Tanabe Hajime

Philosophy as Metanoetics

Trans. by Takeushi Yoshinori, James W. Heisig, Valdo Viglielmo
Revised edition with a new biographical essay by Takeshi Morisato]

Written in the closing months of World War II, Philosophy as Metanoetics seeks to respond to the failure of Japan’s philosophical tradition to face up to the political and cultural realities that had landed the country in the war. It calls for nothing less than a complete and radical rethinking of the philosophical task itself. To perform this “absolute critique” of philosophy, while at the same time protecting it from the specter of nihilism, the author embraces what he calls metanoetics: a letting-go of the self’s own power so that it can be transformed by
the power of absolute nothingness. This is a powerful, original work, showing vast erudition in areas of both Eastern and Western thought.

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“This is a remarkable volume…. Already I can feel how deeply it will influence me in my future work…. The translation is itself a work of art; it flows in such clear, smooth and flawless English, and its content is so elegantly articulated and so intelligible, that it makes one quite forget that this is a translation from a vastly different language and style of thinking.” —Langdon Gilkey

“This book shows Tanabe’s superior philosophical originality. It is high time Tanabe’s thought is introduced to the West. —Joseph Kitagawa

“Tanabe’s Philosophy as Metanoetics can only be described as a monumental work in the philosophy of religion.” —Steve Odin

“Philosophy as Metanoetics is the 1986 translation of a remarkable work written near the end of World War II, when Japan was succumbing to the military might of America…. The result is a critique of reason that takes us to the borderland of rational thinking and beyond, into a paradoxical realm that surpasses the rational in the very act of bringing it to fruition.” —Steven M. Rosen