死と実存協同 : 田邊の晩年の思想をめぐって

Abstract

The term “existential communion” may sound a bit strange, but it is the concept that forms the core of Tanabe's philosophy in his final years. It was a thought that delved into things from the angle of the relationship with death and thereby reached a special breadth and depth. As Nishitani Keiji writes, “It reveals a new aspect of things, an aspect that is not revealed in the history of Western philosophy. In its originality it has a very great significance.” (Tanabe Hajime's Collected Works (Tokyo : Chikuma shobō, 1968), Vol. 13, p. 677) In this article I try to investigate how this “existential community thought” is connected with death. Death can be viewed from many angles, but in Tanabe's later thought an unprecedented view of death comes to the fore. The center of the inquiry shifts from “my death” to “your death” or, in the words of V. Jankélévitch, from “death in the first person” to “death in the second person.” My death melts away in the look at your death and is seen in the overlap with your death. At the same time, the world of the “intercourse” of human beings, which Tanabe then calls the world of existential communion, appears in the center of Tanabe's thought with a new aspect. This world, which earlier had been grasped as a communion of living beings, is no longer limited to living beings only but expands to embrace also the dead. It comes now to be conceived as a world of communion that embraces life and death in interpenetration. While death is generally thought of as the loss of communion, Tanabe's thought now penetrates deeply into a communion that opens up with death as its point of origin. The quintessence of the thought of the later Tanabe lies in the fact that he grasps the self in the midst of a community that comprises also the dead. It can be said that also Nishida Kitarō reflected on a communion that has the separation, absence, and distance implied by death as essential ingredients, and tried to grasp it through the concept of “inverse polarity” (gyaku taiō). Tanabe, however, in his pursuit of the proper characteristics of such a communion, discovered its concrete form in the Christian “Communion of Saints” and in the Buddhist “Bodhisattva Path.” The special characteristic of a communion that embraces the dead is that it is freed from the closedness and egoism that unavoidably affect a community of the living only, which has no eye for death. The community is thereby elevated from a specific to a universal one. A community that excludes the dead reckons with magical interference by the dead and with evil spirits, and therefore evokes the ideas of vengeful spirits and their pacification. In a community that embraces the dead, on the other hand, the “Holy Spirit” is at work between the living and the dead; the community is thereby purified and becomes an “inspiration-filled reality.” In the history of religion one can find many forms of such a community that has the idea of death as its central reality, and it can be said that they contain deep insight and wisdom about the evils inherent in a community of the living only and about the way to overcome those. The reason why, in his final years, Tanabe propounded a “philosophy of death” is that at present the philosophy of life is bankrupt. Philosophy of life, by seeing life only from life, by having lost the eye to see the other dimension that pervades life, invites the impoverishment of life and becomes the source of various diseases and alienations that plague present-day society and culture. To expand the scope of our vision and to come to a way of thinking that can see life from the death that is immanent in life, that was the central intent of Tanabe's final opus, “Philosophy of Life or Dialectics of Death?”

Tanabe called the world of existential communion, wherein living and dead go freely in and out and life and death interpenetrate, a “monadological existential communion.” As such, this world has the possibility of throwing new light on the traditional problems that surround the core of religion. In this article, the themes of “Kingdom of God” (of Christianity), “Pure Land, ” “Original Vow of the Tathāgata, ” “Alaya-vijnāna” (of Buddhism), “anamnesis, ” and so on, are pursued in connection with that thought of the later Tanabe.