Ozaki, Makoto. "Religion and Politics in Tanabe's Triadic Logic of Species." Process Thought and East Asian Culture: Social Science, Natural Science, 25-30.[Conference paper presented at The 5th International Whitehead Conference] Seoul, South Korea, May 28.2004.

Abstract

Tanabe Hajime, the Kyoto School philosopher of modern Japan, proposes a new idea of the relationship between religion and politics in terms of the triadic logic of species that is motivated by the religious moment of repentance. Even the state existence has the inherently radical evil as in the case of the individual person, due to its duality of the species level of being. This means that the state existence is on the way of actualization of the genus-like university, while always involving in the regression into the past substantive being which prevents it from realizing its own university. In other words, the state existence is not absolute as such but rather a balanced being between ideality and reality, absolute and relative. This entails that politics is in need of perpetual reformation in connection with the religious act of repentance for sin and evil deeply lurked in human beings from the time immemorial. Tabane’s Logic of Species as the dialectic elucidates the negative mediation of politics and religion from the metanoetic perspective and sheds a new light on the relation of world religious and politics today.

The state can transcend its own peculiar definiteness on the level of species and go a step further to participate in the universality of humankind, as long as it is a being as mediated by the religious principle of Nothingness, i.e., a negative existence in the form of being qua nothingness. In other words, it is the expedient or balanced being between the genus-like universality and individuality. The state is not merely an assembly of an infinite number of individual persons. But it aims at unification of the states, i.e., a worldly unity, as the self-manifestation of the religious principle of Nothingness through the practice of absolute negation of the state particularity. In concreto, whereas space is always a limited area, time refers to unification through conversion in history, brought about the political constructive practice of the state or a union of states, mediated by the limited space. A union of plural states is to be directed towards a unification of the world from the religious standpoint of Absolute Negation. This represents the concrete practice by which politics and religion are to be unified through conversion in negation in a higher dimension. In the end, Tanabe asserts that today’s politics on a worldwide scale should participate in the salvation of humankind through the mediation of rewarding love to the world religion that is to be ideally realized as a result of a mutual transformation of Buddhism and Christianity.   

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