Tanabe Hajime and the Hint of a Dharmic Finality

The Japanese philosopher, Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) is taken up as an example of a thinker who, like the conference question, straddles intellectual histories East and West. Of all the Kyoto School philosophers, it was he who took history most seriously. He not only criticized Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist notions of teleology and the modern scientific myth of “progress” on their own ground, but went on to counter these views of history with a logic of emptiness grounded in Buddhist philosophy. The essay concludes with an attempt to uncover the tacit assumption that allows Tanabe to make his arguments.