaism, he chooses the very difficult issue of Holocaust theology as a basis for beginning an exchange.
The little that remains in this vein of scholarship is either not properly identifiable as scholarly in nature or is methodologically suspect. Rodger Kamensetz’s The Jew and the Lotus is the account of a Jewish journalist’s experience as an observer at a meeting of the XIV Tibetan Dalai Lama and a group of Jewish delegates in Dharmasala in October of 1990. Zen and Hasidism, edited by Harold Heifetz is a collection of essays from the traditions mentioned in the title that identifies as its explicit goal to be an exploration of “the similarities between two spiritual disciplines.”[8] Many of the essays in the volume were not written with the intention of examining issues of inter-faith dialogue. However, much of what is included is of interest for individuals because of its emphasis on the concrete practicability of seeking to somehow appropriate both Buddhist and Jewish religiosity into a single life.
Characteristic of all these attempts at a Buddhist-Jewish dialogue is a too broadly defined comparative enterprise which has yielded a fragmented, poorly articulated basis for comparison. What further impedes these projects is an attempt to dialogue without first establishing a common language for discourse. Establishing such a language means more than simply making sure that all terms used by the respective traditions are carefully defined. What is necessary is a methodology that systematically reveals the larger world views behind propositional or even theological/philosophical statements made by each side in the dialogue. The quality of the exchange depends on the ability of the one side to deepen his understanding of the other, not by reinterpreting the other in his own terms, but by sympathetically and critically learning what life might be like for the other. One achieves this by imaginatively entering the other’s religious world and using both elements of difference as well as sameness between himself and that other world to aid the discovery of the explicit and implicit assumptions that go into forming it.
Nothing short of a new language of discourse—a kind of philosophical Esperanto—is necessary if we aspire to this level of exchange. Ideally, this language (unlike Esperanto) would not have been developed specifically for the sake of facilitating or perpetuating the comparative discourse itself. That sort of language would be too aritificial, provisional and functional to be ultimately meaningful. If, rather, the language of discourse were an independent creation, one that each of the parties individually simply happened upon in a sort of happy existential coincidence, the possibility for discourse would be facilitated markedly by the relative neutrality of its terms. My project will be to show that the languages of German idealism, phenomenology and religious existentialism, all of which both Tanabe and Soloveitchik knew fluently, provides the occasion for such a happy coincidence, making Soloveitchik and Tanabe ideal candidates for participation in a study that might be the beginnings of a Jewish-Buddhist inter-faith dialectic.
Though prima facie Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s respective projects closely approximated each other, there is reason to doubt very much that either would have been very interested in the thought of the other when they studied at the University of Berlin. Neither was yet mature enough in his own philosophical framework to appreciate what an exchange with the other may have meant. The climate for discourse might have been more favorable for our odd couple sometime later when each was regarded as a spokesman for the philosophical standpoint of his particular faith community.
Yet, even the older and more mature Soloveitchik and Tanabe are not exactly the most natural choices as participants in a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. The insular nature of Orthodox Judaism when compared to other, more liberally inclined denominations of Judaism, would seem to make somebody with a less conservative background than Soloveitchik’s more desirable for comparison. With regard to Tanabe, we must admit that his interest in Pure Land Japanese Buddhism does not catch the attention of many Westerners who are more readily eager for dialogue with figures from the Zen tradition.
What is more, when we hearken to Soloveitchik and Tanabe to assess whether or not a project of this nature might attain the blessings of its subjects of study, the answer also seems to be negative. Soloveitchik makes several observations about the nature of “faith communities.” Of faith communities in general, Soloveitchik’s assertion that “there is no identity without uniqueness,”[9] hinges on his belief in the radical incommensurability of what is singular in any two given religious traditions. With regard even to a possible Jewish-Christian dialogue, Soloveitchik maintains that the singularity of each faith community’s ritual practice and normative ethos, makes it “futile to try to find common denominators” between them.[10] The axiological awareness within each community is singularly, even exclusively, its own. Its soteriological vision is uncompromising, and irreducible to the ultimate freedom or salvation of other faiths. Thus, according to Soloveitchik, efforts toward substantive comparison are expended in vain.
Any comparison that does not respect the radical singularity of each faith in the inter-faith encounter jeopardizes the integrity of the traditions it studies. Though faith communities may be united in the mutuality of a common human predicament, when they are compared, what is unique about each should be emphasized equally as much if not more than what is common to them.
In the same manner as Adam and Eve each confronted and attempted to subdue a malicious scoffing nature and yet nevertheless encountered each other as two separate individuals cognizant of their incommensurability and uniqueness, so also two faith communities which coordinate their efforts when confronted by the cosmic order may face each other in the full knowledge of their distinctiveness and uniqueness.[11]
The Western Jew confronts the physical world, on the one hand, in which he may be partnered indistinguishably with his non-Jewish counterpart, but also he confronts the world of faith where no such self-identity is possible. This dialectic allows for both the possibility of cooperation and of conflict. The challenge of the latter possibility of conflict because of the Jew’s unique spiritual destiny, according to Soloveitchik, however precarious, is an immanent one for the Jew in the contemporary world.
In order to protect the individuality of the participants in the conflict of faiths, Soloveitchik insists upon a particular condition. He emphasizes the resistance of religious logos, the words and language of religion, to standardization. As an emotionally informed expression of what is uniquely numinous in a faith community, “it is important that the religious or theological logos should not be employed as a medium of communication between two faith communities…”[12] For Soloveitchik, this position finds expression in the pithy proverb of Micah (4:5): “Let all the people walk, each one in the name of his god, and we shall walk in the name of our Lord, our God, forever and ever.”[13]
According to the standard Soloveitchik establishes, the possibility for meaningful exchange diminishes dramatically. There is, however, a historical exigency particular to the modern and contemporary eras that might facilitate markedly the encounter of faiths, and in the light of which we would perhaps even merit Soloveitchik’s approval. This issue, as it is identified by both Kyoto School philosophers and modern Jewish thinkers, is the crisis of secularism. The terms of this particular problem provide a common language in the dialogue between disparate traditions. Whether confronting the alarming dearth of subjectivity in mass society—the emergence of what Soloveitchik calls “man-object”—or facing the particularly empty way in which humanistic existentialism conceives of subjectivity, i.e. - as the human being’s constant self-creation out of nothing where “nothing” means the existence of no prior locus of meaning or absolute referent prior to or beyond the immediate actual, religion as a category is threatened in its encounter with the modern world.[14] From the perspective of the faith community in its encounter with secularism, “confusion reigns in today’s world at the most basic level concerning what human beings are and how they are to live.”[15] Facing a common challenge in the form of a confrontation with the larger secular world, faith communities of most any persuasion are in a sense bound up in the same dilemma, allowing them a possible point of entry into engaging philosophical discourse, even by Soloveitchik’s standards.
Establishing the legitimacy of our project from Tanabe’s perspective is at once both more and less problematic than it is for Soloveitchik. Though we will deal with him in his capacity as a Buddhist thinker, Tanabe’s own interests in his career as comparative religious philosopher were manifold. Upon the completion of Philosophy as Metanoetics, his seminal work which relies mostly upon an existential reappropriation of the medieval Japanese Pure Land Buddhist thought of Shinran (1173–1262), Tanabe is consumed for several years by a search for religious traditions in which history and ethics play a different role than they do in Pure Land Buddhism.[16] Though this ultimately led to an exhaustive treatment of Christianity and Marxism for Tanabe, his philosophical sensibilities did not lead him to consider Judaism, separate from Christianity, as a distinct possibility in his search for historically oriented religious traditions in the West. His image of Judaism was colored by a Christian reading of Jewish religiosity. This, coupled with the unavailability of any forceful or coherent speculative philosophical presentation of traditional Judaism, made the consideration of the tradition as a likely candidate for ethico-historical mediator of Buddhism impossible for Tanabe.
The little that Tanabe does say about Judaism as a religious tradition is really made in passing on the way to a larger critique of the Western notion of a personal God. He desired demythologization of the personal God from a Buddhistically informed standpoint of Absolute Nothingness.[17] But in the process, Tanabe cut himself off from practically all other religious discourse outside of the Buddhist and Christian worlds; this is true even with regard to Japan’s native Shinto religion, in which Tanabe seems to take very little interest. Though limited to Buddhism and Christianity, Tanabe ultimately seems to embrace neither wholly, but retains his identity as the religious philosopher par excellence—uncommitted to but thoroughly knowledgeable about the traditions he studies throughout his philosophical career.[18] Perhaps the present study will give us a hint as to what would have resulted had Tanabe turned his philosophical attentions to a study of Judaism as a real religious possibility.

III.
Methodology

The comparative enterprise is better initiated at the level of the particular than on that of the abstract. The goal of this study is not to inaugurate a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue on a grand scale. The comparison will focus on a close reading of very particular, perhaps even obscure questions in the minds of Tanabe and Soloveitchik. It is a study of the lives and thought of two religious personalities intended primarily to foster a process of existential familiarization with the immediate in each man’s religious universe.
Chapter One, which precedes the more theoretically rigorous presentation of Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s philosophical thought, will be devoted to the historical formation of each individual as religious thinker. To locate each thinker historically, we will point to the critical events and circumstances precipitating their respective philosophical crises, and how historical determinants shape their resolution of these crises. Included in this project will be an attempt to trace the emergence of each man’s particular religious persona, scrutinizing just how the character of the religious personality forms in the texts Tanabe and Soloveitchik wrote. Also important here will be the portrait of each as ‘philosopher’ and how that ideal becomes a typological identity that competes with another persona, more religious in nature, for both thinkers.
In the second chapter we reenter the religious and philosophical discourse as such, with two tasks in mind. The first will be to trace the role of the classical West in determining each thinker’s formulation of his religious predicament. Then we will look at Soloveitchik’s and Tanabe’s critique of Western philosophy. Here the focus is their approaches to a critique of Western philosophical dialectics. We will see that both Soloveitchik and Tanabe, in different ways, claim to have developed from the sources of their native traditions a more thorough and philosophically rigorous dialectical method. This sets the groundwork for Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s legitimization of their more strictly religious world views over and against the philosophies of the West.
Chapter Three brings us to the topic of repentance, zangedô, as it is rendered in the Japanese Pure Land tradition, or t’shuva in Hebrew. Juxtaposed along side each other will be first Tanabe’s and then Soloveitchik’s thought about several themes important to both on this topic. Comparing Tanabe and Soloveitchik on repentance will bring us into the world of theology, Buddhist and Jewish. This is a world that seems simultaneously more concrete and more mythological than the historical (Chapter One) and philosophical (Chapter Two) worlds we will just have exited. Whereas in the historic and philosophical modes, we will speak of war and peace, famine and plenty, living and dying (history) or, negation and affirmation, relative and Absolute, meaning and discourse (philosophy), in the theological we will instead invoke terms like sin and redemption, man and God, teaching and Scripture.
Engaging Tanabe and Soloveitchik theologically with each other will mean looking for parallel discourse, common language, points of comparison and contrast in the description of the religious experience as well as in exploring the nature of the experience itself. Of central importance will be several questions from classical Christian theology—theodicy, the anthropomor­phization of God, the possibility of man-sinner approaching the divine, final redemption. Beyond this, however, it will also be crucial to discover the kind of logic that underlies the processes which allow Tanabe and Soloveitchik to resolve seemingly irresolvable theological dilemmas as they arise in their own religious worlds. Establishing distinct patterns of such logic in our thinkers gives us insight into the assumptions of the broader, deeper world view and framework from within which each is working. Based on such discoveries, we may even be able to make generalizations about Tanabe’s Buddhist perspective in distinction to Soloveitchik’s Jewish standpoint. As our understanding of how each one’s logic develops deepens, so also will our understanding of the substance of the issues involved. In exploring parallels and points of divergence in their respective religious logics, we might be able to creatively engage seemingly incommensurable differences between Tanabe and Soloveitchik.
[1]. Tanabe originally planned to go to Marburg to study with Cohen years earlier during his time as a faculty member in the Tôhoku Imperial University’s Department of Natural Sciences, where he was appointed as professor of philosophy in 1913. Investing himself profoundly in Cohen’s thought, in 1914, Tanabe published a critique of Cohen’s philosophy entitled “The Limits of Rationalism in Epistemology.” After Cohen’s death in 1918, Tanabe’s dreams were shattered.
[2]. Though Rabbi Soloveitchik was affectionately called “The Rav” by his followers, an appellation also suggesting great respect and reverence, because of the academic nature of this paper, we will refer to him as “Soloveitchik” throughout.
[3]. This title is a loose translation of Josef Solowiejczyk, Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1932).
[4]. Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus, p. 3.
[5]. Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, p. 202.
[6]. Ibid., p. 203.
[7]. John Cobb, Christopher Ives, eds., The Emptying God, and ed. Christopher Ives, Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness.
[8]. Harold Heifetz, Zen and Hasidism.
[9]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” p. 18.
[10]. Ibid., p. 18–19.
[11]. Ibid., p. 20.
[12]. Ibid., p. 24.
[13]. Cited in a statement adopted by the Rabbinical Council of America at its mid-winter conference, February 3–5, 1964.
[14]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Dual Aspects of Man,” (taped lecture). This idea is developed further later in this paper. See also Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, especially ch. 9, “The Meaning of Nihilism for Japan.”
[15]. Nishitani Keiji, The Self-overcoming of Nihilism, p. 190.
[16]. Tanabe was especially interested in traditions that would compensate for what he believed was a deficiency in the socio-historical dimension of Shin Buddhist thought. There was a time when Tanabe saw in Shin Buddhism a deficiency of socio-historical consciousness and a tendency to construct an absolute subjectivity that does not posit the centrality of historical being. He would never be completely convinced of the validity of these criticism of Pure Land Buddhism, but such concerns were significant in his decision to study Christianity. This topic is also further expanded upon below in the first and concluding chapters.
[17]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 120.
[18]. That is not to say we cannot treat Tanabe in his capacity as a Buddhist thinker, when his efforts were most squarely oriented in that direction, or talk about how his logic is affected permanently by his encounter with Shin Buddhism. The question of to what extent we can speak of Tanabe as a Buddhist thinker will receive further consideration below.

CHAPTER 1

Formation of the Religious Thinker

War is a brutal, deadly game … But if you come back whole, you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted.
—William Broyles, Jr., a veteran of the Vietnam war[1]

I.
The Character of the Religious Persona

How does one first encounter the religious? Often it is from outside the confines of intellectual evaluation. Man first welcomes the suggestion of the religious as an inspired-being. Man’s religious sensibility is sparked by a glance toward the countenance of a holy figure, an illuminated manuscript, by arcs and fires, candles and scrolls. Before man knows a systematic theology, he may experience a personality. Before he is convinced of a message, his initial impressions about the character of its author may captivate and emotionally excite him.
The initial encounter with Tanabe or Soloveitchik must foremost consider the conspicuous self-presentation of each figure as a religious persona. In their work, both thinkers return repeatedly to their personal predicament, and in so doing paint a very clear picture of an ideal religious type with which the reader can identify as he is trying to decipher the author’s meaning. This dynamic character embodies the existential affect of particular religious ideals. The reader may look to him as a benchmark for understanding or as a concrete illustration of abstract norms.
Though it is important to recognize the validity of many contemporary critiques pointing to the dangers of explaining philosophy by delving into the lives of the philosophers themselves, I believe such a biographical endeavor is indispensable for us. Tanabe and Soloveitchik both invest a great deal of energy into personally portraying themselves as particular religious personae. The presentation of such personae leave a deep impression on the ways in which the larger public view their ideas, contributing to the formation of particular religious characters in the collective consciousness of their respective religious worlds. As seemingly accidental as these impressions of our thinkers may be, as unknowable the inwardness of each man, as strangely elusive the often irrational character of religious personae and as contingent the historical schema in which they lived might be, it is crucial to articulate some understanding of how our impressions of what life was like for these men affect our reading of their philosophy.
As each of our thinkers experiences “world” what figures most prominently in his experience is a disruption of continuity and wholeness, rationality and stability. Each of our thinkers is foremost a sufferer. He suffers from certain assumptions he brought with him to the enterprise of religious philosophy which have revealed dichotomies that have turned into contradictions, which have in turn become absolute contradictions—crucial questions without satisfactory answers. Yet, it is not at all in abstraction that their existential dilemmas arise. Rather, as we shall see, both are men with a keen tragic consciousness. They are especially sensitive to the absurd encounter of personal subjectivity with irrational historical facticity. The tension created thereby in each man’s life is enormous, perhaps even paralyzing.
Tanabe and Soloveitchik portray themselves as eternal seekers of religious truth. “Eternal” connotes the indeterminacy of resolution, the inexorable inaccessibility of completion, and the tragic impossibility of finishing once and for all. But what is to be finished? What is the finality the seeker is really after? What suffers for lack of resolution? The answer is a particular set of existential contradictions. The religious seeker, as embodied in Tanabe or Soloveitchik does not approach truth with simple questions of identity, never asking “What is...?” He is not curious, not just interested to discover the definitions of things. If he comes upon something that seems alien to him at first, in most cases, upon closer investigation, he discovers that he already has a category for it. He has identified everything previously. He is not concerned with developing a new taxonomy. Rather, he has already formed some assumptions, accepted some axioms, invested his faith in some fundamental beliefs. His questions arise in the face of contradiction and paradox, when one (or some) of the truths to which he has hitherto pledged himself differs fundamentally from another such equally as compelling truth. His question appears more in the form of “how can ...?”—as in “how can A be true if B is also true?” when the truth of both A and B is compelling to him or, more precisely “how can A be true if B is also true and B equals the opposite of A?”
Most salient in this vast body of contradictions are those discrepancies that arise not only between belief and belief but between ideal and empirical reality. These particular contradictions need not become a problem for all seekers; but any who look toward the particularity of history and contrast it with the ideal structures they have created internally to explain history cannot but be overwhelmed at the continual failure of theoretical constructs to account for empirical reality.
When one chooses to recognize disequilibrium not only in the world of theory but also in the world where theory and actuality collide, one has necessarily stepped beyond the bounds of pure thought. What motivates a thinker to consider seriously this latter sort of contradiction in addition to all the theoretical contradictions that might arise in the realm of pure explanation? Not all thinkers, especially philosophical thinkers, begin the normative intellectual task by discussing history. Why might our thinkers ground themselves so fundamentally in an awareness of history? For Tanabe and Soloveitchik the answer lies in the particular historical communities to which they feel beholden. In the community, individual identity as subject-seeker and historical identity as collective-sufferer converge. As spiritual leader, the religious thinker cannot fully differentiate his own distinct identity from the collective personality of the people whom he leads. Therefore, his cognitive and experiential exploration of religious motifs in life, though largely existential, is historically informed by its nature.
This typological religious thinker—suffering individual crisis while still deeply woven into the chaos of religious communities—leaves a powerful impression on us when we encounter him. We are impressed by the profundity of his suffering, the irresolvable character of the contradictions he faces, and his almost obsessive dedication to realizing his ideals in the concrete world.


Tanabe

The inscription on Tanabe’s tombstone reads “My search is for truth and nothing otherwise.” Tanabe’s search for truth is both a personal and communal quest for self-realization. Tanabe’s religious community consists of the Japanese people. For their sake, as well as his own, Tanabe works tirelessly to open up viable paths of religious understanding, envisioning himself and what he called his philosophy of metanoetics as the spiritual-philosophical guiding light out of the “tragic and appalling circumstances” he believed the Japanese people to have fallen into after the Pacific War:[2]

May there not possibly come a time when religion will be sought for the sake of people’s spiritual peace and enlightenment? If so, it would be a signal that the period of repentance for the entire Japanese people has begun. I myself have the feeling that my philosophy of metanoetics has opened the way for such action.[3]

Tanabe hopes that the birth of his philosophy can lead to the transformation of the Japanese people. In his own religious self-realization Tanabe believes he can lead his historical people to spiritual regeneration:

My one hope is that I might assimilate thoroughly within my being the way of transcendence … and so prepare myself to participate in the task of leading those who will choose to take that path in the future. It seems to me that there can be no other path of national rehabilitation…. My philosophy may come to have a strange kind of historical objectivity about it.[4]

Tanabe intimates here how powerful he believes his philosophical discovery might be. His role in the recovery of the Japanese people approaches a grandiose optimism. His belief about himself is clear—the religious future of his people depends on his personal performance of a spiritual transformation. In this sense, he sees himself as the central figure for the Japanese people in their post-war process of spiritual recovery.
If Tanabe is to be the ideal penitential figure, there must paradoxically be another side to his religious personality—that of Tanabe as the guilt-stricken sinner par excellence. He who wishes to be most penitent must also be most thoroughly sinful. He must harp upon and regret his sin most grievously. His spiritual agony must be unmatched by that of any other. Whose torment surpasses that of Tanabe? Who laments as deeply for his inability even to feel guilty with any sincerity? Though he confesses his sinful nature, he cannot but feel proud even of his confession. He knows that ultimately there is insincerity behind his sincerity.[5] Though he feels remorse for his decrepit state, even his lamentation is somehow grossly imperfect.[6] Interspersed throughout the philosophical prose in Tanabe’s Philosophy as Metanoetics are dramatic pronouncements of his own personal “ignorant and evil nature.” He contrasts himself with a class of Great Sages and enlightened beings, the wise and intelligent to the likes of whom he could never himself aspire.

For me, the very idea that ‘thought’ should have the power to transform one’s being is no more than the ideal of the wise and the holy[7]… I found my way to metanoetics as a philosophy for the ignorant and ordinary, such as I consider myself.[8]
This dichotomy of the wise and holy, on the one hand, and the ignorant and ordinary on the other, is a crucial one for Tanabe. He tells us that “we must not overlook the difference between the standpoint of the wise and heroic and that of the ordinary and ignorant.”[9] Tanabe goes to all lengths to disqualify himself as a member of the religious or intellectual elite, who claim not to suffer from the agony of ordinary existence, but somehow transcend it. “The path of sages is closed to me. I am but an ordinary person groping my way through dark tunnels …”[10] Tanabe is flawed and irreparably so. He can neither hope for the perfection of his spiritual condition, nor even for some progress toward that goal. He passes only from darkness to darkness. Like his spiritual mentor, the Medieval Pure Land Buddhist Shinran, he seems to declare “Indeed, how miserable I am!”[11]
Crucial in this dual self-presentation of Tanabe as, on the one hand, an agent of the spiritual salvation of the Japanese people, and, on the other, amongst the most regrettable creatures ever to have the misfortune to walk as man on earth, is that, though each seems to be the other’s polar opposite, Tanabe somehow believes that neither works to the ultimate exclusion of the other. Indeed, as we shall see, the one necessarily implies the other. Just how he is able to assert such an unlikely possibility is the heart of his philosophical logic, as we shall see below. For now what is important is to remember Tanabe’s conviction that “I, in my ignorance and sin, can participate in nirvana just as I am and without extinguishing my evil passions.”[12] For Tanabe, redemption is possible even in light of the immanence of sin.
Tanabe is a seeker, but why do we call him a religious seeker? Tanabe has a proclivity to investigate expressive possibilities for his own religious experience in the language of religious and philosophical traditions other than Pure Land Buddhism. Tanabe’s peripatetic seeking leads to continuous outward transformation with respect to the terms of his practice. Stated negatively, this means Tanabe is forever unable to commit himself to a particular historical religious tradition. He envisions rather a mediation of Buddhism and Christianity in which the mythological character of Western religion is tempered by the Eastern emphasis on the notion of “emptiness” as the principle of religious self-understanding. At the same time, in such a mediation, the ahistorical nature of Eastern religion could be informed and transformed by the social-ethic brought to the Christian tradition by its Judaic origins.
Toward a fusion of these elements, Tanabe hopes for a Second Religious Reformation heralded by a great religious genius and leading to the mediation of Christianity, Buddhism as well as Marxism.[13] Why include Marxism in this triad? Marx seems oddly misplaced next to Amida Buddha and Jesus. We can explain this anomaly in terms of Tanabe’s broader interpretation of the definition of religion as such. Tanabe saw religion as the mediation of the history of culture and the history of politics.[14] The interaction between a historically determined culture and its political circumstances produce certain ethical demands. Cultural mores are the ideal self-articulation of what is harmonious in peoples, the symphonic expression of national achievements. Political policy is the embodiment of a peoples’ striving, the upshot of the chaotic state of neediness and aspiration to harmony of a people.
Contradiction between the two can create difficult ethical predicaments. Politics may advocate methods of achieving cultural goals that compromise the character of the goals themselves. That is, war in the modern era (politics) ironically has often taken its opposite as its aim, peace and prosperity (culture). Without culture, the methods of politics would have no aim. Without politics, the continuity of cultural ideals is threatened. Though mutually opposed, they are indispensable to each other.
In the case of an irresolvable dispute there must be a third force which provides a creative manner of addressing ethical questions—something that, like cultural values, carries more normative weight and promises greater harmony, but which also actively advocates participation in the violent world of history, as would politics. The third force capable of this Tanabe calls religion. Insofar as Marxism in some capacity fulfills the dual-role of that “third force” Tanabe considers it to be religious.[15]
In our provisional answer to the question of why Tanabe included Marxism in his vision for the Second Religious Reformation, we have returned to the larger question introduced previously about whether Tanabe is a religious thinker or not. We know that Tanabe was trained as a mathematician and philosopher. He neither associates with nor commits to any particular historical religious tradition exclusively. Nor does he openly practice religious ritual of any variety. Knowing this, we might ask, what makes Tanabe a religious thinker as such? That he has an abstract definition of the “religious” as articulated above may not demonstrate to us that he himself is a religious thinker. Given his peculiar brand of abstraction, might there not be some other way to test whether or not Tanabe really fits the description of “religious thinker” which we here impute to him? What proof is there that Tanabe is indeed a religious thinker?
Tanabe is continually revealing deep attachment to and intimacy with historical religious traditions. He states openly that “What metanoetics has learned from the teachings of Shinran Buddhism belongs to its very essence.”[16] Tanabe accepts Shinran as “my teacher and guide,” calling him “a source of great encouragement and enlightenment.”[17] But such confessions by themselves are not sufficient evidence, for Tanabe also tells us that “Metanoetics does not always and of necessity adhere to the doctrine and tradition of Pure Land Buddhism.”[18]
We could argue that Tanabe enters the religious when, in addition to utilizing religious texts and exploring the thought of religious figures, he makes experiential claims on his reader—that he must experience certain things to understand them and that without such experience the idea or text remains incomprehensible. Speaking about the Kyôgyôshinshô he tells us that “Unless one undergoes the same kind of sincere repentance as did Shinran, one will never achieve a profound understanding of the work.”[19] Earlier, in reference to his own philosophy, Tanabe tells us that, “Were someone to ask how one can become religiously conscious … I should not be able to answer satisfactorily through theoretical discourse. I could only say: ‘You must, at least once, perform zange yourself.’”[20]
Tanabe’s plea is more than a rhetorical devise such as a religious mystic might invoke to compel his disciple into action. Behind this seemingly condescending call to action there is a profound philosophical idea. What Tanabe means to suggest here is the inevitable implication of the self in the totalizing religious enterprise. In religious experience the self must itself become a question, whereas in simply cognitive inquiry the self may go unchallenged at the ground of that inquiry. Tanabe calls this the “witness”[21] dimension of religious experience and it will actually become the hallmark of authentic religiosity for Tanabe. Tanabe does not seek to “expound a philosophy based on the Shin sect.” His “real intention” is more ambitious, more integrative, and closer to what makes Shin Buddhism a religious phenomenon rather than simply a cognitive gesture. Tanabe wants, “instead of interpreting Shinran’s philosophy in a philosophical manner … to remold philosophy as metanoetics, to start fresh along the way of philosophy by following Shinran’s religious path.”[22] It is this drive to put into practice rather than simply expound Shin Buddhism that implicates Tanabe’s entire self-understanding fundamentally.
This complete transformation of the seeker as he ventures into the philosophical endeavor is part of what makes Tanabe’s thought religious as such. No part of his self is any longer tenable ground for self-assertion, which is the mode proper to analytic philosophy according to Tanabe. There is a necessary element of complete surrender of the self in the movement of the philosophical to the religious—a yielding of the present self in the radical transformation to what the self will become. What Tanabe surrenders is himself—or, as he puts it using the terminology of Shin Buddhism, his jiriki, self-power. What he surrenders to is tariki, Other-power. Though some systems of Western philosophy/religion or other Eastern religions may manifest such self-sacrifice in parts, it is in Shin Buddhism as Tanabe interprets it and nowhere else that such self-surrender in transformation is so ideally embodied.[23] If religion by definition means that which thoroughly implicates the self, leaving no dimension of the self unquestioned, and allowing no part of the self to independently assert itself, nowhere else is the surrender of the self so complete as in Tanabe’s version of Shin Buddhism.


Soloveitchik

The sine qua non of the religious thinker, according to Tanabe, is self-implication and radical transformation at the most fundamental level. That means leaving nothing unquestioned, or, to use Tanabe’s language, submitting the self to thoroughgoing self-revaluation. “Thoroughgoing” means that nothing is left uninspected; no bit of data, no matter how difficult to quantify or capture temporally is ignored. If it involves the human self, nothing is without significance to the religious seeker. What is probed is the self, verily, my-self, and what is probed of it is everything. The result of such intense self-exploration is chaotic and unordered; the enormity of the task is often grossly disproportional to the strength of the one charged with its execution.
Our impression of Soloveitchik is of a thinker who feels also beholden to just such a task. In the opening to his Lonely Man of Faith, he begins by telling us,

Theory is not my concern … I want instead to focus attention on a human-life situation in which the man of faith … is entangled. Therefore, whatever I am going to say here has been derived not from philosophical dialectics, abstract speculation, or detached impersonal reflection, but from actual situations and experiences with which I have been confronted… It is a tale of a personal dilemma. Instead of talking theology, in the didactic sense, eloquently and in balanced sentences, I would like, hesitantly and haltingly, to confide in you and to share with you some concerns which weigh heavily on my mind and which frequently assume the proportions of an awareness of crisis.[24]

Soloveitchik’s expression, like Tanabe’s, takes on the form of confession. He is a tormented soul with anything but answers to the questions which so plague him. He has little to offer in the way of new approaches, and expects to find none—rather what he seeks is cathartic self-expression and confession.
What, though, is the nature of this self who confesses? We saw that Tanabe, as man in religious crisis, was both the redeemer and the unredeemable, simultaneously the lowest and the highest. In him we find both what cannot be surpassed as well as what has been lost beyond retrieval. And what does Soloveitchik portend is the content of his confession? What sort of “inner conflicts and incongruities”[25] so immobilize him? It is the oscillation between “ecstasy in God’s companionship and despair when he feels abandoned by God,” the self-appreciation of the former and the self-effacement in the latter, that is the essence of how he portrays his religious experience. Man’s majesty, on the one hand, and his humility, on the other, define his perplexing predicament. One moment he is standing alongside his Creator, and the next he is exiled from His presence. Both a sinner and a covenental companion, man is baffled by his lot.
What allows Soloveitchik such intensity of experience, so dizzying in its simultaneous, continual ascension to the heights and descent to the depths is what he calls the depth of man’s subjectivity, his inwardness. This is the dimension of human existence that opens up to infinity, that sets man apart from a material existence which has no detectable inwardness but only surface reality. Inexhaustible in his capacity for a variety of experience, man in his subjectivity is

… not satisfied just with surface existence, vacuous reality. He thinks primarily in pictures. He holds beautiful visions. He is original, unique to the extent of being misunderstood… His spiritual perception is abrupt, … he lacks precision… He does not handle well … methods of induction. Induction is not his forte. However, he is a genius in question making… He lacks perceptivity for details, for the minutia; he is impatient as far as detail is concerned. However, he is very sensitive to the tremendum of the whole… [He] projects the outline, the grand perception… [He] is visionary, and on the other hand, confuses the real with the unreal, the fantastic with the practical.[26]

As his most precious human asset, Soloveitchik guards his interiority, his capacity to feel the religious heights and depths, like the Holiest of Holies on the Temple Mount was guarded—not available for the general use of the coarse public.[27] With so singular an interior life, Soloveitchik presents himself as a man of profound loneliness. This trait (along with what he will claim is its more positive counterpart “aloneness”) forms the core of his philosophical anthropology as well as his personal self-reflection.[28]
Soloveitchik seeks knowledge of himself, of the dualities in his own religious experience. He, like Tanabe, also foresees no end to the inquiry—but not joyfully so, for he suffers what he does not know. He is both what Soloveitchik himself calls a homo religiosus, who is swept dreamily away by the powerful currents of the beyond, and a pedantic “cognitive man,” who must understand and make sense of the internal current of flux running through him lest he live with contradiction, who must know lest he allow disparity where none can be tolerated, who must have certain knowledge about his spiritual condition, lest he err unwittingly.
Though this “furnace of struggle”[29] between all the aspects of his personality enriches and refines him, and he is deepened for having suffered the fragmentation, Soloveitchik the religious seeker hopes for an end to the torment. He loathes the idea that his seeking may be eternal. He hates zealously anyone who questions but desires no answers and is satisfied only with his questions. Though he knows his millennial dream of perfect clarity and understanding is hopelessly distant, he aspires ardently despite this for totalizing knowledge and complete redemption.
As a decidedly lonely figure, Soloveitchik does not envision for himself the kind of salvific power of which Tanabe believes he and his philosophy might be possessed. That is not to say Tanabe is arrogant in his self-adulation, for essentially he is speaking of a complex process of transformation in which an exchange between master and disciple perform the task of facilitating individual passage into Buddhahood and salvation. Tanabe envisions himself and his philosophy as a link along that spiraling chain that conveys and relays the passing of Buddhas and sentient being to and from salvation—an agent that brings others to repent by himself submitting to Other-power. Soloveitchik, though he had many disciples whom he influenced profoundly, imagines no such immediate process of mutual interpenetration or salvific communion in his religious community. He is a master of a tradition, indeed several traditions, having been educated in the classics of the West as well as the classical Jewish canon. He concentrates his energies into the project of self-understanding and into leading a religious life that puts into action that understanding. But he is still perplexed and without answers. He is at a loss when asked to reconcile the various extremes of his subjectivity. His internal discourse is discontinuous and fragmented. He cannot be an agent of salvation because he too is entangled in a dilemmas that belong to the seeker in general. If anything, he is perhaps only more keenly aware of the problems than are others, and therefore also more distraught. “Judaism has many problems, but very few answers. And perhaps the more I lecture the more confused you will be.”[30]
Despite this self-admittedly confused state, critical to understanding Soloveitchik as a religious personality is comprehending how deeply he envisions himself to be part and master of a mesorah—a tradition of transmission of religious knowledge. His family history, crucial to understanding his thought and life, stretches back to the times of the great Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon (1720–1797), more popularly known as the Vilna Gaon (the genius/wise man of Vilna). And beyond this, in imaginatively tracing his traditional roots, Soloveitchik goes further back than even this great leader of East European Jewry,

every time I enter the classroom at the Yeshiva … [and] I start a shiur [lesson], the door opens, another old man walks in and sits down. He is older than I am… (The talmidim [students] call me the Rav. He is older than the Rav.) His name is Reb Chaim Brisker, without whom no shiur can [begin]… Then the door opens quietly again, and another old man quietly walks in. He is older than Reb Chaim. He lived in the seventeenth century. What is his name? Shabbasai Cohen, the famous Shach, who must be present when dinei mamonos [laws concerning property and money] are being discussed… And then more visitors show up. Some of the visitors lived in the eleventh century, some in the twelfth century, some in the thirteenth century. Some lived in antiquity—Rabbi Akiva, Rashi, Rabeinu Tam … More and more people come in. What do I do? I introduce them to my pupils and the dialogue commences… Suddenly, a symposium of generations comes into existence.[31]

Soloveitchik was ensconced in this line of holy religious teachers. He was himself a melamed, a teacher par excellence. Soloveitchik was designated by his rabbinical peers as a chacham hamesorah—a phrase literally meaning “sage of the tradition” but implying one who “appears at a time of despair when Torah continuity seems threatened.”[32] Yet he simultaneously embodied such erratic uncertainty about fundamental questions of religious experience that he always came across as a profoundly lonely figure. Like Tanabe, he was willy-nilly represented as one who could take responsibility for the spiritual well-being of a particular historical community. From under such extreme demands, Soloveitchik emerged as a sage of unusual creativity in a time of crisis.


II.
Historical Underpinnings in the Emergence of Soloveitchik and Tanabe

We have encountered men in crisis. We have heard the exclamatory cries which contribute to the formation of their religious personae. Yet, we are still in the dark about the essence of the crisis. The nature of the crisis itself, at the hands of which both Tanabe and Soloveitchik suffer and also in which they find their religious-philosophical points of departure is not at all vague or nondescript. Crisis as we use the word here refers not some kind of Heideggerian angst, a fear without an object only manifest in the face of the muteness of objects in the world, the nothing of the world itself or the impending threat of my ownmost death.[33] Though such might be phenomena symptomatic of the crisis these men face, the driving force prompting despair for Tanabe and Soloveitchik is foremost the concrete-historical.
When students of philosophy undertake a study of great thinkers, be they politically significant or not, it is rare to find any serious discussion of the relevance of historical exigency in their life predicaments. More so of late, we are beginning to see a critical approach to the study of philosophy that does take a significant interest in the topic of history in the formation of philosophy. Generally, however, even contemporary readings of philosophy that take history into account are more interested in questions of historicity—the ways in which socio-historical conditions construct/determine normative claims in philosophy—than in understanding the ways in which historical circumstance informs philosophical thought. Scholars want more often to undermine the philosophical-grandiose by showing how historical particularity humbles totalizing theory, than to deepen our understanding of particular thinkers by showing us what forces in history made certain issues important to great individuals. In an attempt to locate rather than deconstruct Tanabe and Soloveitchik, my hope is to add a necessary depth to our understanding of each by exploring the historical difficulties to which both were bound.

Tanabe and Soloveitchik are both to some extent “Holocaust thinkers.” Though for different reasons, both had to resolve the atrocities that took place during the Second World War. Both were beholden to historical communities that played a significant role in the events leading to and resulting from World War II. Unlike many intellectuals of their time, and the present day, both Tanabe and Soloveitchik, each for his own reason, neither did nor could they have left the issue of historical tragedy unexplored.


Tanabe

Students of Kyoto School philosophy often overlook the drastic historical circumstances in the midst of which it flourished. If one does not look for it, allusions to concrete historical phenomena do not too often explicitly appear in the volumes of text Kyoto School philosophers have produced over the years. Jan Van Bragt, scholar and translator of many central figures from the Kyoto School compared the effects of studying the historical dimension of the Kyoto school to “someone shaken by the feminist movement into realizing long-standing habits of male chauvinism,”[34] in Western philosophy. Learning about the historical implications of Kyoto School philosophy force one to reflect deeply upon the peculiar irrationalities one discovers.
The philosophy of Kyoto School thinkers was unable to prevent any of the several national tragedies that led to or took place during the Pacific War. Arguably no philosopher in the Kyoto School attempted—even philosophically—to make a case against the actions of the government during the war. Many philosophers from the Kyoto School in fact expended great effort, both philosophically in their writing and publicly in nationalist propaganda, to support the Japanese government in its various military projects throughout the thirties and forties. For the remorseful Tanabe, who emerged after the war with his great confessional Philosophy as Metanoetics, his self-professed post-war act of repentance, this signified something terrible. It meant that not only was philosophy unable to prevent a disaster of international proportions, it was indeed unable to prevent the soul of even one person—even the author and creator of that philosophy—from descent into hell.
In September of 1931 the colonial army of Japan stationed in southern Manchuria defied national authority and attacked the Chinese permanent military base at Mukden. A little more than a year later, the Japanese had complete military control of the entire province of Manchuria. This was to be the beginning of a fifteen-year military campaign in Asia that would end only with the unconditional surrender of the Japanese to the Allied Powers in the Pacific War. The immediate consequences of the Manchurian occupation were both severe criticism of Japan’s hostile military position from major world powers, and the consolidation of Japan’s right wing in its drive toward military supremacy in East Asia. During this period, no segment of Japan’s political or intellectual elite was immune to the influence of the powerful ideological forces of the right.[35]
Several years after the incident at Mukden, the military coup of 1936 and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July of 1937), amongst other things, led to the Sino-Japanese War. The most significant of national decisions following this was the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, and Japan’s subsequent involvement in World War II. The terrors of war would end in mid August of 1945, leaving Japan in a state of deep sorrow and national disgrace with little hope for immediate recovery.
Philosophically, Tanabe addresses the question of ethnic nationalism in his shu no ronri, “logic of species.” This social philosophy, mostly developed in the years of 1934–1940 challenges claims that Japan’s national unity need be established along ethnic lines, suggesting instead “a rational basis for the nation-state as the practical unity of the real and the ideal.”[36] The “species,” though its name would not indicate as much, is according to Tanabe a historical-existential, rather than an ethnic, community that ultimately seeks to transcend its own particularity. It does so not by renouncing its finite nature but conversely by communally awakening to the universal ground (genus) upon which its own particularity (species) is predicated. Though the species persists as an entity, it does so only provisionally to allow people to transcend its confines and enter the Absolute universal. The communal religious orientation of the species, informed by the humility of Shin Buddhist self-negation, most easily lends itself to such a movement. Tanabe, acknowledging the practical futility of opposing nationalistic, species driven beliefs, seeks to utilize the species to move beyond itself.[37] Such attempts at undermining the ethnic nationalism of his day, though somewhat indirect, did earn Tanabe the censure of leading ultra-nationalist organizations and figureheads.
The ultra-nationalist stronghold established in 1925, Genri Nihonsha, under the leadership of Minoda Muneki (1894–1946), for example, denounced Tanabe as a pro-liberal individualist. Tanabe was not without a history of thought and action that would merit such accusations of liberalism. In 1933, for instance, in his first encounter with Shôwa Period fascism, Tanabe defended Kyoto University law professor Takikawa Yukitoki. Yukitoki was indicted on charges that he had made dangerous remarks against the state. Tanabe, in the name of academic freedom, was part of the contingent of intellectuals at Kyoto who spoke out on behalf of Yukitoki.[38] Two years later, Tanabe publicly voiced opposition to the Japanese Ministry of Education’s efforts to isolate Japan from the West, also criticizing its growing militaristic ideology the following year.[39]

Tanabe’s pre-war record of intellectual and philosophical responsibility would unfortunately not extend into the war. Tanabe was sometimes scrupulous and outspoken during the pre-war years about the impropriety of certain government actions and policies. He was also an ex post facto critic of Japanese polity during the war. His philosophical position from 1941-1945, however, was itself largely responsible for directly justifying much of what he opposed in the pre- and post-war eras.[40] During his seldom spoken of “middle-period,” Tanabe conceptually absolutized the status of the state. At the Chûôkuron discussions, a year long series of meetings beginning in November 1941 where some of Japan’s foremost young scholars discussed issues of national polity, Tanabe’s proposition that “the Emperor should be regarded as a symbol of Absolute Nothingness”[41] met with the general approval of conference attendees. Even after the war in 1946 Tanabe expresses a similar sentiment:

The emperor is the embodiment of the ideal of the unity of the people as a whole. Only nothingness is able to unify things that stand in opposition; simple being cannot do it. The absolute inviolability of the emperor is a function of transcendental nothingness.[42]

Tanabe’s theory of national existence depicts the emperor as sacred. The highly esteemed category of absolute nothingness, the philosophical center of Tanabe’s centerless universe, is embodied in the emperor.
Most surprising is that these are comments Tanabe makes after publishing Philosophy as Metanoetics, the work which most closely approximates an apology from Tanabe for his war time philosophy. Considering this, Tanabe may here have been proposing that it is the emperor’s absolute status that would make his repentance meaningful for the Japanese people. Emperor Hirohito did in a sense repent during the surrender of August, 1945. The emperor’s penitential gesture could have theoretically led the people to metanoia. Practically, however, the people never followed the emperor’s partial movement of repentance. Yet, we can read Tanabe implicitly to be making such a suggestion.
This is all to say that we cannot judge Tanabe too quickly. Though remnants of his nationalism persist even after the war is over, we find him writing a final letter in 1945 to his by that time academic nemesis Nishida Kitarô speaking out against the military’s atrocious behavior. Tanabe crossed boundaries of philosophical difference to ask for Nishida’s support in requesting that Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945) put a stop to the army’s excesses.[43] Also in his favor, we can point out that Tanabe was a serious critic of the culturalism of the Taisho period which was reemerging in the mid nineteen-forties, calling it “nothing but an artistic hedonism that flatters its proud proponents with an awareness of their own privileged status.”[44]
Popularly, however, Tanabe made public pleas during the conscription of students in the war encouraging drafted officers to have the bravery to fight without worrying about life or death. Telling them that “the spirit of the imperial army … is none other than the quintessential flowering of the spirit of the nation,” he claimed that service “which sees living and dying only for the sake of the Sovereign” is truly the highest glory available to a Japanese.[45] The greater philosophical vision informing comments like these consisted in the irrational dream shared by many philosophers in the Kyoto School of Japanese domination of East Asia. Tanabe’s conviction “that Japanese Buddhism, Japanized as it is by Japanese polity (kokutai) thought, contains in itself the spirit needed to carry on the creation of a new age,”[46] lent legitimacy to, and perhaps even ennobled the rightist agenda. Although he only speaks of it as a spiritual creation here, historically Tanabe, like many of his contemporaries, envisioned an East Asia under the reigns of Japanese rule.
The very term Kyoto School of Philosophy was first a political designation coined in 1931 by Tosaka Jun in order to identify rightist tendencies in the circle of philosophers surrounding Nishida Kitarô. People on the “right” at that time were members of the Japanese intelligentsia who worked against rapid modernization and Westernization introduced by the government during the Meiji Period (1868–1912). Many of them, including figures as well received in the West as Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945), Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) and Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960) were philosophers who could arguably be criticized for philosophically privileging the particularly Japanese approach to religious self-understanding even as they attempted to argue the need for a synthesis of East and West. Though figures like Nishitani and Nishida focused far more closely on the standpoint of individual subjective selfhood than did Tanabe, who was more concerned with “species existence,” they also furthered ideologies of the nation-state that many would later see as contributing to the self-justification of the totalitarian fascist state. Certainly, as far as political measures of nationalism, they did not fare much better than Tanabe in the endeavor to pursue preventive measures, philosophically or popularly, in the face of a rising tide of militarism and patriotism. Unlike Tanabe, however, neither Nishida nor Nishitani laments that shortcoming later in his career.
Deeply regretful after Japan’s surrender, Tanabe did not believe he had any choice but to admit his failure as a philosopher. During Tanabe’s later period, when he moved from focusing on the development of his logic of species to embracing religion as such, Tanabe went through a very deep depression. Beginning in the summer of 1944, Tanabe was forbidden by the government from freely expressing his ideas. He was also tormented by his general indecisiveness about certain of his ideas during this period.[47] From that time, therefore, he published very few papers or articles until 1946 when his Philosophy as Metanoetics first appeared. From then onward he admitted that he indeed allowed military expedience to undermine his endeavor toward philosophical truth but also emphasized that he did certain things and pushed certain ideas, even during the war years, designed to prevent the darker side of ethnic nationalism from rearing its ugly head.
Tanabe not only accepted responsibility for government actions himself, but imputed it also to the Japanese people as a collective whole. He remarked that “I am deeply convinced that, in the last analysis, everyone is responsible, collectively, for social efforts.”[48] Collective responsibility means that only collective repentance can account for failure. “It seems to me that there can be no other path toward national rehabilitation than for our people as a whole to engage in repentance.”[49] Tanabe identifies Japan’s past nationalism specifically as the cause of its decline and the origin of its decadence.[50] As the agent facilitating the metanoetic movement, the state comes to have new meaning for Tanabe. No longer an incarnation of the Absolute, it is rather to be viewed as a hôben, a skillful means for the transformation in subjectivity of the Japanese people.
Tanabe would in fact go on to argue that not only the Japanese people but all the world’s nations need to participate in a repentance of international proportions in order to resolve the contradictory yet simultaneously valid visions of socialism and democracy. Tanabe identifies this conflict as the “touchstone of present-day philosophy.”[51] Though he is never really explicit with regard to how this might happen, envisioned as a possible path to a fusion of the freedom of democracy and the equality of socialism, his philosophy of repentance takes on greater historical significance. “Zange is a task that world history imposes on all peoples in all times.”[52]


Soloveitchik

Tanabe is best understood historically in typological categories—as the distraught public intellectual whose thought not only lacks sufficient integrity to save his people in a time of crisis, but is not sufficiently powerful even to save himself from corruption. He was in a position of importance and power in which, though weighed down heavily by the rightist government, he could have taken action, even if only in the realm of theory, to mitigate the atrocious circumstances in which he found himself. Further, our image of him is of a man whose historical crisis comes to fruition at the end of a fifteen-year period beginning with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and ending in its unconditional surrender in 1945. That same year Tanabe would retire from university life altogether to spend his remaining sixteen by himself at his Kitakaruizawa cottage in deep religious introspection. His last official act as university professor would be to deliver a series of farewell lectures in the winter of 1944. The opening sentence of the first lecture in this series reads: “The people of Japan watch in alarm as their nation sinks deeper and deeper into hell.”[53] The contents of what follows would later be published as Philosophy as Metanoetics.
Soloveitchik is not as accessible a character. He is not as easily classified typologically. The significance of history as a theme in his philosophical self-formation, though in some cases equally as concrete as it was with Tanabe, is not nearly as systematically presented. We do not get the sense that his is an overarching theory of history or even that his attitude toward history is consistent or distinct. Firstly, to historically locate Soloveitchik and the essence of his religious-philosophical project we must travel much further back in time, and traverse the borders of many more countries. “I am a wandering Jew. I have come into contact with many lands, [and] so many languages… I have had to come to grips with the problem of loneliness and aloneness.”[54] Born in the then Russian city of Pruzhana, Soloveitchik would travel throughout eastern Europe (mostly in Russia and Poland) as his father, the much revered Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, transferred from one rabbinical posts to another. In 1922 he would move to Germany to study at the University of Berlin; finally in December of 1932 Soloveitchik made his final move to Boston where he was installed as the city’s unofficial chief rabbi.
The expanse of Jewish history, which Soloveitchik was either immediately affected by or under the shadow of which he lived continuously, is largely one of opposition to and terror in the face of the non-Jewish world. As it was for Tanabe and the Japanese people during the war, the question of ethnic particularity and isolation from the forces of greater Western civilization were always extremely salient for Jews. This was true particularly because, until the middle of eighteenth century Jews throughout Europe and outside were living in autonomous corporate states relatively independent and removed from the governments and societies of the countries through which they wandered and in which they dwelled. In an odd way, this corporate isolation mirrors very closely the national isolation of the Japanese people before the arrival of Westerners in 1853.
Jewish corporate communities were uniformly religious, with almost categorical participation by all members of the community in its ritual life. Soloveitchik nostalgically remembers “a time when ninety percent of world Jewry were observant and secularists were a small minority at the fringes of the camp.”[55] Though also largely a preference of the Jews themselves, Jewish communities were separated economically, politically and socially from the rest of the Western world. The tradition of Jewish textual lore interprets this separateness as a fundamental religious condition of the Jew. Even from Judaism’s inception, according to its own sources, “the whole world was standing on one side of the river, while Abraham was on the other.”[56] Abraham, who is called haivri, the Hebrew, is thought of metaphysically as ever, or other, on the opposite side.
Such strong dualism in the question of nationhood, or we might even say ethnic nationalism, as well as in other dimensions of life, is a theme that runs throughout Jewish philosophical thought, and is something Soloveitchik focuses heavily upon. Drawing distinctions between the holy and the unholy, the Sabbath and the rest of the week, the Jewish and the non-Jewish is amongst the most essential motifs of the Biblical, rabbinical and liturgical traditions in Judaism. Soloveitchik will use this tradition ultimately to reveal the dialectical nature of dichotomies Judaism creates. In so doing, Soloveitchik engages in a creative but not completely unprecedented interpretation of the Jewish tradition’s propensity to focus on principles of difference by which the world is ordered, separating in its appropriate measure things from each other.
The corporate status of Jewish communal life in Europe changed radically in the era immediately preceding and during Soloveitchik’s own lifetime. Enlightenment thought and modernization in western Europe brought with it new ideals of national citizenship and the universal equality of men that would eventually make independent Jewish corporate states economically, politically and ideologically irrational entities. Thus, beginning around 1770 and taking as long as until 1917 (as was the case in Russia), the Jews of western, central and eventually eastern Europe began a process of “emancipation” from their independent yet politically inferior status to the status of “national citizens.”[57] The “elected ones, the true children of God,” as the Livornese democrat and novelist Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi would sardonically describe the people Israel, who “pass across centuries and peoples as oil in water; they never mingle, they never mix,”[58] would now willy-nilly have somehow to be acculturated to the world of post-Enlightenment Europe.
In that world Enlightenment ideals of the equality of humankind (at least on the plane of reason), however, did not always unfold accordingly in practice. Historian Ira Katznelson remarks that, “The relationship of the Enlightenment to European Jewry was contradictory from the start.”[59] Who better to illustrate the irony of the historical predicament into which the Jews were thrust at this time than the Enlightenment thinker par excellence himself, François-Marie Arouet, otherwise known as Voltaire. The same individual who spoke so eloquently of the tremendous liberating power and equalizing force of human reason for all rational beings tells us in 1756 of Jews that:

In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they were tolerated and enriched.[60]

Such blatant disqualification of Jews as fully human inhabitants of the world which Voltaire envisions as new, free, liberated and enlightened is mitigated only by the comment which immediately follows the above tirade, in which Voltaire instructs curtly that “Still, we ought not to burn them.”
The tension that results from such contradictory ideological orientations towards Jews would follow them from where it originated historically, in bourgeois Berlin society in 1770, to the present day. As Jews became more important to European economies, and as they were socially and hierarchically integrated into the institutions of mainstream Christian European life, the character of religious life for Jews would alter dramatically. What was once a remarkably uniform religious community throughout the entire continent of Europe, adhering to a relatively stable tradition in isolated religious ghettos, despite national divisions, became a community in continual rejection and radical reappropriation of its spiritual heritage.[61]
In the Jewish world, two major ideological camps, with gradations between them, emerged from the revolution of Enlightenment thought. At the one extreme were thinkers in the tradition of the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, whose disdain for Jewish tradition was not unlike that of Voltaire and who assimilated as thoroughly as possible to the philosophical and cultural climate of the non-Jewish world surrounding him. Perhaps, at the other end of the spectrum, were figures like the Gaon of Vilna, a spiritual antecedent to as well as ancestor of Soloveitchik, who devoted a life to resisting himself, and aiding his community in resisting, the often seductive and more often intrusive forces of acculturation and assimilation.
Decentralization and de-consolidation of Jewish religious communities resulting from emancipation was a major event in Jewish history, notable particularly for its irony. What was this irony? In the words of Todd Endleman, historian of Jews in Victorian England, “what centuries of persecution had been powerless to do, has been affected in a score of years by friendly intercourse.”[62] The liberation of Jewry led to the dissipation of Judaism. Of course, the history of emancipation in each European country was different, sometimes radically so, but in general the tension resulting between traditional Jewish religious life and possible radical reinterpretations or even complete rejections of that religious life was a theme that would shape Jewish history across the Western world.
Newly emancipated Jews were subject to a kind of quid pro quo liberation: their Verbesserung (betterment), according to the standards of the governments liberating them, was expected in return for the rights they were granted. In most cases, as in Germany, this process was to be focused on redeeming the Jew through improved Bildung, education and self-formation. Ultimately, with the possible exception of England, this proved to be a false quid pro quo because no matter what measures Jews took to assimilate, even if they intermarried and converted, they were still by and large stigmatized by the societies whose standards to which they so wanted to adhere.[63]
The emphasis on Bildung, however contradictory it ultimately came to be, did lead to substantive changes in the religious lives of Jews throughout Europe. Most notably, in Germany as well as ultimately France and Russia, secular education became at some level compulsory for Jews. The German rabbinate was particularly affected by this decision because rabbis in Germany were required to receive a university education in the early part of the nineteenth century.[64] A tradition that had for so longed abhorred, even forbade secular learning would be brought into the modern world under the leadership of people who had significant exposure to non-Jewish thinking and traditions. What resulted was that the foundations of faith were often challenged in non-Jewish university settings and a new liberal Jewish thinker emerged, a radical departure from central figures of the tradition preceding him but equally determined to shape that tradition for coming generations.
Enlightenment thought in the Jewish world was transformed into the Haskala movement. Beginning with gigantic figures in Germany such as Moses Mendelsohn (b. 1729) who introduced enlightenment thinking to colleagues and contemporaries, the Haskala would in time make its way to Russian Jewry. Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik, grandfather of Joseph, like all rabbis from the famed Brisker tradition, “despised the Haskala movement.”[65] He faced opponents like Joshua Steinberg (1825–1908), whose objective was to bring secular learning to the Great Yeshiva of Volozhin and expose Russian Jewry to advances in modern thought and culture. Successful in his endeavor, Steinberg would make sure that the Yeshiva instituted a Russian language program in 1887; later, however, because of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik’s refusal to comply with government edicts which would further secularize the Yeshiva’s curriculum, Steinberg watched as the doors of the Yeshiva were closed by imperial order.[66]
Rabbi Chaim developed a new method of Talmud study which would go on to greatly influence Soloveitchik as a dialectical thinker. Soloveitchik credits his grandfather’s new approach to Talmud with having created a place for traditional Jewish learning in the twentieth century from which it would not need to conform to the institutions and demands of the non-Jewish world.[67] Soloveitchik’s family is replete with figures like Rabbi Chaim who have a history of social and intellectual action on behalf of Russian Jews during the time they and their solidarity were threatened by the encroaching world of modernity. Soloveitchik’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner (1749–1821) was the spokesman for Russian Jewry under Alexander I. He is even rumored to have met with Napoleon during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.[68] Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner’s successor as the head of the Yeshiva of Volozhiner, his son Rabbi Itzele (d. 1849), along with the leader of the Chasidic Jewry of Lubavitch, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, met extensively with government officials in 1843 to discuss the economic plight and possibilities for social betterment in the condition of Jews in Russia. In 1882, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II when the Jews of Kiev, Odessa, and other cities were subject to widespread pogroms, Soloveitchik’s maternal grandfather met with other rabbis to petition Alexander III (1854–1894) on behalf of Russian Jewry.
The case of Russian Jewry is distinct from the rest of world Jewry in that Russian Jews were granted full emancipation only after the revolution of 1917. Prior to emancipation Russian Jews suffered a history of inhuman persecution in the Pale of Settlement, the territory tsarist rulers forced Jews to settle during the greater portion of their history in Russia, after the partitioning of Poland in 1772. Actually, under both tsarist rule and later communist regime rule, Jews were subject to mass slaughter, pogroms and the horrors of military conscription. A military draft was first instituted by tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) in 1827 on the Jews with the specific purpose of converting them to Greek Orthodox Christianity.[69] Each community had to produce a quota of young men per year to be conscripted as officers. The result was that Jew turned against Jew, as kidnappers took other peoples’ children, sometimes as young as ten years old, to send to the military.
Years later, in the shtetl town Khaslavichy where Soloveitchik grew up, he and his family lived in constant fear for their lives at the hands of their non-Jewish neighbors and government. The situation was no better for Soloveitchik and his family when they moved to Warsaw Poland in 1920. They had to leave Russia both because of extreme poverty and because the introduction of Marxist educational programs created a new sort of Jewish youth, far removed from their traditional upbringing and bent on secularization. In Warsaw, Rabbi Moshe, Soloveitchik’s father became the teacher of Talmudic studies at the Tachkamoni Rabbinical Seminary, a religious academy established by leaders of the Mizrachi movement (religious Zionists) with the goal of providing an institution that stressed the importance of both Talmudic and secular scholarship.[70] Though he would ultimately leave this post, frustrated with the spiritual deterioration of the student body, his role at Tachkamoni would foreshadow his son’s religious destiny.
The situation that Soloveitchik faced as leader of American Orthodoxy and spokesperson for traditional Talmudic Judaism was in many respects similar to but in most respects radically different from his ancestors’ predicament. Soloveitchik never had to worry about pogroms, military conscription, famine or oppression of Jews based on ethnic particularity. His greatest worry was the condition of the assimilated Jew, the Jew in passive spiritual dissipation, for whom the traditional world of religious practice no longer was appealing as a possible direction in which to orient the development of his/her religious subjectivity. As a most highly revered teacher of Talmud at New York’s Yeshiva University, in some ways the American equivalent of Poland’s Tachkamoni, he was continually confronted by the deleterious effects of the contemporary world on the viability of traditional Jewish communities and learning. Though he never advocated shunning secular education entirely and on the contrary spoke frequently of the absolute indispensability of participation in the non-Jewish world, a profound pessimism characterized his vision of Judaism’s future status. From Soloveitchik’s perspective, the statistical figures alone are enough to alarm one who has faith in the traditional covenental community. Intermarriage amongst third-generation post-emancipation Jews exceeds a rate of one in three, and the Jewish community erodes as only Jews who choose to ghettoize themselves and reject modern life entirely seem to have any success at maintaining their continuity.[71]
The Second World War was also, of course, no less an important event in Soloveitchik’s life than it was for Tanabe. As a leader of American Orthodoxy, Soloveitchik was turned toward for reassurance and explanations in the face of perhaps the most tragic event in Judaism’s exceptionally dismal history. Like Tanabe, Soloveitchik had to accept the utter defeat of the Holocaust. The Holocaust as historical event brings into the religious consciousness a crisis in our understanding of suffering and the reasons for suffering. Genocide so close in proximity to our own time is the contradiction that makes us cognizant of the utter disparity between what is good and what is evil in world being. Facing the terrible stench of what is lowest in humankind, in light of our previous knowledge of the rosy fragrance of what is highest, we try to understand how the incommensurable opposites can be resolved one with the other.
Yet it is really only after the suffering has passed that man is afforded the luxury of being able to strive after such imagined resolutions. In the midst of his tragedy, the sufferer is silent and only “after this psychic upheaval” does an intellectual curiosity follow. But then it is too late, for the sufferer has forgotten and “utilizes his capacity for intellectual abstraction… to the point of self-deception,” in order to affirm the resolvability of the evil that so plagued him.[72] For both Tanabe and Soloveitchik, the impossibility of overcoming the hideous facticity of evil does not allow philosophical-speculation an inroad to the dream of synthetic harmony. No matter the level of the abstraction, or how great the concentration of energies to eliminate it completely, the bare fact of human suffering as it transpires in our midst will not wait for or yield to the contrivance of explanation to hinder it in asserting its negativity.
Defying explanation, the Holocaust represents for Soloveitchik the consummate expression of hester panim muchlat, absolute divine self-concealment—“Thou canst not see my face, for man shall not see me and live”[73]—galut, an exile from God’s midst without parallel in religious history.[74] The horror of the Holocaust was not simply the irrationality of its victimization of Jews. What exacerbates the tragedy to intolerable proportions for Soloveitchik was rather the silence of American Jewry during the war:

Let us be frank: During the terrible Holocaust, when European Jewry was being systematically exterminated in the ovens and crematoria, the American Jewish community did not rise to the challenge, did not act as Jews possessing a properly developed consciousness of our shared fate and shared suffering, as well as the obligation of shared action that follows therefrom, [and] ought to have acted. We did not sufficiently empathize with the anguish of the people and did very little to save our afflicted brethren. It is hard to know how much we might have accomplished had we tried harder. Personally, I think we might have been able to save many. There is no doubt, however, that had we properly grieved over the affliction of our brothers, had we raised our voices and forcefully demanded that Roosevelt issue a sharp protest-warning, backed by concrete actions, we could have substantially slowed the process of mass murder. We were witnesses to the greatest and most terrible tragedy in our history and we were silent… We all sinned by our silence.[75]

Tanabe too laments the collective sin of his own species, what Soloveitchik called his “camp-people,” and their inability to act responsibly in the tragic circumstances in which they could have prevented horrible mistakes. Further, like Tanabe, Soloveitchik will indict himself in the sinful crime in a powerful gesture of self-accusation. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean all of us—myself included.”[76] He asks openly of himself, why did I remain inactive during the atrocities? Why didn’t I do something? Where was I in the midst of the crisis—comfortable, unbothered, oblivious?![77]
We know not the why of the Holocaust, says Soloveitchik; all we know is that we are guilty for our silence when it happened. But Soloveitchik will not allow imperfect knowledge and undeniable guilt, however, to impede action. We do not need to understand completely to respond appropriately. For Tanabe also, responding appropriately need not presuppose exhaustive knowledge—on the contrary, the fact that I do not know even the gravity of my sin or the extent of my confusion further confirms my need to repent. How much more am I sure of the lowly state into which I have sunk because I am unaware of the tragic proportions of just what has happened around me! Faced with this circumstance of unsurpassable confusion and decadence, Tanabe writes of the necessity for the action of complete submission in powerlessness and thorough spiritual transformation.
From one perspective, however, Soloveitchik’s response differs radically from Tanabe’s. Soloveitchik tells us that if God has hidden himself from us in the Holocaust, He has just as clearly revealed himself in the emergence of the state of Israel. God has spoken in history by allowing for the formation of Israel, which, though Soloveitchik does not see it as intimating the impending arrival of the Jewish Messiah, is to his mind miraculous in every other imaginable respect.[78] Failing to hearken to God’s call in the emergence of Israel would be a missed moment perhaps equal in tragic proportions to the Holocaust itself. Not answering the voice of our beloved calling would leave an irreparable gap in the time consciousness of world Jewry’s existential community. Lest God leave as the Jew tarries, it is incumbent on the community to return to the land.
More than simply a call to populate the land, however, Soloveitchik means this to be a call for a collective repentance. This sort of repentance is nothing foreign to the Jewish tradition, prophesied even in the Torah:

And it shall come to pass, when all these things have come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have put before you, and you shall have a turn of heart while still amongst the nations, whither the Lord your God has driven you. And you shall return unto the Lord your God and shall obey Him… then the Lord your God will turn your captivity, and have compassion upon you, and will gather you from among the nations, wither the Lord your God has scattered you. If any of you be driven out to the ends of the horizon, from thence will the Lord your God gather you, and from thence will He fetch you.[79]

Settlement in Israel ultimately alludes to spiritual rebirth and redemption, and follows an era of blessings and curses, which, though inexplicable in themselves, indicate the necessity of communal transformation.

III.
Living with the Love of Wisdom: Biography of the Philosopher

The aim of our study is penetration into the philosophical depths of these two thinkers. We have spent a great deal of time thus far contexualizing their respective philosophical projects. But our purpose in so doing has not been simply to provide background for our later discussion; understanding the historical subtleties that contribute to the formation of our thinkers’ theoretical approaches should alter considerably how we encounter their philosophical lives.[80]
Though we have analyzed the significance of Tanabe and Soloveitchik as religious figures and historical subjects above, we know not yet the importance of the philosophical dimension of each man’s life. Interesting is the fact that both men treated the philosophical as somehow related to yet ultimately incommensurable with the religious. For both, philosophy could not aspire to the heights of explanation and understanding; it was somehow limited structurally, somehow inherently incapable of such a tremendous task. Yet Tanabe and Soloveitchik both exist in some capacity as philosophers—not theologians with some knowledge of philosophy or dabblers casually interested by the subject in passing, but as masters of the discipline who dedicate themselves to its study with the intention of grasping its core. The next chapter explains in detail why philosophy, particularly Western philosophy, falls short for both Tanabe and Soloveitchik in the endeavor to illuminate the depths of the human condition. What follows in this section are some very brief remarks about the history of their involvement in the grand enterprise of philosophy itself.
Soloveitchik and Tanabe both began their careers not in departments of philosophy but rather as aspiring mathematicians. Though each would ultimately part roads with the discipline, opting in both cases to pursue the study of philosophy, there is a way in which mathematics or mathematical thinking becomes a predominant force throughout the rest of their work.
Tanabe’s career in philosophy can be broken down into three or four major periods. Interested first in the philosophy of science, he earned a doctorate with a dissertation entitled “A study of Philosophy of Mathematics.”[81] His preoccupation here was with the problem of infinite continuity in mathematical systems, which he was already beginning to relate to social and cultural issues. What allowed him to make the connection between the two areas of philosophical inquiry was his fascination with Hermann Cohen’s idea of the infinitesimal and other topics in Cohen’s epistemology.[82]
Tanabe’s second period begins when he succeeds Nishida as Professor of Philosophy at Kyoto University in 1927. During this time he begins forming his so-called “logic of species”—an articulation of what he believes was the ontological structure and existential experience of the relationship between the world, the state and the individual.
The third period, with which we concern ourselves mostly in the following chapters, begins at the time of his retirement in 1945 when he declares a radical negation of philosophy and the adoption of the religious standpoint of metanoesis. Here, asserting the logic of absolute mediation, which is a kind of neither/nor approach to explaining the human subject’s relationship to the relative, on the one hand, and the Absolute, on the other, he is at his most volatile.
The remaining stages of his philosophical development are not at all definite. Never exiting the realm of the religious, in his last days he makes a return to Zen but with a heavy emphasis on the bodhisattva ideal of one who returns to the world of the deluded to be an evil and ignorant being again but also for the sake of the salvation of the many. He also turns at this point back to his interests in the philosophy of mathematics and science, reaching for an all encompassing integration of the many fields of inquiry in which he took interest throughout his life. It is also here that Tanabe’s interest in Christianity becomes significant, with the publication of The Dialectic of Christianity in 1948.[83] Following his wife’s death in 1951, Tanabe also faces a period during which the philosophy of death, particularly the question of the correlation between life and death, as well as various issues in aesthetics become important to him.[84]
The entire question of Soloveitchik’s involvement with philosophy was significant in his life even before his birth. The marriage of his parents—Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, well known for coming from a family with a strict aversion to all things secular, and Harabbanit Pesha Feinstein, from a family well known both for its great piety and its acceptance of secular learning—was thought to be an oddity destined for chaos.[85] This union of opposed approaches to life in fact led to much turmoil, resulting even in a period of separation early on in the marriage.[86] It, however, also led to many wonderful things, included amongst them the self-formation of a world religious leader known for his exceptional creativity.
The decision to send Soloveitchik to Berlin to study Western philosophy was much disputed. In one sense, the union of his parents, both prominent heirs to the era’s most distinguished rabbinical dynasties, was engineered to produce a figure of unsurpassable learning and leadership qualities in the Jewish world.[87] Anything that threatened such a result was to be avoided like the plague. About her brother, Soloveitchik’s sister Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman remarks, “Ever since I can remember, our life centered around … Josef Dov.”[88] Not only members of his immediate family, but the entire community invested a great deal of hope in Soloveitchik’s ascent to greatness. Distinguished members of the community, as a result of their concern, even paid visits to Soloveitchik’s father expressing their worries about the propriety of his secular studies.[89] A man well versed in secular thought, they claimed, could never be embraced by the orthodox community. Indeed, later in his life Soloveitchik’s erudition made him a loner even amongst his most learned contemporaries. Yet what resulted from such a novel life path was a mind comparable in character and breath to that of Maimonedes.
Soloveitchik did not progress from philosophy to religion, as did Tanabe, but, beginning in the world of religious thought and life, he picked up philosophy after having studied religion and always somehow kept the two relatively separate in his mind. Like Maimonedes, whose Mishneh Torah enjoys widespread adherence in the world of orthodoxy, but whose Guide for the Perplexed is popular mostly amongst those who live in the world outside of strict religious observance, Soloveitchik rarely mixed the content of his Talmud lessons with that of his speculative philosophy. This does not, however, preclude the possibility that his methodology of analysis from the one deeply influence the other, as I will later argue. Yet, as far as content is concerned, Soloveitchik often expressed his belief that all the philosophy in the world could not help one understand the unique intricacies of Talmudic disputes.[90]
Given the stigma associated with secular thought, and the way in which Soloveitchik chose to separate philosophical speculation from traditional Jewish scholarship, we might ask—what was it that prompted him to undertake the project of philosophical investigation in the first place? Soloveitchik describes it as a need to turn to philosophy in order to speak in the language of the spirit of the time. Though he would fulfill the traditional role of a community leader, opening up the Maimonides Day School in 1937 as well as occupying countless official advisory posts in Boston and New York, he also believed he had to try very hard “to interpret Judaism in modern terms, for modern man.”[91] He makes it clear that such interpretations were not absolute, that whatever he says of Judaism are strictly his subjective impressions. He makes them not for the sake of definitive explanation, but more for the sake of reaching out to those who would listen with interest only if he spoke in the language that they understood. In this sense, philosophy is for Soloveitchik a kind of upâya (skillful means) for speaking to Jews who no longer find the tradition accessible when represented in the terms by which it was conventionally articulated.
The principle of upâya, although I have borrowed the term from the Buddhist tradition, is actually not completely foreign to Jewish lore. There is a story in the Talmud which tells us that before God revealed the Torah He tarried and the angels asked what was taking Him so long. God replied that He had to add the tagim, the crowns on the letters, so as to make it attractive to Akiva ben Yosef. This is a reference to the great Rabbi Akiva who did not begin the study of Torah until he was forty and was drawn into the tradition, not at first by the words, but by the ornamental crowns drawn on the letters of those words. For Soloveitchik, then, we could say that philosophy came to represent the crowns on the letters of the singular enterprise of Torah study.
Because Soloveitchik is far less systematic than even Tanabe in the formation of his philosophical world-view, it is difficult to schematize the progress of his interests in a coherent outline as we did for Tanabe. Out of a principle belief in the continuity and flexibility of interpretation as well as out of a concern for perfection, Soloveitchik published much less than did Tanabe. We can, however, detect a kind of philosophical transition between his two most seminal works—between the triumphant spirituality of the Talmudic Jew as articulated in Halakhic Man, published in 1944 and the exasperated confession of the defeated existential creature in The Lonely Man of Faith, published in 1965.[92]
Though both Tanabe and Soloveitchik see themselves as first and foremost religious thinkers, each also has an affair with philosophy proper. Both become at one point or another enamored of the philosophical life but are later disenchanted. Neither regrets his detour into the philosophical side-streets, for each understands that process as somehow having been necessary in helping him arrive at his religious standpoint. Though they use it in vastly different ways, both Soloveitchik and Tanabe believe they have of necessity to exit the philosophical detour because it somehow fails to achieves its self-assigned goal.
[1]. As cited in George Feifer, Tennozan, p. 337.
[2]. The details of Tanabe’s involvement in the war will be discussed below. By “Pacific War” I mean both Japan’s war with the United States initiated formally on December 8, 1941, and the war Japan was involved with in China from July 7, 1937.
[3]. From a letter to his students dated August 27, 1945, as cited in Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. xxxviii.
[4]. From a personal correspondence to Takeuchi Yoshinori dated July 7, 1944, as cited Ibid., p. xxxvii..
[5]. Ibid., p. 15.
[6]. Ibid., p. 3.
[7]. Ibid., p. 197.
[8]. Ibid., p. 225.
[9]. Ibid., p. 192.
[10]. Ibid., p. 31. For further instances of self-effacement in Philosophy as Metanoetics see pp. 90, 91, 128, and 194.
[11]. Shinran, Kyôgôshinshô , 4:11 as cited Ibid., p. 21.
[12]. Ibid., p. 250.
[13]. Ozaki Makoto, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 15. A more detailed explanation of this so-called “religious genius” comes in the conclusion of this paper.
[14]. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 284.
[15]. Ibid., p. 92–93.
[16]. Ibid., p. 281.
[17]. Ibid., p. 31, 20.
[18]. Ibid., p. 221.
[19]. Ibid., p. 21.
[20]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 8. Zange is the Japanese term for repentance which the translator of Philosophy as Metanoetics leaves transliterated throughout the text. It is used interchangeably with the term “metanoetics.”
[21]. This is one part of the shin-gyô-shô, “faith-action-witness” triad Tanabe uses to explain religious experience. This idea is a fairly complex one, and will start to unfold more clearly in our discussion of Tanabe’s view of repentance.
[22]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 20.
[23]. Ibid., p. 254. The specifics of this assertion are further developed in the following chapter on Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s respective reappropriations of Western philosophy.
[24]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 1.
[25]. Ibid., p. 3.
[26]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Dual Aspects of Man” (taped lecture).
[27]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 113.
[28]. Though the distinction between “loneliness” and “aloneness,” a central topic in Soloveitchik’s thought and life, will not become the subject of major concern for us, it will receive some further treatment in subsequent chapters.
[29]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 4.
[30]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #1 (taped lecture).
[31]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Unity of the Generations” (taped lecture).
[32]. From an unpublished eulogy given by Rabbi Isadore Twersky z”l for Soloveitchik at Maimonedes School on May 31, 1993.
[33]. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSan Francisco) 1962, p. 393.
[34]. Jan Van Bragt, “Kyoto Philosophy—Intrinsically Nationalistic?” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 234.
[35]. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 255.
[36]. Tanabe Hajime, “The Dialectical Method of the Logic of Species,” Tanabe Hajime Zenshu [The Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], volume 7, p. 253, as cited in Kevin M. Doak, “Nationalism as Dialectics,” in Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 187.
[37]. Tanabe’s logic of species is much more complicated than I have presented it here. Though it is a topic of considerable importance for understanding Tanabe’s religious thought, it is in many ways outside the scope of our current project. The ideas behind Tanabe’s “logic of species,” however, are integral to many other topics Tanabe addresses and will be further discussed below.
[38]. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 265.
[39]. Ibid., p. 266.
[40]. Ibid., p. 265.
[41]. Ôshima Yasumasa, “The Greater East Asia War and the Kyoto School,” as cited in Horio Tsutomu, “The Chûôkuron Discussions,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 303.
[42]. Tanabe Hajime, Rekishiteki genjitsu [Historical Reality], in Tanabe Hajime Zenshu [The Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], volume 8, as cited in Heisig, Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 264.
[43]. James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 273. Tanabe’s break with Nishida revolved around the former’s accusations that the latter was too steeped in a philosophy centered around mystical intuition to face the exigencies of historical responsibility. Beginning as early as 1930, the clash reached its worst stages after Nishida’s retirement in 1945. So serious was the nature of the schism that the two men could not even stand to be in the same room together.
[44]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 262.
[45]. Tanabe Hajime, “Farewell words to students on the way to war: Realize the true meaning of conscription!” Tanabe Hajime Zenshu [The Collected Works of Tanabe Hajime], as cited in James W. Heisig, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism,” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 270.
[46]. Jan Van Bragt, “Kyoto Philosophy—Intrinsically Nationalistic?” Rude Awakenings, eds. James W. Heisig and John C. Moraldo, p. 248.
[47]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. l.
[48]. Ibid., p. liv.
[49]. Ibid., p. xxxvii.
[50]. Ibid., p. 296.
[51]. Ibid., p. 261.
[52]. Ibid., p. 296.
[53]. Ibid., p. xxxv.
[54]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape # 5 (taped lecture).
[55]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 88.
[56]. Midrash Rabba (42:8).
[57]. See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto.
[58]. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Note autobiografiche (1833) (Florence, 1899), ed. R. Guastalla, pp. 85–86, as cited in Andrew Canepa, “Emancipation and Jewish Responses in Mid-Nineteenth Century Italy,” in European History Quarterly, 1986.
[59]. Ira Katznelson, “Between Separation and Disappearance: Jews on the Margins of American Liberalism,” in Paths of Emancipation, p. 160.
[60]. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire, translated by William F. Fleming (Akron, Ohio: Werner Co.) 1904, pp. 283–84.
[61]. Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, p. 257.
[62]. Endleman, Radical Assimilation, p. 113. Endleman wrote this book based upon the suggestion of Soloveitchik’s brother, Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik.
[63]. Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering, p. 20.
[64]. Ibid., p. 22.
[65]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 71.
[66]. Ibid., p. 71.
[67]. From an unpublished eulogy by Rabbi Yehuda Parnes given for Soloveit­chik at Yeshiva University on May 6, 1993.
[68]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 27.
[69]. Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, pp. 3-96.
[70]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 203–4.
[71]. See Arthur Hertzberg, “The Emancipation: A Reassessment after Two Centuries,” Modern Judaism 1, September 1981. This is, of course, only one reading of Judaism since emancipation.
[72]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek—It is The Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh,” p. 53.
[73]. Exodus (33:20).
[74]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 63.
[75]. Ibid., pp. 96–97.
[76]. Ibid.
[77]. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Dilemma of the American Jew” (taped lecture).
[78]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 69.
[79]. Deuteronomy (30:1-4).
[80]. The reader may notice a kind of disequilibrium in my treatment of Tanabe’s versus Soloveitchik’s personal biographical life. Soloveitchik’s family history is more detailed, his personal character more vividly articulated and his singular personality more easily detectable. This disparity is due to a number of factors. Firstly, there are few sources which deal with Tanabe as a personality. He was an extremely private man, who was even reluctant to be photographed. His academic position did not demand that he address larger, more general audiences. Tanabe’s family history also seems not to bear too heavily on his own philosophical legacy. Though his father’s mastery of Confucian classics would influence his thought, Tanabe would never draw a direct correlation between his status as familial heir, on the one hand, and as philosophical heir, on the other.
[81]. Suri tetsugaku kenkyu.
[82]. Ozaki Makato, Introduction to the Philosophy Tanabe, p. 3.
[83]. Kirisutokyô no benshô. Sections of this work have alternatively been translated as the Demonstratio of Christianity.
[84]. Ozaki Makato, Introduction to the Philosophy Tanabe, p. 28.
[85]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 2.
[86]. Ibid., p. 24.
[87]. Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, p. 10. In trying to convince Soloveitchik’s grandfather of the propriety of the match between Rabbi Moshe and Harabbanit Pesha, Rabbi Menachem Krakowsky, a son-in-law of Rabbi Eliyahu Feinstein’s (Pesha’s father) exclaims “Their children will be geniuses.”
[88]. Ibid., p. 152.
[89]. Ibid., p. 226.
[90]. From an unpublished eulogy by Rabbi Hershel Reichman given for Soloveitchik at Yeshiva University on May 10, 1993.
[91]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape # 1 (taped lecture).
[92]. In the interim between the publication of these essays Soloveitchik underwent cancer surgery (1959) and shortly after the publication of the latter lost his wife, his mother and his brother Samuel all within a ten-week period in 1967.

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.

CHAPTER 3

Return along the Way of Repentance
Zangedô and T’shuva

Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall become like fleece.
—Isaiah 1:18

We began with the problem of historical irrationality. Irrationality causes suffering—suffering for lack of understanding the origins of the disparity between ideal and actual in history. We suffer a paralyzed condition before the unexplained, perhaps even inexplicable. Historical crisis brings into relief the vast gap between our understanding of the human condition and the realities of human being.
Faced with the atrocities of world history, we are speechless. Our initial impulse is to elect philosophy to elucidate irrationality in historical reality. The philosophical mind, operating in the mode of logical analysis, attempts to explain that of which common intuition suffers ignorance. Yet, there is, alas, a dimension of human experience to which the otherwise far-reaching grasp of rational sciences is not privy; and philosophy is not enough to account for the contradictory extremes of historical human experience. Any dialectic which tries to take into account all extremes rationally, ultimately fails to live up to the demands of dialectics. An authentic philosophical dialectic has not been produced in the West. Despite the ingenuity of its many traditions, philosophy in the classical West still cowers before the formidable contradictions of historical existence.
In order to facilitate our comparison of Tanabe and Soloveitchik we have traced a movement from history, through philosophy and ultimately, as we will embark upon below, to religion. The unique logic of religious life is singularly equipped to handle the philosophical antinomies which result from historical irrationality and seem to be, within the framework of formal logic, irresolvable. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe will claim that religious man, unlike man-philosopher, operates according to an alternative logic very well suited to dealing with contradiction and irrationality.
To illustrate the logic of the religious standpoint, there are numerous aspects of religious thought and life we might discuss. Why concentrate on the problem of repentance? What particularly relevant contradiction does this bring into relief and to what vital resolution of that contradiction does the question of repentance orient us? Why not pick prayer, meditation, ritual, or discuss love of the divine or the sublime in religious life?
The issue of repentance is for us particularly important, firstly, because it includes and addresses, to some extent or another, a great many other themes in religious life. For Soloveitchik and Tanabe, repentance is a core element of virtually all aspects of religious experience. To some measure, in all facets of religious life, the religious individual experiences repentance as a category or mode of religious existence. Secondly, repentance is only partially a cognitive act. It necessarily implies moving beyond what is philosophically tenable—necessitating consideration of vital yet non-rational data. In Tanabe’s language, it is a meta-noia, a movement beyond knowing. For Soloveitchik, it is a mesirat nefesh, a sacrificial act that requires personal withdrawal, an admittance of the self’s weakness, and ultimately a transformation of the self from sinner to sage by virtue of divine mediation. For both it requires recognition of and submission to what philosophy, which is synonymous with the self-affirming self, cannot achieve.
Repentance as an act poses a great religious contradiction. Philosophically, we expressed this contradiction as the incommensurability of the Absolute and the relative. In religion, the same problem is expressed more concretely, (or more mythologically, depending on one’s orientation) as the inconceivability of the encounter between the sinner and God. How does an infinite, perfect God who is wondrous in all His ways, unbounded and uncontainable, meet the finite human sinner who is mortal and suffers from innumerable limitations? Where might such an encounter take place? How is this in so many ways diseased human existence even possible, in light of the omnipresence of the divine? How can perfection tolerate, let alone commune with, imperfection?[1]
Repentance as a category of religious action and inquiry seeks to answer precisely these questions. It challenges without reservation the most compelling sort of contradiction—that between sinner and sage, wicked and wise, man and God. Complete reconciliation of these extremes is impossible. Self-identity between man and God is not an option for man in the religious universe. On the other hand, it is equally inconceivable that the gap dividing imperfection and perfection is so great that no relationship exists between the two. The contradiction between them must somehow be maintained while it is at the same time resolved. One who realizes the irreversible and grave nature of his sins, but wants to live despite them, must ask—how can I and my past, without being obliterated and vanishing, be redeemed?


Tanabe
sin * coincidentia oppositorum * transformation
sin

Tanabe asserts that religion differs from philosophy in that “religious thought is by nature the opposite of philosophy, which begins from a critique of doctrine and makes self-witness the main thing.”[2] Philosophy is a critique of tradition and therefore must categorically question all that it inherits or towards which it turns its attention. Religion is also a critique but it differs from philosophy in its object of criticism—religion critiques thoroughly something philosophy plainly cannot, i.e., the self. The philosophical critique of the philosophical self, as we saw, can lead to religion insofar as it facilitates a death of the self being critiqued. But once intensive self-evaluation begins, along with it ensues the radical negation of the self, the end of philosophy and entry into the realm of the religious.
What does religion discover in its critique of the self that philosophy cannot? The recognition of sin is the abysmal depth to which religion is able to descend in its critique of the self, but which philosophy will never grasp. Sin makes no sense as a philosophical category. Its character is self-accusatory and self-deprecatory. It actually requires the negation of the self, that the self place its own existence—its very capacity to comment on itself—in grave danger.
Understanding the character of sin is the first step in understanding the gesture of repentance, for the activity of the latter maintains as its purpose the eradication, or transformation of the former. Sin as Tanabe interprets it exists because we live in what Shin Buddhism calls the time of mappô, the so-called “latter days of the law,” the days so far removed from the teachings of the last Buddha Gautama that the dharma, the true teachings of the Buddha, have fallen disastrously into decline. Because of its historical nature, there is no way at all to diminish this situational sin in which we are currently entangled. With each passing moment, our predicament worsens and becomes more lamentable.
Phenomenologically, the story of sin is more complicated. Tanabe proposes that we experience sin on several different levels. These level are expressed in the nineteenth, twentieth and eighteenth Vows of Amida Buddha.[3] The Buddha Amida, according to Shin Buddhist soteriology, is the future Buddha, the Buddha who currently stands at the threshold of salvation but refuses to take the final step for the sake of saving all suffering sentient beings. In his total devotion toward this end, he makes a series of vows aimed at saving different sorts of current aspirants toward enlightenment. The first of these, the nineteenth, is the vow to save all sentient beings who perform virtuous deeds. Here sin can be understood in terms of its opposite—appropriate ethical action. According to this vow, he who lives the ethical ideal is guaranteed salvation. Thus, the first moral failure—the first sin—is failure to live according to such an ideal. We are first sinners in that we are unable to do what is right.[4]
Amida’s twentieth vow is to save all those who even aspire sincerely to do good and be saved. This is the “Vow Assuring the Aspirant” of his salvation. Here also sin can be understood in terms of its opposite. Whereas in the nineteenth vow the sinner could not act in accordance with moral principles, the fault of the sinner of the twentieth vow is somewhat less concrete. He fails not only to do what is right, but also even to want to do what is right—perhaps even to want to be saved. In the age of mappô, the latter days of the law, not only the prospect of ethical action, but also the sincerity of intention in action, even in conceiving of one’s own salvation, is a problem. We are sinners in that we also are unable even to want what is good.[5]
In the final and so-called Primal Vow, the eighteenth vow, Amida pledges himself to save all those who say nembutsu, the calling of the Buddha’s name with sincere faith. “If, after I have attained Buddhahood, the sentient beings in the ten quarters who have Sincere Mind … to be Born in my country, should not be Born, even with ten utterances (of the Nembutsu), may I not attain Perfect Enlight­enment.”[6] Here the aspirant arrives at the final declaration of his wholly sinful nature—nothing of his own devising can procure his salvation, and only utter reliance on the saving grace of Other-power can save him. The utter resignation of the aspirant in the eighteenth vow constitutes the basic beginnings of the act of repentance. Both the ethical and volitional dimensions to sin, that is, the inability both to do or even to want to do good, cause the penitential resignation of the aspirant.
Shinran’s religious genius, according to Tanabe, is his emphasis not only on sin’s ethical nature, but also on its existential-somatic or volitional character. “Even though I can understand intellectually that the self’s true countenance is none other than the Buddha himself, I cannot witness to this out of my own experience.”[7] We have only intimations of reality’s true nature. So utterly absent is the Absolute from our lives that it exists for us as only a remnant of an idea long forgotten. We are sinful for the purity we cannot even fathom, much less achieve. We cannot feel even the true sincerity of aspiration.
What we do know to some degree is the extent to which we are ignorant of our sinful condition. Here Tanabe compares himself to Socrates, who begins with the irony of “the knowledge of ignorance.” Socrates’ confession of ignorance mediates his acquisition of true wisdom.[8] It is a necessary first step. Similarly, Tanabe’s aspirant who desires purity so ardently begins by acknowledging that the only thing pure about him is his recognition that not even a trace of purity abides in his being.
It is vital to Tanabe’s religious and philosophical thought that sin, as it exists both ethically and volitionally, never be eradicated from our understanding of the human condition. In accordance with both his and Soloveitchik’s desire for a true dialectics in the West, Tanabe insists that both extremes of the dialectical spectrum must maintain their singular integrity. For the sinner this means that repentance must allow somehow for the purification of the aspirant even in his sinful state. Tanabe ultimately needs a logic that defies rational explanation, a logic which allows me to be both sinner and saved at once.
Indeed, the ultimate religious dialectic for Tanabe would declare the sinner saved precisely because he is sinner, and for that reason only—a situation in which the greater the gravity of the sin, the more certain the salvation of the sinner. Man is redeemed not despite his sinful nature, but because of it. Thus, the greatest imaginable source of negation becomes the exclusive catalyst by virtue of which man may participate in the greatest imaginable act of affirmation.[9]
Tanabe turns to the possibility of repentance because he suspects that only therein is such a paradoxical logic possible. The heights attained by the repentance of zange are predicated upon the severity of the sin which provokes it. In this sense it is literally the most “fool-proof” of religious gestures—not only can the greatest fool perform it adequately, but in fact repentance is in a sense meant specifically for those least capable of doing it.[10] Repentance exists for the incapable, for those who otherwise are unable to abide by ethical ideals, for sinners. One who is not able to repent with heartfelt sincerity, who is arrogant and sinful—it is for him specifically that a way of repentance exists and he more than anyone is meant to repent most spectacularly, not despite his inabilities but just because of them. “These very defects themselves give rise to the zange that helps us penetrate them and see through them for what they are.”[11] Even to criticize the life or idea of repentance, i.e., the religious life, from a secular perspective, Tanabe says, would be to further fuel the desperate need for it.[12] Criticism points to fault and the necessity of overcoming the limited self. It therefore helps the individual being criticized to hearken to the call of what might rectify him.
This formulation of the logic of sin in repentance is consistent with the integrity of Tanabe’s philosophical thought as articulated earlier. It is sin itself which affords a place for Divine Perfection in the world. Tanabe’s true dialectics posits the Absolute in the mediation of the relative. Divine Perfection as affirmation in no way precedes the negation of sin, by the same dialectical logic that prevents unity from taking priority to opposition in dialectics.[13] The moment of affirmation of the eternal Absolute must be simultaneous exactly with the moment of the negation of the mortal sinner.
Sin is redeemed, according to Tanabe’s absolute dialectics as well as to Soloveitchik’s philosophy of repentance, not through perfection’s eradication of impurity, or the destruction of evil by good. The redemption of sin cannot be affirmation simply negating negation en toto, for each affirmation itself is yet incomplete and suffers an aberration or rupture in its own being. No such unadulterated pure affirmation is known to man such that exists so free of imperfection that it might be used to annihilate sin in this world. Perhaps in times closer to those during which Gautama Buddha taught the true dharma such things were possible. But in the time of the latter days of the law, mappô, the expiation of sins and the purification of the sinner begin only negatively in the action of self-negation. Repentance, to wit, does not begin when the good proceeds to condemn the evil, for no such unstained good exists that it is not itself sullied somehow by the far reaching expanse of evil and imperfection. Repentance, if it comes at all, comes when the sinner condemns himself and casts himself away to die. In the sinner’s recognition of his own sin he comes to understand his deeply corrupted nature in a movement of self-negation. Yet this same gesture of recognizing and abdicating the sinful self is the act of repentance and restores the sinner to life.
What exactly occurs in repentance to make this happen? Why should the negation of the self become the only way that the self might be affirmed and exalted again? What is the nature of the dynamic taking place? Tanabe answers that it is the fact that the self consciousness of inauthentic existence belongs to authentic existence that allows negative awareness to be the basis of self-transformation. “It is utterly important to realize that it is not the subject of evil but the subject of goodness that comes to the awareness of the structure of evil.”[14] Though the sinner is so limited that he may not be able to use any side of himself to eradicate the sin, his very awareness of sin as sin demarcates the starting point of his penitential journey.
As finite being, the essence of the sinner, even before he repents, is being-as-negation. Then, in his open negation of himself in the penitential action of zange the sinner negates, as it were, his own sinful being-as-negation. As the negation of negation, the sinner’s repentance, which begins in his self-awareness of his sinful state, becomes an affirmation. Tanabe is able to suggest the possible unity of the opposites of sinner and saint, therefore, through the mediation of negation.[15] This Tanabe identifies as the negative determination of the whole in finite being.[16]
Of course, this journey from negation to affirmation is not wholly the finite being’s own. His realization cannot originate in himself alone. He is a sinner and suffers from the exceedingly rotten core of a sinner. Though only a slight step toward his ultimate salvific goal, even the realization of his sinful nature as the beginning of his penitential journey is initiated by Other-power, and not by self-power. Only the sinner can fathom what it means to “live by grace,” because even his first baby step toward transformation begins not within himself but from a source of purity outside of his sinful self. Yet, such an understanding—the very fact that the sinner in his deep vulnerability realizes his sinfulness—means that somewhere ‘in him’ abides the mind not of a sinner but of a saint. On the other hand, yet again however, whatever that saint in the sinner understands of grace depends wholly on the perversion of the sinner within the man. The more one is a sinner the better he understands what it means to live by grace. Tanabe resolves this paradox by interpreting the origin of the sinner’s supernal wisdom to be outside the sinner, given to him by the grace of Other-power.[17]
Sin, as the assertion of the self’s power over and against Other-power, serves as a mediator, as a relative absolute allowing for the open acceptance of grace by the sinner from the Other-power against which he rebels. The self is assured salvation by means of that which most threatens its selfhood. The grave misgiving of the sinner about his soul’s fate because of his sin becomes the guarantor of his salvation in repentance. It is only by virtue of this sin that he might be grateful for what the divine has granted him. “The power urging us to forsake ourselves is at the same time the power that reaffirms our once negated being.”[18] What forsakes us also saves us. “Repentance of such sin, the metanoetical awareness of the accumulation of sins, is the true mediating force between our being and the activity of the absolute.”[19] The pain of negation in the historical shortcoming and the insincerity of the fragmented sinful being become the basis for the joy of affirmation in the gratitude for salvation of the penitent in his rebirth.
About the suffering sentient beings who are destined to be saved by the Buddha’s Great Compassion Shinran says, “without being made to sunder their great passions, they are brought quickly to the realization of great nirvana.”[20] Tanabe understands this to mean that, evil becomes the cause for the finite being’s connection to the Compassionate One’s Being. The evil of the sin is able to do this without diminishing one iota; on the contrary, it increases more and more. Sin is viewed from the perspective of unbounded gratitude for the path of repentance toward the love of the Buddha which it opens up for the aspirant.
As negation itself, sin is never threatened by negation; it indeed draws its source of strength to look toward the possibility of salvation precisely from the lowliness of the sinful condition.[21] Thus, what was impossible through self-power because of the intractability of sin, becomes possible through gratitude in the surrender to Other-power, even by virtue of that very irreversible sinfulness.[22]


coincidentia oppositorum

The evil of sin is transformed into bliss through gratitude. The greater the gap grows, the more violent the rupture between divine and human, saintly and sinful, the greater the gratitude of the sinner for the vow of salvation Amida makes on his behalf.[23] This is how Tanabe posits the coincidence of the opposites of human and divine, the meeting point of the finite and infinite.[24] The ethical self becomes the manifestation of the Absolute in its confession of inability and powerlessness. Without ceasing to be ordinary and ignorant, man is allowed an inroad to the sublime life of the saintly through the confession of his sinfulness. Repentance enables finite beings “to participate in nirvana without being released from bondage to worldly passions.”[25] The Buddhist image of the lotus in the fire, surrounded yet unconsumed by its flames, Tanabe tells us, portrays ideally the condition of the sinner who is at the same time the saint.
The dialectical identification of sinner and saint, infinite and finite, Buddha and sentient being which occurs in the penitential act can be understood in terms of the true meaning of the bodhisattva ideal in Mahayana Buddhism.[26] The Buddha Amida is at present not actually a Buddha. He stands on the brink of salvation, at the veritable threshold of Buddhahood, but does not enter for the sake of the myriad suffering sentient beings. He reenters the stream of suffering, not as a Buddha, but still to some extent as a suffering sentient being. His is not an insincere sacrifice, a superficial re-immersion into the world of the blind and ignorant that is actually aware of itself as true wisdom simply costumed in the thin veils of suffering and desire. He, to some degree, takes upon himself again the yoke of blindness and ignorance, becoming again that from which he worked so hard to liberate himself, for the sake of the suffering many, so that he might be amongst them again to work for their salvation. Having truly become blind again to the nature of ultimate truth, he has to some extent even forgotten his sacrifice and lives as others live, as a suffering sentient being. He is like each of us. Due to his interpenetrating and omnipresent nature, he, in fact, is each one of us as we make our ways blindly through the world.
In this sense, all sentient beings, whether they are partially awakened or completely blind, are Buddhas who have sacrificed their salvation for each other’s sake. All acts of the self on behalf of itself are just reaffirmations of each individual’s bodhisattva vow to become an ignorant being again so as to save the myriads of sufferers from their otherwise bleak doom. That is, all acts of self-power, of the suffering sentient being still immersed in ignorance, become acts of Other-power, of the benevolent bodhisattva who, working for the salvation of all mankind, remains and continually chooses to remain immersed in ignorance and sin.[27]
The mediated self-identity of Other-power and self-power in Tanabe’s thought is also expressed in terms of notions of ôsô and gensô. Ôsô, going forth to the Pure Land from samsara, is the movement of the relative, suffering sentient being who repents and moves forward toward his salvation thereby. Gensô is the correspondent movement of the bodhisattva who returns from the Pure Land in order to attend to the salvation of other sentient beings. “The mediating character of gensô is none other than the metanoetic conversion that takes place in ôsô.”[28]
The movement of the sinful being as he aspires toward salvation is simultaneous with and actually self-identical to the movement of the saintly bodhisattva who returns to save the latter. The hand that reaches to take is the same hand that extends itself in the giving. The more the aspirant progresses toward Buddhahood, the more he becomes the bodhisattva who is thrown back into the world of the suffering sentient beings in order to save them. Here, the presence of one thing signifies its opposite. “The Buddha’s coming to himself … is at the same time his going out to the relative world.”[29] The more highly exalted one becomes, the more deeply immersed in sin he wishes to be, so that in becoming sinful he may descend to the deepest depths of hell to save the huddled masses who otherwise live at the lowest levels without access to the Buddha’s Great Compassion.
In the coincidence of gensô and ôsô we witness how the relative and Absolute come into relief only in terms of each other.[30] Finite sentient being is the essential element in the expression of Amida Buddha’s Great Compassion, in his continual transformation from bodhisattva to Buddha.[31] Without the finite sinner, Amida would have nobody to whom he might offer his Compassion. The drive to self-affirmation is allowed to exist provisionally, but without foreseeable end, for the sake of the transformation it affects in Amida to love the finite being and save him from his own sinfulness.[32] Likewise, the independence of the relative is allowed for its own sake—for the sake of its own repentance and aspiration to the Absolute.
Tanabe says that “selfhood is realized as the functioning of an ego allowed by God to work independently of God.”[33] But we must ask why God would make such a sacrifice to begin with and allow for the independence of the self. The independence of relative being is maintained as hôben, or the provisional being of skillful means to a divine end. As “empty being,” finite man is restored through, or rather for the sake of self-negation. Without such empty being the Absolute would itself be incapable of performing the act of Great Compassion.[34] That is, without the other, there is nobody for whom to be compassionate. As Soloveitchik expresses it, kindness cannot exist in a vacuum, for by its very nature it requires the interaction of beings independent of each other.[35]
The Absolute itself suffers the fate of the particular by creating relative absolutes and thereby depriving itself of solitary, i.e. - absolute, existence. The Absolute allows for the independent existence of empty-beings and thereby relativizes and negates itself. It condescends to the relative for the sake of the relative. “It is necessary for the Absolute … to assimilate to them [relative beings] and to elevate them to [the level of] the absolute good by descending down into the place of the mediative movement…”[36] The self-negation of the Absolute is an act of love and compassion. However, this act of self-negation is not only for the sake of the relative. It follows necessarily that the Absolute, because it is Absolute, must embark upon this act. That is, the Absolute relativizes itself simultaneously for the sake of the relative, finite being, as well as for its own sake. The Absolute negates itself for itself in the sense that it cannot exist as Absolute and absolutely Compassionate without the mediation of relative beings for whom to be Compassionate.
Authentic dialectics makes the existence of a primordial Absolute prior to relative being an impossibility. Partially, what allows the Absolute its self-identity as Absolute is the particular sort of negative relationship it shares with relative being. Its own self-negation is also its self-formation—it is born as it dies. In this sense, the self-negation of the Absolute for the sake of the relative mirrors directly the self-negation of the relative in repentance for the sake of mediating the Absolute. That is to say, the Absolute also performs something like zange, in a sense repenting its absoluteness and in so doing allows for the independent existence of relative being. The Buddha becomes a sentient being. Yet the relative being, in its own sinful state, must also repent and aspire to Buddhahood. So closely are the repentance of the Buddha as he becomes a sentient being and the repentance of sentient beings as they become Buddhas intertwined that they in fact become indistinguishable.
The self-sacrifice, or zange, of the bodhisattva and his descent into the world of relative being is an expression of love.[37] Its voluntary self-negation is also its compassionate activity.[38] As such, the repentance of self-negation becomes a compassionate expression of affirmation.[39] Because it is an affirmation-qua-negation, we can say it is only an indirect affirmation.
In Tanabe’s religious universe, generally and in particular with regard to the question of repentance, one never encounters the Absolute directly. Because the finite being experiences God indirectly and negatively, Tanabe says that “God exists without existing, and without being as direct being, becomes the absolute negative ground for all existing beings.”[40]
The character of man’s encounter with the divine as negation makes divinity synonymous with Nothingness for Tanabe. Nothingness, or Absolute Nothingness alludes to the absolutely indirect and negative character of man’s encounter with the divine. It takes place in an act of repentance as the finite self’s negation of its own negative being. God when experienced is only indirectly experienced. Man’s relationship to God as it is depicted in much of the history of Christian theological thought, according to Tanabe, is vertically oriented. In metanoetics no such vertical relationship is possible. That is, no beam of light streams forth from heaven to enter man’s heart. The so-called private, personal experience of the divine, one which exists only between man-subject and the divine Absolute in an intensely individual encounter, is a formal impossibility for Tanabe. The Absolute cannot be placed next to or even above the relative, or relate to the relative as “one” relates to an “other.”[41] The Absolute, if it were to directly encounter the relative would simply become another relative. In such an encounter the being of the Absolute depends on its relative positioning in terms of the relative—either next to, above or below—and thus itself is relativized. In metanoetics no such relativization of the Absolute takes place, for in the metanoetical encounter man knows divinity only dialectically, never unilaterally. In zange the divine is known only obliquely. Man’s encounter with the divine must be mediated, thus enabling the Absolute to maintain its integrity as Absolute.
If the encounter between Absolute and relative is mediated, what mediates this encounter? If man’s immediate experience of God is vertical—a connection or beam of light running from man to God, from below to above—the mediated experience of God can be described as horizontal. What does it mean to know the Absolute horizontally? Horizontally, man encounters God through his direct, immediate relationships with his fellow man. Only the transforming action of the individual in society can mediate freedom and the presence of the divine.[42] The interaction of the relative and the relative also mediates each relative’s encounter with the Absolute.[43] “The absolute tariki [Other-power] manifests itself in horizontal relationships between relative beings.”[44] Without the horizontal mediation of the Absolute in the mutual interaction of relative beings, the Absolute has no place in finite human life.
Expressed concretely, this means that the love of God is realized in the love of men. For Tanabe, “God reveals himself in the fraternity of human beings,” precisely because “the love of God is realized in the love of men and the mutual love of human beings.”[45] The ideal expression of religious subjectivity, therefore, comes in the formation of the so-called “existential community,” in which God is mediated by human action in the realm of the ethico-social.[46]
The mediation of God in the existential community is also for Tanabe an expression of Absolute Nothingness in that it is only through the self-negating penitential act of relative beings that such a community can be formed.[47] Because self-negation is the hallmark of Absolute Nothingness, which is synonymous with the horizontal, that is, indirect manifestation of the love of God in the existential community, people never cease being sinners though the love of God is in their midst. Indeed, it is only as sinners that they may negate themselves in a gesture of humility and afford a place for the divine in their lives. By this logic, says Tanabe, a believer may “attain the merit of nirvana while not stopping the human passions.”[48] The self-negation of the opposites of Absolute and relative in love allows for the former to approach, even identify with the latter in its sinful state.[49] Thus, through the model of the penitential community, Tanabe can propose tekitaiaizoku—the logic of antagonistic unity, according to which the Buddhist world of blind passions called samsara is equivalent to the realm of enlightenment and liberation known as nirvana, an authentically dialectical unity of opposites.
The logic by which one extreme not only can exist alongside its opposite, but according to which one extreme indeed signifies its opposite, Tanabe believes, is true dialectics. Here sin necessarily means salvation, death necessarily means rebirth.[50]
Through the incomprehensible power of salvation into which the Great Compassion is poured we are redeemed from evil passion and lusts (bonnô) without their being extinguished. Since grave sin and the tendency toward it still remain in zange, fear, gratitude, and blasphemy flow together and penetrate one another. It is here that a mediatory relationship is set up among metanoesis, salvation and sin, a circular process wherein the blasphemy and sin of honganbokori[51] can be transformed through metanoetical mediation, into a moment of salvation without the tendency to sin having been extinguished. Even the betrayal and profound sin of honganbokori are transformed into salvation through the mediation of metanoesis. Whatever passions, lust, and sin exist, they are all converted into salvation by metanoesis without being extinguished.[52]
As the necessary condition for repentance, gratitude and divine love, evil is redeemed without being erased. “Metanoetics opens a way to salvation for ordinary people … Negation is converted into affirmation without being simply eliminated.”[53] Here what at first appears evil and unsurpassably bad, short of self-identifying with good, is made simultaneous with it in the mediatory act of repentance. In the words of Zendô, who writes a commentary on the Meditation Sutra, “The darkness of my own ignorance lights up for me the Great Compassion of the Buddha’s mind; my own inability testifies to my rebirth in the nembutsu.”[54] In the singular logic of the transformation of absolute mediation in zange, darkness becomes the sole medium for sparking light.[55] Or as Shinran phrases it in the Tannishô: “Even a good person attains birth in the Pure Land, how much more so an evil person.”[56]
In search of something that maintains unity of opposites on paradoxical grounds—“a unity that leaves contradictions just as they are”—Tanabe arrives at the standpoint of repentance.[57] Based on the logic of negation, that is, on the ground of Absolute Nothingness, the formulation of this unity is a neither/nor.[58] What affirmation is allowed the self abides only in the self’s freedom to negate itself.[59]
This contrasts with Soloveitchik’s proposed method of reaching the same desired end of true dialectics. Soloveitchik’s is a both/and logic which proposes unity in the simultaneous affirmation of both thesis and anti-thesis, instead of in their mutual negation. Soloveitchik’s standpoint of Being is antithetical to Tanabe’s Nothingness. This does not however mean that Tanabe’s is a philosophy of death and Soloveitchik’s a philosophy of life. Both embrace affirmation. Both, as we shall see below, emphasize the importance of mediation in the encounter between human and divine. They differ radically, however, when it comes to understanding the nature of that mediation. Mediation as a category is, however, the essence of each thinker’s conception of man’s encounter with God in the penitential act.
Absolute knowledge for relative beings (philosophers) can only be affirmed negatively, as a keen awareness of our radically limited being. Both Soloveitchik and Tanabe maintain this position. The virtue of repentance subsists in its dialectical nature—its profundity is directly proportional to our awareness of our own sinfulness when we practice it. Philosophy, our thinkers claim, has never been able to aspire to such a thorough dialectic. Merging with the Absolute can take place only insofar as we understand how other, how alien we are to the Absolute. The Absolute has a perfect knowledge of our finitude. Though we also fail even in knowing how sinful we are, we can in some sense make the contents of the self-consciousness of the Absolute identical with those of our own self-consciousness by coming to an awareness of our ignorant natures, performing zange and confessing our radical evil. In this way the self negation of our penitential act

turns into an affirmation at the outermost limit of its negation, and resurrects the relative that … died behind the negation to serve as a mediator of the absolute without ceasing to be relative … as ‘empty being’ that … has life in its very death.[60]

Philosophy’s dependence on and attachment to the relative’s finite powers will not allow it to attain such dialectical heights.
The self-assertion of philosophy is not ultimately viable as a mode of being because according to Tanabe, finite man’s primary mode of engagement in the world during repentance is “being as upâya.” “Relative beings… move toward nothingness and … return to the world to serve as a means of enlightenment and salvation for others.”[61] Ignorant man cannot begin his religious transformation on the sublime plane of divine inspiration and self-assertion. The transformation of zange always begins in the relative world of history, and thus the world of crisis, negation, and sin. The beings and social institutions of that world serve as the medium through which the Absolute is realized.[62]
The Great Compassion of the Buddha means nothing without relative beings for whom that Compassion is meant. “Tathâgata cannot exercise his absoluteness apart from his descent to save relative sentient beings.”[63] The independence granted the relative being, by means of which it ultimately sins, is given for the sake of facilitating the realization of its utter dependence on the Absolute in the action of repentance. In this sense, the independence of the relative, while absolutely necessary for the manifestation of the Absolute, is a false, or simply provisional independence because it depends on the Absolute granting it for its own sake.


transformation

If man comes to truth indirectly by way of negation, our potential for realizing the ultimate is commensurate with our distance from it.[64] “Metanoetics is as strong as we are weak,” says Tanabe.[65] The weaker man is, the more distant he is from his ideal state, the greater also his gratitude toward the Absolute for allowing him even to realize, however partially, his own sinfulness and begin the act of repentance. What self-power and self-determination cannot achieve in sinful being, gratitude can. Man is forgiven his sins, without the sins actually being eradicated, through gratitude toward Other-power and love toward his fellow man.
What is the nature of this man who has been forgiven his sins and who approaches the divine in negating himself? He who has repented, who has died and been reborn, what is the nature of his selfhood? How does such a man live? What is the status of the relative self in repentance?
Death and rebirth in metanoetics is not simply a return to the world of relative being for Tanabe—the world to which the penitent individual “returns” is not the same as the one which he left in his ascent toward the Absolute. Repentance is a conversion, both of the individual and the world in which he abides.[66] The original rupture and irrationality that is “world” for the individual before he performs zange becomes the basis for a higher stage of purification. The self, resurrected “from the ashes of the fire on which the old self has been consumed,”[67] makes its own defeat the basis for a greater victory. In zange “the ego is given up once and for all, but his initial negation is then transformed into new life.”[68]
That is not to say that the initiatory sin and disjuncture that precipitates repentance is in some way extinguished. Tanabe’s conception of repentance is dialectical, which, to him, means that “opposition is … retained to the end.” Rather, instead of eradicating the opposition, the penitent individual submits to it. Indeed he dies before it, entirely negating his selfhood. Reciprocally, “death is turned about into an affirmation of new life, surpassing the opposition.”[69] As such, sin is not so much overcome, as it is redeemed, or perhaps we might say (as will be similar to Soloveitchik’s position) as it is elevated.[70]
Though it is in some ways a future directed movement, synonymous with a rebirth which looks hopefully toward the horizon, temporally repentance is essentially backward oriented. It looks first to the past, toward the desire of reversing an irreversible yesterday, of somehow redeeming it. Through a creative element in the process of repentance, the sinner transforms past into future.[71] All visions of possible futures originate in desires to somehow reform the past; indeed, future aspirations really aspire to the past. “Rebirth in the future is already contained in the past as a destination.”[72] Past in metanoetics expresses the central motif of regret. Though no more salient in the conversion process than desire for rebirth in the Pure Land, which is the characteristic modality of future, regret of the past and transformation of the past makes future aspirations possible. Thus past for Tanabe is much more than simply memory. It is the source of possibility.
Repentance for Tanabe signifies a death-and-rebirth of the self, a transformation predicated necessarily on evil toward good, and an orientation to the past for the sake of the future. It is also by its nature continual. Never a “once and for all” attainment, the encounter with the divine in the penitential gesture must be mediated continuously lest repentance become a one time event instead of a mode of being. Self-abandonment, the self’s utter and complete death unto itself, must be a continual action, a relentless self-transformation through negation.[73] The sinful self regenerates itself only to destroy itself again and again. The moment even the slightest attainment is achieved in the penitential transformation, remnants of the sinful ego arise to gleam proudly over what it believes to be the self’s accomplishments and must in turn be vanquished. So inexorable is the radical evil of the human self, even when that self is diligently occupied in the pursuit of all that is worthy, that it “forever trails the concrete nembutsu of Other-power like a shadow.”[74] Even complete repentance destroys itself. The opportunistic self capitalizes on the greatness of the merit it thinks it has attained especially when its repentance is perfect, and therefore cancels out the very merit it gained by demonstrating its ingratitude and arrogance. Yet despite the inherent impossibility of perfect repentance, the finite self is left with no other recourse before the divine but to repent—thus making the action of zange of necessity continuous and continually repetitive.


Soloveitchik
sin * self-assertion and divine withdrawal * elevation
sin

Soloveitchik approaches the problem of sin on two separate planes, one practical, the other, volitional/epistemological. Sin explains the “agonizing gap between knowing and doing what is right,” on the one hand, and, on the other, man’s inability to appreciate what is right, to know it is right to the fullest extent possible or even to want it because it is right.[75] As I have presented him above, Tanabe operates under similar categories. Practically, or ethically, sinfulness for Tanabe is man’s inability to do what is right; volitionally, it is his inability even to aspire sincerely toward the good. Tanabe in this latter aspect of sin identifies not an epistemological problem but a volitional problem. True, he admits, man will never know how sinful a condition he really exists in, but more importantly, he can never bring himself to genuinely will himself to want to exit such a lamentable predicament. Soloveitchik, when focusing on the epistemological dimension of sin, emphasizes something more akin to a cognitive rather than a volitional problem—he points to our inability to fathom to what extent we are blessed in our blessings or even to what extent we are cursed in our various human defects and limitations. Thus, to sin is both to commit ethically unspeakable acts, as well as to forget or never fully understand the reality of the human condition as it exists in all its varied extremes.
As an analogy to illustrate the latter, more ambiguous category of sin, Soloveitchik compares the sinner who repents to the mourner. The mourner embodies thoroughly a particular and particularly “tragic flaw inherent in the nature of man from which no one can escape.”[76] What is this obscure personality defect? Soloveitchik speaks here of the human inability to fully appreciate the people we love and cherish most as long as they are alive, well and with us. It is only after those most dear to us leave that we begin to lament all that we could have done while they were alive. Entering what Soloveitchik calls the darkness and hopelessness of the “would that I could” signifies the onset of mourning, of true and genuine lament for people not fully appreciated when they were alive.
Man-sinner suffers from a similar sort of forgetfulness with regard both to his own once pure condition, which dies in sin, and also with regard to God whom he loses when he enters the dejection of sin. Though sustained by God, nourished by the sustenance He provides, and as recipients of His graces, we are also in continual amnesia and fail to remember the immediacy of His presence. This is itself a tragic shortcoming. Even if we abide by all His commandments and do all He demands from us, even then our appreciation of His awesome compassion is grossly inadequate, just as even

those who showed the utmost honor to their parents and who esteemed their teachers and were dedicated to their husband or wife … must suffer the burden of feeling … guilt for not having done what they could while their loved ones were still alive.[77]

How much more lamentable indeed is our condition when we do sin, and verily banish God from our midst by making what was once holy unholy. We mourn our rejection of Him as we might mourn the passing of a parent with whom we exchanged only bitter words when last we were together. The sense of irreversibility, of utter loss, of baseness and ugliness becomes a bitter scent that pervades the air and a mood of despair descends upon us like a dark sky.[78]
Man bemoans both the absence of God and the irreparable damage he has inflicted upon his own once pristine self. Whereas Tanabe calls the action of repentance itself a death, for Soloveitchik death is present already in the act of sin as such. Sin is a death of the unblemished self. The morrow after the passing of one who was close to us is not unlike the morrow after sin. In both cases we yearn for the one lost to us—in the first case our longing is for another, and in the second it is for a part of ourselves. The nausea which ensues on this classical “morning after” sickens us to no end.[79] There seems to be no respite for the sinner who has discovered the utter negativity of his sinful condition.
Thus, man according to Soloveitchik suffers from both an epistemological condition of sin that is unintentional and leads to estrangement from the divine, as well as the sin of ethical iniquity that is freely chosen and results in death.[80] Sin, in the sense of ethical transgression, is a somewhat less lamentable tragedy. It at least may be atoned for, and does not carry with it as serious a mood of melancholy or depression. Transgression of ethical norms is best expressed as et, one of the Hebrew terms often translated into English as “sin.” et literally means “missing the target,” having done something off the mark.[81] Man’s obligation, according to Soloveitchik’s reading of the canon of Jewish sources, is to scrutinize himself, discover where he has stepped off the path and correct what wrongs he can.[82] With regard to the particular transgressions of ethical sin, this is in many cases a possibility. The sin of stealing, for instance, can be in a sense “reversed” by restoring stolen property. But what can compensate for the continuous epistemological condition of ingratitude and unawareness that is also sin? Can the sinner in this case, who suffers precisely because he cannot know to what extent he sins, have any recourse beyond lamentation of his spiritually sick condition?
It is important to note the urgency, and deep sense of spiritual estrangement with which these questions leave the sinner. The soul afflicted by their incessant and demanding cries to be answered suffers without relief. Such is the condition of the sinner, according to Soloveitchik—he endures a spiritual pathology, a sickness of the soul leading to a seemingly eternal separation from God and a feeling of solitude that penetrates to his marrow.
Not only a condition of moral wretchedness, sin is also displeasing aesthetically.[83] Soloveitchik dwells on the sheer ugliness of sin, how it brings out so shamelessly what is lowest in man, leaving him metaphysically devoid of all redeeming qualities, or at least redeeming qualities enough to uplift him. Better had I who have fallen not been born, cries the sinner, for my own diseased existence is intolerable and I am sullied beyond hope of restoration.
What Soloveitchik calls the “ontological” status of man undergoes a change once he has sinned. By “ontological” Soloveitchik here means that the sinner has acquired a new character status. In the terms of Jewish legal discourse, in some cases this means that the sinner is no longer even a credible witness.[84] He has been deprived of whatever qualified him as trustworthy or valid. To some extent, he has left the realm of the living, compromised what makes him human and forfeited all rights to reliability he may have enjoyed.
Most disturbingly, man-sinner has driven away the shekhina, the divine presence, from his midst. Sin is the nullification of what divine being abides in man and the most direct expression of its negation. This means that not only has the divine presence exited man’s domain—indeed the divine has itself been damaged, harmed, wounded. Man, who God allows to stand before Him in all His majesty and glory, has inflicted harm on “Divinity itself” by perverting insensitively He who has trusted him and made Himself vulnerable to him.[85]
As a result of man’s impudence and utter insensitivity to the harm his sin inflicts upon the divine, both man and God are sent into galut, exile, alienated from each other, scattered and banished to the most remote corners of the self, for man, and the universe, for God. “Exile means the absence of a home and the sinner is someone who has lost his way from home.”[86] What the possibility of repentance promises is the great Jewish messianic dream—an “ingathering of exiles.” Borrowing from the mystical philosophy of Chabad Chasidism as formulated by the second rabbinal leader (rebbe) of Lubavitch in his work entitled the Gates of Repentance,[87] Soloveitchik speaks of the ingathering of the fragments of the disparate soul in t’shuva, repentance. He pinpoints this movement as the essence of repentance. A necessary parallel to the repentance “on high” which will take place when all Jews are gathered from the four corners of the earth and united in the Promised Land, the return of the soul from the exile of its own spiritual confusion of sin is a repentance “on low.”
What makes the sinner’s condition so regrettable, so much the object of lament, is actually its paradoxical condition. Soloveitchik suggests that the sinner, though he sees himself as beyond rehabilitation, is also as keenly aware of his former greatness and irrationally longs for it once more. The reintegration of his fragmented personality becomes his fantastic dream. Only in the recognition of his former purity can he appreciate the altogether pitiable state of his current deplorable condition.[88] The sinner’s self-accusation is predicated upon his visceral memory of what was once his justified self-affirmation. The sudden awakening the sinner has while in the midst of his iniquity, the sobering moment in his debauched intoxication, depends directly upon his shock at his own condition. The idea that one like himself, who once stood so magnificently upon the mountain of purity, can have fallen so pitifully into the abysmal valley of defilement fills him with awe, shame, and disbelief. Even as a sinner, man remains a dialectical being for Soloveitchik. He cannot concede, as Tanabe seems to, the utter debasement of man as existing apart from his genuine exaltation.
What is, nevertheless, congruous in both Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s thought is the way in which both depict the expressive, passional lament of the sinner. Both further agree with the proposal that this lament is the first step on the path of repentance. Man-sinner, says Soloveitchik, moves from silence to tza’akah, or inarticulate cry, to t’fila, or formal prayer in his expression of the pain he experiences while in the condition of deep need in which sin leaves him.[89] Prayer emerges from utter wretchedness, from the Ecclesiastical despair of “All is vanity … all things toil to weariness … and there is nothing new under the sun.”[90] Man is a sinner, and his penitential lamentation must be commensurate with the misery of his sinful state.
Sin is a spiritual pathology. The roots of this disease run deep into man-sinner’s spiritual substance, deep into the core of his metaphysical self, sparing no corner its venomous presence. It is true that remnants of his previous exaltation still exist within him. But the job of reviving what has died or been rendered unconscious in man seems so formidable a task that its achievement appears to be no more than a very distant dream. Man reaches an impasse. Again, an insurmountable contradiction looms over us, and plagues us with threats to vanquish our very existence. What is to be made of this negative element in man’s being, so polarly opposed to what is triumphant and divine in him? What can man do outside of submit to his own unhappy demise?
Soloveitchik alludes to an answer to this question first exegetically from the tradition of Jewish religious texts and then conceptually from his own original adaptations of philosophical ideas hinted at in Jewish sources. We will try to do the same, and begin briefly to introduce Soloveitchik’s philosophy of repentance by offering for consideration his explanation from the exegetical tradition.[91]
Soloveitchik explains that the Jewish people are entitled to the city of Jerusalem only on account of the inherent k’dusha, holiness of the city. Jews may lay no claim on a Jerusalem devoid of its holiness. In this context, Soloveitchik explains that the opposite of k’dusha is orba, desolation. They are two mutually exclusive categories. They oppose and contradict each other. Where there is the wholesomeness, orderliness and perspective of k’dusha, there cannot be also the desolation, debris, and chaos of orba. Jerusalem without its holiness is a desolate city, and as such belongs with no certainty to the Jewish people. Or so, Soloveitchik states, one strand of the tradition has always viewed the issue.
The actual claim that the desolation of orba and the order of k’dusha are incompatible comes from a verse in a passage from the book of Leviticus. The passage from the Penanteuch reads, “And I will make your cities a waste … and I will make your sanctuaries into desolation and I will bring the land into desolation and your enemies, that will dwell thereof, will be astonished.”[92] This passage lends itself to two possible interpretations. The first, as well as the one the tradition has accepted most favorably, would read the passage as meaning that k’dusha, or sanctity will be terminated since waste and holiness, desolation and greatness are mutually exclusive. “By destroying the physical sanctuaries I will destroy [also] the idea of k’dusha which hovers over them,” God seems to be saying. Soloveitchik suggests that we might interpret the passage in an entirely different light. It might in fact be that God is saying “I will physically destroy your hallowed houses [but] nevertheless they will remain holy in spite of everything.” It might be that God here declares to man the utter indestructibility and intractability of the holiness that dwells in the city by pointing out that even when it is physically destroyed it will still remain completely sacrosanct. Thus the astonishment of “your enemies”—they will see the physical destruction of the sanctuary but sense its holiness nevertheless and be astonished that the two can coexist.
Notice that this interpretation would not entail diminishing completely the difference or even the opposition between the desolation of orba and the holiness of k’dusha. According to Soloveitchik’s reading, a further distinction is drawn between spiritual and physical destruction which allows for the possibility that both the former and the latter can exist simultaneously without conflict. The sanctuary might be physically destroyed but retain its spiritual sanctity.
Which interpretation—Soloveitchik’s more unusual version, or the tradition’s otherwise more common one—is correct? To answer this question, Soloveitchik calls on the third mishna in the third chapter of the tractate Megilla in the Talmud. In one section of the tractate the question of whether or not the laws of a bet k’nesset, house of assembly, apply to a bet k’nesset that has been destroyed or consumed by fire. The mishna answers unequivocally yes: all those laws which apply to a physically undamaged bet k’nesset apply also to one that has been so damaged; “for it says,” relates the mishna, “Even though they are desolate … the holiness does not disappear.” Applying this idea to our present case, the sanctity of the city of Jerusalem, established eternally (according to Maimonides) by King Solomon dwells in the city undiminished by Jerusalem’s physical desolation.
Using the principle developed from this particular exegetical idea, Soloveitchik extrapolates more generally that “God abides in splendor and in grandeur, in the vast stretches of the universe as well as in the desolation, loneliness, [and] bleakness of the bet hara’a, the house of evil.” The two images of the city—one desolate and the other exalted—are reconcilable with one another, for God is not absent anywhere, and abides everywhere, even in what seems to be desolation. Similarly, Soloveitchik argues, what is desolate in man cannot vanquish the presence of the eternal within him, which remains unaffected by the threat of nihility because it exists in a class all its own.[93]




self-assertion and divine withdrawal

Above we alluded to the beginnings of an authentically stubborn difference between Soloveitchik and Tanabe’s conceptions of sin. The latter sees sin as a negation through and through. Through the “negation of negation” in gratitude, repentance and humility affect an oblique yet crucial affirmation. But the character of this affirmation is entirely negative. In his conception of sin’s dialectical predication on greatness, Soloveitchik hints at an affirmation of the individual that is not understood primarily in terms of his self-negation. Though it influences man’s move toward repentance and his desire again for purity and holiness, sin itself is not synonymous with that move. Though the relationship between negation and affirmation of the self is, from Soloveitchik’s standpoint, one of extraordinary intimacy, as it is for Tanabe, the qualities of affirmation and negation do not seem to reach the level of interpenetration and indistinguishability for Soloveitchik as they do for Tanabe. For Tanabe, as we saw, ôsô or ascension to the Pure Land, is experienced as simultaneous with and indistinguishable from gensô or descent into the world of blind passions. Thus, for Tanabe, in a sense, Buddha is sentient being. Soloveitchik, who comes from a tradition that has emphasized God’s transcendent qualities does not allow for the same kind of simultaneity or self-identity, however oblique, between human and divine.[94]
Sticking instinctively to a motif characteristic of Judaic thought—that which assigns sacrosanct importance to drawing distinctions and maintaining difference (not necessarily, however, at the cost of forfeiting an awareness of interdependence)—Soloveitchik will not allow any one category to collapse into another. Each aspect of man—man-sinner and man-exalted—maintains its own singular origin in a realm related to but not somehow self-identical with its opposite.[95] Tanabe too does not allow for a self-identity of opposites and insists on the utter incommensurability of contradictories. In so doing, he remains loyal to both his Pure Land Buddhist and Neo-Kantian origins. Yet, he has a tendency to speak more directly to the way in which opposites so intimately mediate each the other that they seem to interpenetrate one another. Though he often focuses on difference and separateness, one could argue that he never completely relinquishes the Mahayana Buddhist insistence on the total manifestation of ultimate reality in the immediate world. There is an equally great tradition of dissolving distinctions, dichotomies and dualities in the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy from which Tanabe draws, as there is a tradition of creating and exponentially increasing them in Soloveitchik’s world of Talmudic scholarship. The conflict of these larger religious universes may be responsible for the apparent disparity, or we can say incongruity of Soloveitchik and Tanabe’s thoughts on sin.
The willing self according to Soloveitchik plays an integral, irreducible role in effecting the transformation of repentance. Judaism (and especially in contrast to Christianity) Soloveitchik points out, “has always held that it lies within man’s power to renew himself, to be born and redirect the course of his life.”[96] As a master of creation and potential executor of social justice, man is partnered with God in the quest to rectify the disordered and violent state of the world. In fact, “everything depends on man’s will.”[97] Though it sounds almost antithetical to the idea of repentance as submission of the self as we have presented it thus far, the will of man is in one sense for Soloveitchik a supremely-powerful agent in religious life in general and in repentance in particular.[98]
What allows the man of repentance such certainty in self-assertion? Soloveitchik answers that it is by virtue of the Halakhah and its ideal nature that man is allowed to reenter the world to transform it by means of his own will. With a mastery of the Halakhah, man approaches the real world with an a priori ideal of what it should be according to the tradition of Judaic sources. With these “images of the world which he bears in the deep recesses of his personality,” man proceeds to compare reality to ideal existence and attempts, to whatever extent possible, to make the former conform to the latter.[99] No category of existing thing is excluded from the far-reaching expanse of the Halakhah. Each object in nature or potential condition of man-subject falls into some legal category, and can somehow or another be understood in terms of a normative ideal. The Halakhah deals with every possible detail in the realm of the living and the dead. Since “objectification reaches its highest expression in the Halakhah,”[100] there is nothing unrepresented, neither in the realm of normative ethical action nor even in the realm of human emotion,[101] according to Soloveitchik, within the permutations of legal constructs in the Halakhah. The complete and true universe is the Halakhik universe. In this light, reality is only an anomaly in the ongoing process of actualizing Halakhah.[102]
Ideal Halakhah is made actual through the initiative of man, through his determination and resolution to make it real. Like a theoretical scientist who does not care if his ideal constructs do not match up with reality, Soloveitchik’s halakhic man disregards the apparent impracticability or impossibility of his desired object of realization.[103] He is a man almost intoxicated with the force of his own determination to subordinate the actual and imperfect world to the ideal order of the Halakhah.[104] Halakhic man is an utter master of his ideal universe, so much so that even God is beholden to him, by the covenant He shares with him, to adhere in the holiness he embodies when His decrees are fulfilled in the study and practice of the Halakhah.[105]
In this somewhat hyperbolic fashion, Soloveitchik describes the way in which Judaism urges man to charge forward Halakhically in his own repentance.[106] The Halakhah gives him recourse to change himself, an apparently definite way to respond to the call to repent when it rings out. The Halakhah prescribes a method by which the divine presence might reenter the world of the sinner and purify him again.
How can the Halakhah do this? To answer this question Soloveitchik turns to the mystical concept of tzimtzum, or divine self-contraction. Though this term has a largely mystical interpretation, as first introduced by the Lurianic school of Kabbalistic thought in the twelfth century and later developed by the first Rebbe of the Chabad tradition of Chasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Soloveitchik presents here the halakhic dimension to the mystery of divine self-contraction. According to this standpoint, through the requirements of the Halakhah, infinity can “be contained in the finitude of ‘twenty boards in the north and twenty in the south and eight in the west,’”[107] that go into the construction of the divine tabernacle in the holiest of holies of the Temple in Jerusalem. Through the Halakhah, which “firmly established and clearly delimited laws, statutes, and measures for each and every commandment,”[108] what is essentially utterly immeasurable—that is, the holiness of the divine presence and the power of the divine will—delimits itself into particular precepts and quantified measures. Just as in the world of science where cognitive man turns his sense perceptions of qualities into equations measuring quantities, so too does the divine Absolute subject itself to the self-limiting process of transforming His infinity into a finite, particular order in the Halakhah.
“Halakhic man craves to bring down the divine presence and holiness into the midst of space and time, into the midst of the finite, earthly existence.”[109] By realizing God’s statutes and ordinances in this world, man-sinner has recourse to redeem himself and make the divine presence descend to him. The Halakhah is the normative, exoteric expression of God’s will; but it is up to man to implement it using his own will. The result is that both man and God are redeemed and exalted through it.[110]
The Halakhah is an intermediary between man and the divine. Its completely externalized, legalistic, objective nature makes it accessible and exoteric. Each individual Jew has direct access to the Halakhah. The halakhic man is not dependent upon anyone’s will or subjectivity besides his own. The Halakhah gives him the tools to implement the Creator’s will. He therefore enjoys a certain measure of confidence, a certain surety in his actions. Because of his confidence, halakhic man “is characterized by an almost festive dignity.”[111] He is possessed of a special kind of spiritual power, a sureness which outstrips fear. He is unconfused about the nature of his task and not at all skeptical of the importance of its undertaking—he seeks to redeem himself and the world in which he lives by means of the mediation of the Halakhah.
This is, however, only one side of the dialectic. Repentance, though it is a volitional movement of assertion, requires also that man withdraw in a gesture of negation. Repentance means to retreat. To advance is not a cathartic act, but withdrawal is always for the sake of self-purification.[112] Surrender to a higher, more perfect will becomes the basis for the creation of a transformed self. Man-victor, who often “needs only to reach out and grab everything his heart has anxiously desired,” must in repentance recoil and relinquish his desires for the sake of absolution.[113] If the man of self-assertion can be compared to the triumphant Jacob who wrestles with the divine antagonist in the book of Genesis and defeats him, then the man of self-negation and withdrawal is like the defeated Moses who in the final of his Five Books must resign himself to the fate of never being able to see the land for the sake of which he suffered so long.
Man in the mode of mesirat nefesh, self-sacrifice returns to God through humility and despair.[114] By virtue of the vast discrepancy between the pure, anointed man of God he could be, and the lowly desolate man he has become, man is afforded great knowledge of his own finitude. This sort of knowledge, comparable to Socrates’ notion that ultimate wisdom comes in knowing the despair of ignorance, is man’s point of entry into the penitential continuum. When the ideal cannot be met, and man’s failure dramatically overshadows his success, the only certain, pure knowledge he has is the knowledge of his own finitude in relation to God. Here Soloveitchik agrees with Tanabe’s proposal, that man’s self-negation must become the starting point for his self-regeneration.
Though Soloveitchik makes clear that the movement of withdrawal applies only to failed man and not to man-triumphant, he emphasizes that all men at some time or another face defeat. Even if only on their deathbeds, all men must suffer the incapacitating reality of sin and finitude, and cry out like the psalmist “Out of the depths, I call unto Thee, O Lord.”[115] To be defeated is not an anomalous condition. All living beings must endure failure and live in crisis to some degree. What Judaism teaches, claims Soloveitchik, is just how to “accept failure and not get lost, to be defeated and not be disintegrated, how to be crushed and not be overcome by black despair and resignation.”[116] By prescribing when self-assertion, on the one hand, and withdrawal, on the other, is appropriate—when to seize and when to desist—the Halakhah guides the penitent individual along the path of return to religious purity.
To explain more thoroughly the meaning of withdrawal and self-sacrifice in repentance Soloveitchik again invokes sod hatzimtzum, the mystery of divine self-restriction. Above we saw Soloveitchik’s halakhic appropriation of this mystical concept. Soloveitchik does not, however, leave the mysterious aspect of tzimtzum, or, as it is often translated, divine self-containment, undeveloped. To the mystic, tzimtzum is the act of withdrawal on the part of the divine that made creation itself possible. Creation of a finite world, logically speaking, is an impossibility if one assumes the existence of an infinite God. To add a finite world to a Being who exists infinitely is an absurd proposition. Infinity plus finitude always equals infinity. There is no “room” for finitude in infinity. If God is all-encompassing, all-inclusive, and unlimited, how can God create a universe that is separate from Himself and, unlike God, is finite, dies and operates within the confines of space and time? This being a conceptual impossibility, the mystics say that God metaphorically “retreats” in order to make room for the finite world. He steps aside and recoils for the sake of this world and from His love for it. Without this recoil, this self-sacrifice of God for the existence of the finite world, no universe could indeed exist.
On the one hand, tzimtzum conceals a part of God—i.e., it seems to compromise His exclusive being. On the other hand, it discloses His will and love by making possible the existence of man. Timstzum is a dialectic act of concealment and disclosure. Were God only to conceal Himself in all His aspects from man, man would be completely severed from the source of all existence. Were He only to disclose His being in all its glory, then all the world would be overwhelmed and revert to chaos and void.[117]
Tanabe’s suggestion that the Absolute exists in a self-sacrificial relation to the relative, allowing for the manifestation of Great Compassion, parellels Soloveitchik who says that the “Creation of the world is a sacrificial act on the part of the Almighty.”[118] God gave something of Himself so that there might be light for an other; by creating something with even relative independence, He to some extent challenged His own absolute dominion. “Before the universe came into existence, God was one [and] his name was one. By creating a world in general, and by creating many in particular, God … surrendered His aloneness … to the world.”[119] God allowed the finite physical world to share what was hitherto exclusively in His domain alone—being. Something else was allowed entry into the realm of existence, which, prior to creation, contained nothing but God. “God had to withdraw and contract Himself in order to let a world be born out of nothingness.”[120] And thus the divine withdrawal responsible for the creation of the world becomes also the vehicle by which divine love is expressed.
From the viewpoint of logic, creation is a nonsensical act. The existence of the world is an absurdity because logic will not allow finitude to exist beside infinity. Without this absurdity, however, no world would have come into existence. Why did God take upon Himself the sacrificial burden of such an absurdity? Similar to the sacrificial act of the bodhisattva, who postpones his own enlightenment to reenter the realm of suffering sentient beings, God according to Soloveitchik, undertakes the burden of self-restriction for the sake of His creatures. God sacrificed His own inclusivity, His own “consuming infinity” for the sake of the world, that it might emerge and abide alongside Him. Creation of the world, being the first act God directs toward the other, becomes also the first act of divine kindness.
But more important than why God chooses the act of withdrawal to affect the creation of the world, says Soloveitchik, is what man must do based on the reality of tzimtzum. If man is created, as it were, b’tzelem elokim, in the “image of God,” and imitatio Dei is a primary motif in Judaic thought, as Soloveitchik will want to claim, then the human being, a relative absolute being, must also perform an act of self-limitation. Man must sacrifice his share of the infinite, his seemingly absolute self—not only to allow for the existence of his own creations but to allow for the existence of the human other and the community of others. Without the existential recognition of the other, which means essentially an admonition of man’s own finitude and a withdrawal of the self’s absolute presence, no community is possible. For the Jew, every moment of communal existence is a chastening but revelatory moment. “This recognition is … a sacrificial act, since the mere admission that a Thou exists in addition to the I, is tantamount to tzimtzum, self-limitation and self-contraction.”[121]
Thus Jews are required by the Halakhah to return greetings to those who have extended them—in some cases even during the most sublime moments of prayer, when in communion with God.[122] “If the Holy One, Blessed Be He willed a world to rise from nihility to disorder to bestow His love upon this world, then lonely man should affirm the existence of somebody else in order to have the opportunity of giving love.”[123] God, “the Master of creation, of the great cosmic drama, of the innumerable galaxies and uncharted plains of the universe,” allows man being by virtue of humilitas Dei, “humbles Himself to commune with the individual and abide in the tents of the poor and oppressed.”[124] Man must in turn do the same for his fellow.
Here we have hinted at several key similarities between Soloveitchik and Tanabe. As was made explicit above, Tanabe’s conceptions of the Absolute self-sacrifice which allows for the existence of relative beings, as well as the bodhisattva’s self-sacrifice in his descent to save sentient beings from their own suffering, mirror Soloveitchik’s appropriation of the mystical idea of divine self-contraction. On both accounts the Absolute imposes upon itself irrational restrictions for the sake of the relative out of love and Great Compassion for the relative. For both Tanabe and Soloveitchik irrational divine self-limitation is the source of relative being and the expression of God’s love. It is also the self-negation in this action that is the model for repentance for man—for Tanabe because the bodhisattva becomes indistinguishable from the sentient being in the salvific act and for Soloveitchik because Judaism grounds man’s morality in the obligation to imitate the divine, particularly the traits of divine humility and divine self-restriction.
A second similarity only hinted at above is the assertion that man’s encounter with God is more horizontal than vertical. This similarity points to the extreme importance of action in the world, and the love of man for his fellow, as a medium for the presence of the divine in man’s life. “Duty to man, basically, is service to God,”[125] says Soloveitchik in defiance of the notion that God is approached only directly in a personalistic, mystical or otherwise solitary realm. For Soloveitchik, divinity descends to man, as for Tanabe, only through the horizontal encounter of the relative and the relative.
In order to aspire to a transcendental Absolute, man must concern himself with the particularities of the finite world. In fact, the search for the transcendental is simultaneous with the encounter with the finite; man approaches the infinity of the former through the minutiae of the latter. “By loving the parent, one loves God.”[126] The idea of a covenental community itself implies that somehow in order to meet God man must also meet his fellow man.[127] In fact, man’s meeting with God takes place simultaneously with his meeting with the human other. In the encounter of man and his fellow, each relative being mediates the presence of the sacrosanct for the other and for the community as a whole. Just as God lets go of his loneliness to create the community of relative beings, so must the community of relative beings, each one as an individual, emerge from solitude to create an abode in which God might dwell among them.[128]
The overlap we find here in the thought of Tanabe and Soloveitchik with regard to the horizontal, communal, and ethical nature of man’s encounter with the divine is really a specific instance of an overwhelming concern on the part of both men for the idea of mediation in the relationship between God and man. For Tanabe, this means that no direct encounter of relative and Absolute is possible. The suggestion of such an encounter is ipso facto an impossibility. No authentic dialectic would tolerate such a manifestly illogical meeting. Absolute meets relative only obliquely, in such a way that the relative might glimpse the Absolute through the action of self-negation but never through the affirmation of self-identity. Concretely, this means that the Absolute resides in and only in the interaction of man and man in the species—the mediation of Absolute and relative just is the negative action of the relative being when it acknowledges the other relative being to form community.
Though Soloveitchik speaks at length of the indispensability of the ethical-existential community, and the self-negation of man for his fellow in that community as an agent for the mediation of the divine presence, this is not the only or primary mediatory moment in Judaism according to Soloveitchik. The community for Soloveitchik is not just any community, nor even is it just any community that is also characterized by the attribute of mutual love. It is foremost a covenental community, which understands itself through a text by which it was linked to God millennia ago. The covenant (as well as the sacred tradition of the interpretation of that covenant) becomes the object which mediates man’s encounter with the divine. Talmud torah, study of Torah, becomes the primary mode of mediation between man and God. For Tanabe, mediation happens without an agent of mediation, without an object-mediator. Soloveitchik’s community, on the other hand, cannot exist without the covenant which forms it continuously. Only when Adam absconditus and Eve absconditus turn their minds to a common object of study and self-understanding is communion with God as well as with each other possible at all.
Soloveitchik again borrows from the tradition of so-called rational mysticism in Chabad Chasidism to explain this textually and cognitively mediated encounter between man and the divine. Again citing Rebbe Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the philosophy of Chabad Chasidism, Soloveitchik emphasizes that

when a person knows and comprehends with his intellect … a verdict in accordance with the law as it is set out in the Mishna, Gemara, or Posekim, he has thus comprehended, grasped and encompassed with his intellect the will and wisdom of the Holy One blessed be He.[129]

The Holy One’s wisdom is described as being “clothed in the laws that have been set out for us,” and can be in turn “clothed in the soul” as well through study and cognitive appropriation of these statutes and ordinances.[130]
Soloveitchik asserts that man meets God in the cognitive realm of Halakhah. “The primary approach to God is the ideal-normative-theoretical relationship.…”[131] Here ‘cognitive’ does not imply limitation to the intellectual realm. It also intimates a metaphysical coincidence of man and God via the mutual apprehension of a common object of knowledge.
The conception of man’s meeting with God mediated by talmud torah, the study of Torah, is both a complex one and has solid support in the Jewish textual tradition, dating back to the thought of Maimonides. Maimonides explains the unity of subject and object in the act of apprehension. During the act of cognition, the I-knower and the object-known merge into one entity—this is adut hamaskil v’hamuskal, the unity of the knower and the known.[132] “It is clear that whenever intellect exists in actu, it is identical with the intellectually cognized thing.”[133] By “intellect in actu,” Maimonides means an intellect actually engaged in the act of apprehension versus one that might have the potential to so engage an object but is at the present moment not fulfilling that potential. Man’s knowledge of objects is only imperfect, for he can never know all aspects of any given object completely. Therefore, he identifies only with those objects, and those aspects of objects, with which he is actively engaged. In this sense, there is always something potential or not yet actualized about human knowledge. This fact does not preclude humans from knowing, it simply precludes the possibility that their knowledge of any one thing can be exhaustive.
God’s knowledge, on the other hand, is inexhaustible and infinite. He is the ultimate knower; there is no limit not only to what He can know but also to what He does know. Thus, because a subject-knower in a sense is identical to the object-known, God is everything that He knows. Hu hayodea v’hu hayadua, He is the knower and He is the known, says Maimonides. Most particularly, this means that God’s Torah, the source of divine revelation and of which He has perfect knowledge, is identical to God Himself.
Torah as the object of talmud torah, the study of Torah, becomes the object which mediates man’s encounter with God. Any subject A who studies Torah appropriates it as an object of knowledge, and thus to some extent becomes Torah, proportionate to the degree of the perfection of his knowledge. Subject-knower B also may merge with Torah through learning its words. By association, A and B, using Torah as a mediator, may commune with one another, perhaps we might even say identify partially with each other. If knower B is man and knower A is God, then, talmud torah becomes the medium through which finite humans obliquely approach the divine—the common object of knowledge in their mutual cognition.
The notion of hester panim, or the hiding of the divine face, implies, as does the Buddhist notion of mappô, or the world during the era of the decline of the law, that the divine cannot be approached directly. Both explain the seeming absence of God in terms of the sinful condition of humankind, that such a flawed or limited condition necessitates a certain distance from the Absolute. Restoring relations between finite and infinite requires that man somehow redeem himself to be able to approach God again. Yet the intractability of history, its stubborn persistence, makes it impossible to undo a thing once it has been done, to simply live as though evil did not and does not exist. Yet direct involvement with God requires that such a thing be possible. A mediated encounter with God, one through which man approaches the divine with a sort of oblique subtlety, is thus required.
For both Maimonides (and Soloveitchik,) and Tanabe, God may be known only negatively, and thus indirectly. For the former figure and his contemporary exegitor, the danger of ascribing knowledge of God’s positive attributes to man is that even flawed man’s notion of perfection fails utterly to capture the Omniscient One’s true Perfection. “He knows with a knowledge that is not like our knowledge,” says Maimonides of the Creator.[134] Maimonides’ famous corollary to this rule amounts basically to an assertion that God also exists with an existence that is not like our existence. Radically stated, this means that “God does not exist—the way we exist.”[135] Or, to use Soloveitchik’s rhetorical formulation of the same principle, “If you say God exists and you want to subsume our categories of existence—it is a wrong statement.”[136] That man can have an intimation of what God’s existence might be like, however, is conceded by Soloveitchik. Man might glimpse that knowledge negatively—God is lonely, He is singular and unique. Man might know of God all attributes which basically tell us nothing other than that whatever it may be, God’s essence is unto Himself alone, mysterious and too particular to be easily apprehended by man.
Yet man, made in the image of God, also knows loneliness and singularity, and thus identifies with God negatively in this way. “The flight of the lonely to the Lonely One,” is the adaptation of the Plotinian aphorism which Soloveitchik uses to describe this negative identification of man and God.[137] Both in their mutual solitude, and their mutual desire to escape from that solitude, man and God find a negative basis for meaningful knowledge of each other. United because of a seemingly coincidentally shared negative attribute—the distress of solitude—man and God may have authentic communion without the discrepancy between them, between finite and infinite, sinner and redeemer diminishing in the least. On the contrary, the gap estranging man from God, exacerbating the loneliness of each in relation to the other, seems only to strengthen the foundation of their negative unity.
Precisely the same logic is what allows Tanabe to suggest that the very sin of the sinner guarantees his salvation. The sinner, so distant from the Absolute, may only approach the Absolute through gratitude and self-negation in repentance. However worse a sinner he is, so much the greater also is his action of self-negation and so much the greater his gratitude. Thus the very darkness of his sin turns into the source for the light of his salvation.
Man-sinner, penitential man, according to Soloveitchik, arrives at a similar standpoint. From within the depths of his despair, he calls out to God in the words of the psalmist, “Also darkness before you is not darkness and night is bright as day and darkness and light are one.”[138] He is like Tanabe’s man of repentance, who exclaims in the words of Zendô “The darkness of my own ignorance lights up for me the Great Compassion of the Buddha’s mind; my own inability testifies to my rebirth in the nembutsu.”[139] Somehow for Soloveitchik and Tanabe, and in both cases by virtue of a dialectical mediation, darkness becomes the basis for light, sin the source of a more exalted proximity to God.


elevation

Tanabe sees the negation of sin as the basis for an affirmation in the absolute negation of repentance—i.e., the negation (denouncing) of negation (sin) in repentance becomes the source of the affirmation of the penitential self. As such, sin is indispensable for religious man in his quest to approach the Absolute, for it is negatively through his denunciation of the sinner-self that man finds his single inroad to divine greatness. The desperation-exaltation dialectic is similarly paradoxical according to Soloveitchik, who emphasizes that the further one is from purity, the further along that same person is on the way to achieving purity again through repentance. “On Rosh Hashana [the Jewish new year] … a new calendar year begins, and with every passing day one gets farther away from the starting point… But every passing day is also a return … [to] the Rosh Hashana of the next year.” Each step away from God is a step back in His direction as well.
Homiletically and scripturally, the distance of sin has long shared a place alongside the return of repentance and the promise of redemption. As narrated in the Torah, this is the prophecy that, “In your distress when all these things come upon you … you will return to the Lord your God.”[140] The precise nature of that relationship is one of inverse proportion—the greater the distance from God in sin, the closer our proximity to Him in the return.
To explain what happens in the process of transformation in repentance—how exactly that transformation from impoverished distance from God to fiery proximity to Him—occurs according to Judaism, Soloveitchik uses the language of elevation. Originating from the mystical and Chasidic traditions, the concept of elevation as a paradigm for repentance aligns nicely with Soloveitchik’s insistence on the possibility that the sinner may become a saint through the complex mediation of halakhic norms. What happens when the sinner is edified explains the necessity of sin in the first place—for the sinner is not simply restored to a status he once had but lost through the course of history. The sinner is actually elevated beyond what he once was and, by virtue of his having sinned, becomes something greater that he had been before.
Soloveitchik invokes the idea that man is rewarded in accordance with what he has suffered, and in fact “elevates” the sin of his fragmented self, using it to his advantage ultimately, as it becomes the basis for his later exaltation.[141]

The deep split of the soul prior to its being united may, at times, raise a man to a rank of perfection, which for sheer brilliance and beauty is unequaled by any level attained by the simple whole personality who has never been tried by the pangs of spiritual discord.[142] This ideal is embodied, for instance, in the figure of Job, for when Job surrendered himself to God after having suffered and sinned “the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.[143]

Accordingly, to paraphrase a Talmudic adage, the true tzaddik, righteous man, is not he who never falls, but he who falls seven times and gets up an eighth time as well. Only the sinner, and only by virtue of his having sinned, can come to embody true sainthood.
Religious man needs the downward movement of sin, which coils in like a spring, to propel him to greater heights than he would be able to attain from just launching from flat land. The goal of repentance is “to convert sin into a spiritual springboard for increased inspiration and evaluation.”[144] Comparable to Tanabe’s negation of negation, the movement of repentance does not seek to oppose affirmation to negation, fight good in order to eradicate evil, but rather to manipulate the evil and use it to further advance the causes of the good. The messianic task, says Soloveitchik, “is not to annihilate evil but to transform evil into goodness, sin into sanctity, hatred into love.”[145] Rather than destroy negative forces altogether, the man of repentance sublimates the energy, and indeed the substance of the sin, directing it toward loftier ends. “The very same hunger and zest which drove him to do evil and sin can be utilized to do good and observe the precepts.”[146] Thus the sinner may have access to stores of power and energy for having sinned that his unflawed fellow may not. “To the heights of the penitents even the completely righteous cannot ascend.”[147]
Only from the suffering inherent in sin, from the abrogation of reality it effects, can the affirmation of repentance, the new reality inaugurated by the return, burst forth.[148] Thus, says the Talmud in the tractate Berakhot, “a man must pronounce a blessing over evil just as he pronounces a blessing over good.”[149] For it is from such suffering, according to Soloveitchik, and only therefrom, that his moral character is refined.[150]
The Lord experienced from afar, says Soloveitchik, is dearer and more intriguing to his creatures. Distance mediates a more penetrating engagement. Man faced with the challenge of the secular world lives within a contradictory universe where the contrast of secular and sacred reaffirms and brings into clearer focus his commitment to the latter.[151] Man’s affection for his own beloved pure soul burns more deeply when he is uncertain as to whether he will be able to retain it or not. By giving the religious subject a means of elevation, repentance allows for the persistence of contradiction in his life—even requires the existence of contradiction so that the lower might aspire to the higher—but also gives him a way of understanding and responding to its insistent cries for resolution.
Repentance is hakatuv hashlishi, the “third harmonizing verse,” which allows for the internal reconciliation of he who confesses in despair, “what is man, that Thou are mindful of him,” but who also declares in jubilance that, “Thou has made him [man] but a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honor.”[152] The process of emerging from the world of the first verse in the psalm, and entering the second, without erasing also the disparity between man and God disparaged in the first verse, is the essence of repentance.
Accordingly, the logic of elevation dictates that nothing abides in the world that cannot be redeemed, by virtue of its very nature—whether it is evil or good. Indeed, what is more evil, may in turn deliver greater good for the intensity of its focus in one direction may become the basis for an uncommon drive in the opposite direction. To apply Shinran’s addage to Soloveitchik’s thought it would seem that “Even a good person,” is close to God, “how much more so an evil person.” The difference, we should note, between what Shinran actually says about the certainty of rebirth for the evil in the Pure Land and what Soloveitchik proposes in his assertion that the evil may attain heights to which the perfectly righteous cannot aspire, lies in that Soloveitchik means more to emphasize the possibility of that transformation through a self-initiated repentance, not necessarily its certainty simply by virtue of the sin. That is, for Soloveitchik, sin and the suffering of sin are indispensable for one who wishes to attain the greatest spiritual heights. Sin alone, however, guarantees nothing; nor should a person pursue sin itself, even for the sake of salvation in the long run. Though Tanabe (and Shinran) concur with Soloveitchik in some senses,[153] not wholly dismissing a role for human initiative in redeeming sin, they do emphasize the efficacy of sin itself as an agent for affecting transformation and repentance. Tanabe relies less on the role of the human will in securing that transformation. This difference granted, Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s standpoints with regard to the potential greatness of the sinner in comparison with the perfectly righteous individual reflect a formal as well as substantive similarity in their thought.
The highest existence is a dialectical existence.[154] Here both Soloveitchik and Tanabe seem to agree. The trees of great contradiction bear rich and colorful fruit unmatched by fruit from the trees of other, more tranquil gardens. The treasures of the Torah were unfit for angels. The tempestuous world of internally fragmented man to whom these treasures were given was also unfit for angels. No angel was a slave that he needed God to free him; no angel works that he needs to rest on the Sabbath; angels know no jealousy that they should be honored for not stealing; nor do they cohabit that they might be ordered not to commit adultery. Only man, who exists as both slave and freeman can receive the Holy Book of God and its moral instructions.[155] For only man knows the worlds of both good and evil that he can choose to desist from seeking one and instead pursue the other. Further, it is only man who has been a slave who can fathom what true freedom might be, only the sinner who lives in the midst of the most intense contradictions who can fathom also the intensity and harmony of true purity. It is the lofty challenge of turning a slave people into a free people—a total sinner into a pure saint—which both embodies repentance itself and provides the authentically dialectical conditions for the attainment and expression of holiness in utter transformation.[156]
So complete is the transformation of t’shuva, repentance, for Soloveitchik, that he compares it to a conversion. Man-sinner becomes man-creator and re-forms himself.[157] As Tanabe also requires, the sinner must die to himself, and in that death, in the words of Soloveitchik, is sanctified with a new identity. This “complete breaking away” is represented symbolically in the taking of a new name, both for the penitent and the convert.[158] From the molten flesh of man within the churning caldron that is the torment of repentance, a new individual is cast. Even contracts signed by the man of sin in the past are nullified after his repentance—or rather the party involved is considered as though deceased for the “individual has ceased to be the author of his own deeds,” and has come to live as though having extinguished, and been created anew.[159]
The story of severance with the past is only one dimension of the relationship man-sinner shares with his reborn self. T’shuva means literally a return. In common parlance the verb is used to indicate that one is returning, as in returning home or returning to a place one has just left.[160] There is a notion that in repentance the Jew becomes who he really is, returning to his true personality.[161] Thus, inherent in the idea of repentance is the notion of repetition—both in the sense of returning home from exile, back to one’s native land from the hardship and alienation of being in a foreign land, and in the sense of returning to the place of sin, to the exact same scenario, but resisting temptation the second (or third, or fourth) time around. “Who is a penitent? Rabbi Yehuda said: ‘One who had the opportunity to commit the same transgression again and again and refrained.”[162] Penitent man does not simply blot out a sinful past. By re-encountering it, returning to it, and rectifying it, he transforms it.
A man who repents only when he is fifty or sixty years old, can he simply eliminate his former self, a significant part of his identity? Somehow the sin of his former self must be connected to the righteousness of his newborn self in a way that reduces neither the lowness of the former nor the purity of the latter. Severance and continuity are dialectically and paradoxically intertwined in repentance—in such a way that the energy of sin, the vigor and greed with which man-sinner executed the deed, may be used for the sake of attaining the greatest good for repentant-man in his struggle.[163] The character of the sinner must somehow be re-integrated into the character of the saint so as to make more powerful the righteousness of the latter, just as, when incense was burned at the Tabernacle during the days of the Holy Temple, quantities of both the bitter and sweet smelling incense were burned together, for a small measure of the former intensifies the pungency of the latter. “This is the incense of the Day of Atonement,” say the Sages, a mixture of galbinum and odoriferous spices:

Why is it necessary to adulterate the odoriferous spices with foul-smelling galbinum? So as to demonstrate that it is possible to take something evil and mix it with good spices and, as a result, not only does the galbinum not detract from the sweet smell of the incense, but this mixture of good and bad actually enhances and augments its fragrance.[164]

To demonstrate the salvific potential of negation is a very subtle and profound religious gesture. To say “sin reveals to man the beauty of good,” or “there are new values available to man from the springboard of sin,” is to address the primordial theological question—namely, why do we suffer? Tanabe’s philosophy and Soloveitchik’s unique approach to the problem of suffering and sin emphasize the intractability of the negative element in religious self-understanding, its demanding and self-consuming nature, as well as its highly contradictory and problematic character. Both choose creative ways to integrate the problem into the larger philosophical paradigms to which they are committed. Both also choose to make the sufferer, the one who suffers moment to moment from sin—my sin—a very immediate character whose radical finitude, not despite itself, but indeed because of its very limited nature, paves the path to lofty prospects of spiritual greatness.
[1]. This is admittedly a highly Christianized formulation of the problem of repentance. Continual emphasis on the disparity between man and God is a motif more prevalent in Protestant theology than in Judaism, Pure Land Buddhism or even Catholicism. The formulation of the problem of repentance as such, we will see below, will be somewhat altered to fit more particularly the specific traditions to which Tanabe and Soloveitchik pledge their loyalties. But in the meantime, this particular version of the problem of repentance illustrates very well the way in which radical contradiction can become a central issue in religious life, perhaps in ways not as clearly articulated in our historical or philosophical studies above. We should note, of course, that the particular notion of sin upon which our discussion of repentance is predicated here is also not wholly antithetical to the Jewish tradition as such. In Ezekiel as well as in many writings of the so-called “prophets,” or in the Yom Kippur liturgy, a picture of man-sinner is presented strikingly similar to the one described in this section.
[2]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 238.
[3]. The Vows are enumerated here in accordance with the order Shinran enumerates them in his Kyôgyôshinshô. The reason why their order is non-sequential can be found in the meaning of the Vows. Unfortunately, exploring any more deeply the ramifications of this particular ordering would far exceed the scope of this paper.
[4]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 201.
[5]. Ibid., p. 202.
[6]. Tanabe Hajime quoting Shinran’s Kyôgyôshinshô. Ibid., p. 202.
[7]. Ibid., p. 170.
[8]. Ibid., p. 16.
[9]. Ibid., p. 228.
[10]. Ibid., p. 125.
[11]. Ibid., p. 128.
[12]. Ibid., p. 3.
[13]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 74.
[14]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 152.
[15]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 22.
[16]. Ibid., p. 66.
[17]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 5. Tanabe’s use of terms like “sin” and “grace” might seem to suggest that his reading of Christianity heavily influenced his understanding of Shin Buddhism. It is important to note, however, that while Tanabe is certainly very well versed in the language of Christian theology by the time he writes Philosophy as Metanoetics, it is not until later that he begins a thorough study of Christianity and identifies philosophically with its doctrine.
[18]. Ibid., p. 5.
[19]. Ibid., p. 6.
[20]. Tanabe Hajime quoting Shinran’s Kyôgyôshinshô, Ibid., p. 258.
[21]. Ibid., p. 257.
[22]. Ibid., p. 238.
[23]. Ibid., p. 25.
[24]. Although we speak here of a kind of “coincidentia oppositorum” of human and infinite, it is important to note that we do not mean a complete dissolution of the relative world of form into the formless world of the infinite. For Tanabe, the finite subject never apprehends or identifies with the Absolute directly. He can fathom the boundless Absolute only negatively, in the mediation of Absolute Nothingness. The problem of Absolute Nothingness in the finite’s encounter with the infinite is pursued below.
[25]. Ibid., p. 190.
[26]. This is not a comparison Tanabe makes explicitly, but may aid our understanding of his conception of repentance.
[27]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 210.
[28]. Ibid., p. 220.
[29]. Ibid., p. 210.
[30]. Ibid., p. 236.
[31]. Ibid., p. 211.
[32]. Ibid., p. 27.
[33]. Ibid., p. 137.
[34]. Ibid., p. 214.
[35]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Parashat Truma,” (taped lecture).
[36]. Tanabe Hajime, cited by Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 88.
[37]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 83.
[38]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 175.
[39]. Ibid., p. 88.
[40]. Tanabe Hajime, On Dialectics, p. 73.
[41]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, pp. 234–35.
[42]. Ibid., p. 278.
[43]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 43.
[44]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 7.
[45]. Tanabe Hajime, The Demonstratio of Christianity, p. 133. It may seem odd that Tanabe, who we have claimed is a Buddhist thinker, here resorts to the language of “God.” By the time Tanabe is writing the Demonstratio of Christianity, he has made a significant turn toward Western Christian traditions, interested in what he believed was its strong social ethic. As he becomes more immersed in reading the gospels, he also adopts the theological terminology of Christianity. Tanabe has a tendency to appropriate both in substance and in style his objects of study.
[46]. Ibid., pp. 133, 194.
[47]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 55.
[48]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, p. 280. Here Tanabe cites a text quoted by Shinran that can be traced back to Donran’s Oojôronchû.
[49]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 102.
[50]. Johannes Laube, “The meaning of gyô (practice) according to the Buddhist theologian Shinran and the philosopher Tanabe,” p. 109.
[51]. This is the sin of “assurance of one’s own salvation and pride in one’s trust in the vow of Amida Buddha.” Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 12.
[52]. Ibid., p. 15.
[53]. Ibid., p. 16.
[54]. Ibid., p. 252.
[55]. Ibid., p. 189.
[56]. Shinran, Tannishô, p. 8.
[57]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 57, 132.
[58]. Ibid., p. 133.
[59]. Tanabe Hajime, The Demonstratio of Christianity, p. 129.
[60]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 271.
[61]. Ibid., p. 22.
[62]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 98.
[63]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 274.
[64]. Ibid., p. 125.
[65]. Ibid., p. lix.
[66]. Tanabe Hajime, The Logic of Species, p. 285. See also Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 260.
[67]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 107.
[68]. Ibid., p. 197.
[69]. Ibid., p. 133.
[70]. Ibid., p. 49. Soloveitchik’s appropriation of the mystical concept of elevation will be more seriously explored below.
[71]. Ibid., p. 211.
[72]. Ibid., p. 241.
[73]. Ibid., p. 47.
[74]. Ibid., p. 205.
[75]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 6.
[76]. Ibid., p. 257.
[77]. Ibid., p. 257.
[78]. Ibid., p. 149.
[79]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Shiurei Harav, p. 73.
[80]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 152-3.
[81]. Ibid., p. 63.
[82]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 107.
[83]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 21.
[84]. Ibid., p. 51.
[85]. Ibid., p. 82
[86]. Ibid., p. 306.
[87]. Sha’arei Hat’shuva.
[88]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Shiurei Harav, p. 89.
[89]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Redemption,” p. 65.
[90]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 85. Soloveitchik citing Ecclesiastes (1: 1-9).
[91]. The following exegesis is adapted from Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Relationship between sedras and haftoras—sefer v’yikra,” (taped lecture). All citations in the next three pages which are not footnoted refer to this tape.
[92]. Leviticus (26:31–32).
[93]. The importance of the above explanation is that it hints at the kind of assumptions and the methodology Soloveitchik uses ultimately to resolve the problem of sin with the possibility of repentance. We will explore these assumptions and that methodology with greater care below.
[94]. It is, of course, crucial to emphasize that Tanabe is insistent on the impossibility of a self-identity of Buddha and sentient being in the immediate self-consciousness of the latter. He will not tolerate any logic that allows for Nishida’s “self-identity of absolute contradictories.” He does, however, clearly acknowledge the indeterminacy of the distinction between Amida’s identity and that of relative man.
[95]. This topic is further pursued below.
[96]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 182.
[97]. Ibid., p. 240.
[98]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 76.
[99]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 17.
[100]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Mind, p. 85.
[101]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 78.
[102]. Ibid., p. 28.
[103]. Ibid., p. 29.
[104]. Ibid., p. 63.
[105]. Ibid., p. 78.
[106]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Man and the Judaic Approach to Man” (taped lecture).
[107]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 47.
[108]. Ibid., p. 55.
[109]. Ibid., p. 41.
[110]. Ibid., p. 71.
[111]. Ibid., p. 76.
[112]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Interpretation of aggada—Sanhedrin 7,” tape #2 (taped lecture).
[113]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Catharsis,” p. 44.
[114]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 245–247.
[115]. Psalms (130:1).
[116]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “K’dusha v’malkhus” [sanctity and majesty], (taped lecture).
[117]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 151.
[118]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “K’dushas hayom” [the sanctity of the day], (taped lecture).
[119]. Ibid.
[120]. Ibid.
[121]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Community,” p. 15.
[122]. For instance, Soloveitchik points out that sometimes Jews are even required by the Halakhah to extend greetings to people during the recitation of the sh’ma prayer. See Talmud Bavli, tractate Berakhot 13a.
[123]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Community,” p. 16.
[124]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #3, (taped lecture).
[125]. Ibid.
[126]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Marriage,” (taped lecture).
[127]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 45.
[128]. Ibid., p. 60.
[129]. Rabbi Shneur Zalman, Tanya, p. 19.
[130]. Ibid.
[131]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 87.
[132]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Shurei Harav, p. 92, and “Dual Aspects of Man” (taped lecture). Soloveitchik also speaks of adut haohev v’haahuv, the unity of the lover and the beloved. He even suggests that this emotional bond to Torah might surpass in importance and intensity the intellectual bond which we explore here.
[133]. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, p. 164.
[134]. Ibid., p. 144.
[135]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions” tape #2, (taped lecture). Soloveitchik is quoting Maimonides.
[136]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #2, (taped lecture).
[137]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” tape #2, (taped lecture). Plotinus speaks of the “flight of the lonely to the lonely.”
[138]. Psalms (139:12).
[139]. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, p. 252.
[140]. Soloveitchik citing Deuteronomy (30:1–2). The implication is “when these curses come upon you.” [Emphasis added.]
[141]. The idea that man is rewarded in accordance with what he has suffered may be found in Avot (5:25).
[142]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, p. 4.
[143]. Job (42:10) in Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 64. Soloveitchik believes Job’s sin was his unconcern for the welfare of anyone outside his immediate circle. That is why, says Soloveitchik, we are told that Job is blessed again by God only directly after he prays for his friends. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “K’dusha v’malkhus” (taped lecture).
[144]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kodesh and Chol,” p. 25.
[145]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 168.
[146]. Ibid., p. 262.
[147]. Talmud Bavli: Tractate Berakhot 34b.
[148]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” p. 56.
[149]. Talmud Bavli; Tractate Berakhot 65a.
[150]. Joseph Soloveitchik, Reflections of the Rav I, p. 189.
[151]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kodesh and Chol,” p. 26.
[152]. Psalms (8:4), (8:6). Soloveitchik makes this point in Halakhic Man, p. 68. The idea of a “third verse” that reconciles two contradictory passages is codified as the last of Rabbi Yishmael’s “Thirteen Principles” by which the Torah is elucidated. (See the introduction to Sifra.)
[153]. For instance, Tanabe would agree that seeking out sin for the purpose of transcending it and attaining spiritual heights through repentance is a deluded and destructive proposition.
[154]. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 88.
[155]. Talmud Bavli; Tractate on Shabbat 88b-89a. Soloveitchik makes this point in Halakhic Man, p. 33.
[156]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Leadership,” (taped lecture).
[157]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 218.
[158]. Ibid., p. 57.
[159]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Redemption,” p. 63.
[160]. It is also interesting to note that the word t’shuva also means “response,” as in a response to a question.
[161]. Joseph Soloveitchik, “Redemption,”p. 69.
[162]. Talmud Bavli; Tractate on Yoma 86b.
[163]. Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, p. 256.
[164]. Ibid., p. 264.

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).

Bibliography

Kyoto School Philosophy,
Japanese Buddhism and Japanese History

Cook, Haruko Taya, and Cook, Theodore F. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: New Press, 1992.
Dower, John W. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Feifer, George. Tennozan: the Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992.
Franck, Frederick. The Buddha Eye: an Anthology of the Kyoto School. New York: Crossroad, 1991.
Havens, Thomas H. R. Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1978.
Heisig, James W., and Maraldo, John C. Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, ,1994.
Ienaga Saburô. The Pacific War: 1931–1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Laube, Johannes. Dialektik der absoluten Vermittlung. Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1984.
—————. “The meaning of gyô ‘practice’ according to the Buddhist theologian Shinran and the philosopher Tanabe” In European Studies on Japan. Edited by Ian Nish and Charles Dunn, pp. 105–110. Kent, England: Paul Norbury Publications, 1979.
Nishida Kitarô. An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1987.
Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarô. Translated by Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
—————. Religion and Nothingness Translated by James Heisig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
—————. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. Translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Ozaki, Makoto. Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe: according to the English translation of the seventh chapter of the demonstration of Christianity. Atlanta, Ga.: Amsterdam, 1990.
Shillony, Ben-Ami. The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1991.
Shinran. Kyôgyôshinshô. Kyoto, Japan: Hongwanji International Center, 1983–1990, v. I–IV.
—————. Letters of Shinran. Kyoto, Japan: Hongwanji International Center, 1978.
—————. Notes on the Essentials of Faith Alone. Hongwanji International Center, 1979
—————. Notes on the Inscription of the Sacred Scrolls. Kyoto, Japan: Hongwanji International Center, 1981.
—————. Tannishô, Kyoto, Japan: Hongwanji International Center 1995.
Tanabe Hajime. The Demonstratio of Christianity, translated by Ozaki Makoto in Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe: according to the English translation of the seventh chapter of the demonstration of Christianity. Atlanta, Ga: Amsterdam, 1990.
—————. “The Logic of The Species as Dialectics,” translated by David Dilworth and Tairo Sato’. Monumenta Nipponica: Studies in Japanese Culture XXIV, no. 3, pp. 273–88.
—————. On Dialectics Translated by Kim Choon Sup in “Dialectical Method.” PhD. diss., Columbia University, 1951, pp. A16–A84.
—————. Philosophy as Metanoetics. Translated by Takeuchi Yoshinori. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Ueda Yoshifumi, and Hirota, Dennis. Shinran: An Introduction to His Thought, Kyoto, Japan: Hongwanji International Center, 1989.
Unno Taitetsu, ed. The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.




Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Jewish History, and Inter-faith Dialogue

Angel, Rabbi Marc D., ed. Exploring the Thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Hoboken, N.J., 1997.
Blidstein, Gerald. “On the Jewish People in the Writing of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.” Tradition 24, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 21–43.
Borowitz, Eugene. Choices in Modern Jewish Thought. New York: Behrmann House, 1983.
—————. “The Typological Theology of Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik.” Judaism 15 (1966).
Cobb, John and Ives. Christopher, eds. The Emptying God: A Buddhist, Jewish, Christian Conversation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990.
Cohen, Hermann. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, Werke. Vol. 6. System der Philosophie. Erster Teil. Hildesheim, Germany: 1977.
Diner, Hasia. A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration 1820–1880, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Endelman, Todd M. Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656–1945. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 113.
Fox, Marvin. “The Unity and Structure of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Thought.” Tradition 24, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 44–65.
Hartman, David. A Living Covenant. N.Y.: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1985.
Heifetz, Harold, ed. Zen and Hasidism: The Similarities between Two Spiritual Disciplines. Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1978.
Hyman, Paula. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995.
Ives, Christopher. Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe. Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press, 1995.
Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 257.
Kamenetz, Harold. The Jew in the Lotus: a Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSan Francisco, 1994.
Kaplan, Lawrence. “The Religious Philosophy of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik.” Tradition 14, no. 2 (1973): 43–64.
Kaplan, Marion A. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Katz, David. Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870. New York: Shocken Books 1978.
Katznelson, Ira, ed. Paths of Emancipation. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Kolitz, Zvi. Confrontation: The Existential Thought of Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1992.
Klier, John Doyle. Russia Gathers her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825. De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.
Kurzweil, A. The Modern Impulse of Traditional Judaism. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1985.
Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
—————. The Mishneh Torah. Translated by Moses Hyamson. Palestine: Azriel Printing Press, 1937.
Munk, Reiner. “Joseph B. Soloveitchik on Hermann Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,” Torah and Wisdom. Edited by Ruth Link, pp. 147–173. Salinger. New York: Shengold Publishers, 1992.
Oppenheimer, M. “Kierkegaard and Soloveitchik.” Judaism 37 (1988).
Peli, Pinchas. “Hermeneutics in the Thought of Rabbi Soloveitchik, Medium or Message,” Tradition 23, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 9–31.
Ravitsky, Aviezer. “Rabbi J.B. Soloveitchik on Human Knowledge Between Maimonidean and Neo-Kantian Philosophy.” Modern Judaism 6, no. 2 (1986): 157–88.
Sacks, Jonathan. “Alienation and Faith.” Tradition 13, no. 4, and 14, no. 1 (1973): 137–62.
Sherman, Moshe, and Wolf, Jeffrey R., eds. Kavod ha-Rav. New York: Yeshiva Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, 1984.
Soloveitchik, Yosef Dov Baer. “A Tribute to the Rebbetzen of Talne.” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 73–83.
—————. “Catharsis.” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 38–54.
—————. “The Community.” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 7–24.
—————. “Confrontation.” Tradition 6, no. 2 (1964): 5–29.
—————. Halakhic Man. Translated by Lawrence Kaplan. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983.
—————. Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
—————. “Kol Dodi Dofek—It is The Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh.” Translated by Lawrence Kaplan in Theological and Halakhic Responses on the Holocaust Edited by Bernhard H. Rosenberg and Fred Heuman. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav/RCA, 1993.
—————. The Lonely Man of Faith. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1965.
—————. “Majesty and Humility.” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 25–37.
—————. Man of Faith in the Modern World: Reflections of the Rav II. Edited by A. Besdin. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1989.
—————. On Repentance: In the Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Edited by Pinchas H. Peli. Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984.
—————. “Redemption.” Tradition 6, no. 2 (1964): 63.
—————. “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah.” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 55–72.
—————. Reflections of the Rav: Lessons in Jewish Thought adapted from the Lectures of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Edited by R. A. Besdin. Hoboken, N. J.: Ktav Publishing, 1979.
—————. “Sacred and Profane: Kodesh and Chol in World Perspective.” Gesher 3, no. 1 (1966): 5–29.
—————. “The Synagogue as an Institution and as an Idea.” In Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Volume. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House, 1980.
Soloveitchik, Shulamith Meiselman. The Soloveitchik Heritage. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House, 1995, p. 113.
Solowiejczyk, Josef. Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen. Berlin, Germany: Reuther and Reichard, 1932.
Stanislawski, Michael. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: the Transformation of Jewish society in Russia, 1825–1855. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983, pp. 3–96.
Zalman, Schneur. Lukutei Amarim Tanya. Translated by Zalman I. Posner. London: Soncino Press, 1973.


Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lectures on Audio Tape
arranged chrnologically

“Religious Definition of Man and his Social Institutions,” 7 tapes, November 1, 1958.
“K’dusha v’malkhus” [Holiness and Majesty], March 19, 1969.
“Dual Aspects of Man,” 2 tapes, March 7, 1971.
“The Dilemma of the American Jew,” April 16, 1972.
“The Rebellion of Korah,” RCA Dinner, June 1, 1973.
“Man and the Judaic Approach to Man,” 1973.
“K’dushas ha’yom v’yom tov” [Holiness of the Day and Holidays], December 21, 1973.
“Leadership,” Klavan Dinner, June 1, 1974.
“Interpretation of Aggada—Sanhedrin 7,” 2 tapes, RCA Convention, 1977.
“Relationship between sedras and haftoras—sefer vayikra,” May 22, 1979.
“Unity of Generations—pidyon haben,” 1979.
“[Parashat] Trumah Binyan Bais Hamikdash.” (No further information available.)