Phenomenology Reaching Its Limits: Tanabe and Lévinas in 1934

Abstract

In the list of innumerable philosophers to whom Hajime Tanabe refers for the elaboration of his complicated thought, Emmanuel Lévinas never appears. However, as some studies have already noticed, a kind of similarity can be found between their ways of redefining the philosophy itself after the historical catastrophe of the Second World War – the radical criticism of the philosophy of Being and the insistence upon the original sociability determined by the concept of the absolute Other. This parallelism between two philosophers should nevertheless be traced back to the 1920s when both went to Germany to study phenomenology and “discovered” Heidegger. In spite of the enormous influence they received from his philosophy, they commenced to criticize it frontally from the beginning of 1930. The beginning of this convergence is historically dated. It was in 1934 that Tanabe published “The Logic of the Social Being” to understand “the compelling power of the racial state”, while Lévinas published “Reflexions on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”. Try a parallel reading of their paths in order to clarify what is at stake in Tanabe’s “logic of the species”, that is the aim of this article.