Comparative Philosophy: East-West Dialogue after Nishida

Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), who succeeded Nishida as professor of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University in 1928 and held the chair until 1945, developed the most systematic internal alternative to basho logic in his "logic of species" (shu no ronri), elaborated across essays of the 1930s, which inserted the mediating category of the "species" — the nation or ethnic community — between Nishida's universal "genus," the place of absolute nothingness, and the individual, in an attempt to give historical and social mediation a role Tanabe judged absent from Nishida's more static basho. After Japan's defeat, in a dramatic personal and philosophical turn, Tanabe published Zangedo to Shite no Tetsugaku (Philosophy as Metanoetics, 1946, translated into English in 1986), publicly repenting his own prior wartime nationalism and proposing a philosophy grounded not in rational self-power (jiriki) but in the Pure Land Buddhist concept of tariki, reliance on Other-power, as the only honest starting point after moral and philosophical failure.