Tanabe Hajime established the logic of species as his own philosophical conception, sharply distinguished from the logic of nothing [無の論理] of his mentor, Nishida Kitarō, through which his thinking had passed. Having encountered Marxism’s historical materialism, which at the time was enjoying great popularity, he brought the practical dynamism he had learned from it to the logic of nothing.

There is a tendency to view the logic of species as a more or less totalitarian state philosophy and an ideology that supported Japan’s war effort. While in previous logical treatments of genus—species—individual species had possessed the role of connecting genus and individual, in Tanabe’s conception this species is indeed likened to the ethnic nation-state that mediates the ideal human nation-state (genus) and the individual person (individual). Seen from the perspective of the setting of the period, there is no doubt that the logic of species was completed under the shadow of militarism as it deepened from the Sino-Japanese War into the Second World War and with an awareness sensitive to these circumstances. Nevertheless, it is not as though Tanabe simply showered praise on the ethnic nation-state (in his case Japan). While on the one hand he criticized the individualism and liberalism of the modern West, he also argued resolutely against ethnic nationalism (Japanism) [民族主義 (日本主義)], the vehement discourse and actions of which had silenced and oppressed many people.

In Shu no ronri no benshohō [『種の論理の弁証法』The Dialectic of the Logic of Species] (1947), published after the end of World War II, Tanabe recalls the period in which he developed the logic of species as being from 1934 to 1940. The essay excerpted in this book, “Shu no ronri no imi wo akirakanisu” [「種の論理の意味を明にす」“Clarifying the Meaning of the Logic of Species”], appeared in 1937, and in it one might say that the logic of species has by and large been completed. Tanabe would later reach the standpoint of “the philosophy of metanoetics” [懺悔道の哲学; “philosophy of the way of repentance”], but this is a philosophy that plumbs further the idea of absolute mediation forming the core of the logic of species and in this sense lies within its theoretical sphere.

1 The Source of “Species”—Why Can the State Coerce the Individual?

So, without any further introduction, let us dive into our text, “Clarifying the Meaning of the Logic of Species.”

In this essay Tanabe discusses his motivations for formulating the logic of species by dividing them into the practical and the theoretical. In sections one and two he addresses his practical motivations. He then shifts to his theoretical motivations in section three, and in section four explains the kind of revisions he made to the concept of species through the process of adding theoretical reflections to the conception of the logic of species that had sprung from his practical motivations.

We begin by looking at section one. What were the practical motivations behind the logic of species? Tanabe answers this question up front. His answer is also very predictable: noticing the “rise” of the “coercive power of ethnic states” “recently in various states,” he had a philosophical interest in the question of the justification of state control. It is common knowledge as a matter of world history that during the 1930s, when the logic of species was being developed, the trend towards totalitarianism intensified in the so-called Axis nations such as Japan and Germany, and civic freedoms were being stripped away by statist control. It is also well known that during this period the slogan “blood and soil [Blut und Boden]” was being shouted in Nazi Germany. We must take note, however, of the fact that the accumulated contradictions of modern society would inevitably be exposed even on the side of the Allied nations that had allegedly achieved democracy, above all the United States of America. Recent studies have shown how the New Deal policies enacted under President Roosevelt introduced principles of a different nature than had been implemented in previous democracies in order to deal with these structural contradictions.

Even in today’s Japan, where we feel state control to be a thing of the distant past and state authority rarely seems to come to the surface, political and social order does indeed exercise “coercive power” [強制力], whether in the shadows or in broad daylight. This was made particularly clear with the legislation of the national flag and anthem. And facing the phenomenon of truancy in the field of education, we cannot avoid the question of why children must be coerced (the essence of this coercion is the same even when rephrased in terms of children being “guided” or “persuaded”) into studying a fixed curriculum. In this sense we can say that Tanabe’s inquiry into the source of the “coercive power of the ethnic state” indicates a concern for an exceptional and actual problem. Nevertheless, the fact that he utters “ethnic state” in one breath, and views “ethnic group” [民族] and “state” [国家] as essentially identical, raises our initial suspicion. If we tentatively follow Benedict Anderson in characterizing the modern nation state as “an imagined community,” was Tanabe unable to detect the imaginariness of the modern communities referred to as nation states? Was he maintaining, in the shadow of his confrontation with the Japanists [日本主義者], the mythological fabrication of the “Yamato [Japanese] people ruled by an unbroken line of the imperial family”? Although in the first section of this text he explains how even “species” becomes a whole society only by being “negated” and avoids connecting ethnic identity directly to national identity, serious doubts remain.

So from where did the conception of “species” originate? Tanabe mentions the names of French sociologists (chief among them Émile Durkheim), religious studies scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and French philosopher Henri Bergson. Durkheim points out that a social group is not simply a gathering of individuals, but a “chose” [もの thing] of a different dimension than the individual. From this Tanabe concludes that society constitutes a “substratum” [基体] for individuals. Inspiration regarding the species society came from Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of totem tribes. Totemism is a belief and social system, seen in so-called “undeveloped” peoples of North and South America and elsewhere, in which a clan regards a particular animal, for example, as its ancestor and recognizes it as its guardian (its “totem”). Along with identifying themselves with the totem, clan members identify themselves through the totem with the tribe as a whole. Lévy-Bruhl saw operating here a distinctive logic whereby the parts that are individuals “share” [分有する] the whole that is society.

2 The Logic of the Species Tribe [種族 Ethnic Grouping] and the Negation of Self-interest

So why was Tanabe fixated on the “species tribe”? Is it not too much of a stretch to superimpose the clans of primitive societies on modern and contemporary nation states? Tanabe himself acknowledges this criticism. Nonetheless, encouraged by the fact that Bergson’s Le deux sources de la morale et de la religion had distinguished between closed and open societies and positioned the totem society as representative of the former, Tanabe concludes that totemic elements remain even in today’s societies. He was further emboldened by the ongoing reevaluation of myths and legends amidst the rising tide of ethnic nationalism. “Seeing the religious myths and legends of primitive society gradually occupy an important position in recent nationalist cultural studies and their resurgence undertaken as a matter of intellectual policy, I cannot help but believe, now as before, that my amateur intuition was not necessarily mistaken.” As a layman in sociology and religious studies, to find support for his own focus on the species tribe in a political trend that can, to begin with, be described as reactionary, perhaps was not necessarily an appropriate strategy to adopt in legitimizing the philosophical theory of the logic of species.

Compared to philosophy, the discipline of sociology is a much newer field of study, having been created by Comte in the nineteenth century and developed by the aforementioned Durkheim. Tanabe was aware that while he was drawing on the results generated by this new field, he was also simplifying them from his own philosophical perspective. In any case, however, even if society’s coercive power over individuals originates in the species substratum (in other words, the emergence of a coercion that is natural), this does not yield an explanation of a morally binding force. For as clarified by Kantian philosophy, morality takes the autonomy of the individual as its premise, and for society (the state) to simply compel individuals to do this or that by force would be nothing but violence and would not establish morality. (Indeed, with a naturally occurring coercion we would not only fail to account for morality, but presumably even the binding force of legal norms.) Tanabe thus turns to the binding force of the species substratum, and calls for an individual with sufficient power to repel it. This individual, however, must self-negate its own power. In Kantian philosophy, the phenomenal self in the field of “theoretical reason” [theoretische Vernunft] runs into antimonies, learns the limit of its own cognitive capacity, and must inevitably negate itself. But by advancing to its extremity, a new possibility—“subjective self-affirmation”—is opened, this time in the domain of “practical reason” [praktische Vernunft], and Tanabe believed that a “conversion through absolute negation” of precisely this sort was needed here.

On this point he seeks help from Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. In other words, he sees the individual as exercising its will to power by opposing society’s coercive power (its will to survive as a collective) and exercising its own “will to power”. But Nietzsche’s will to power is not simply an attempt to maximize the interests of the self. In some cases it acquires as its nature a “cruelty” that discards even self-protection and births a dynamism from within the self that transcends the individual. In this sense it includes what Tanabe refers to as “overcoming in negation” [否定超克]. The individual Tanabe presents here, however, strives only for self-love and self-affirmation (egoity [我性], egotism [我執]). This individual attempts to seize for itself the coercive power that society as a whole directs toward it and to transform it into its own property. This is the picture that serves as the starting point for the logic of species.

Tanabe states that at first he was disheartened by the baseness of human egotism (particularly intellectuals’ desire for fame), but then realized that this lamentation was itself egotism. Society (the state) attempting to make individuals obey and individuals revealing their selfishness pit their powers against each other. This is the view of human beings and society found in naturalism. Tanabe, who had posed as a scholar of Kant, now tries to borrow the language of naturalism. But preceding this point, had not the proposition—in fact more aesthetic than ethical—that “egotism is base” perhaps come to dominate him? The declaration that lamenting egotism is itself egotism may indeed be insightful, but the premise that egotism is something that ought to be negated is never called into question. Tanabe states that Nietzsche negatively overcomes egotism, but the nature of negativity in Nietzsche’s account of the will to power is, I think, quite different. To begin with, in Nietzsche there exists no duality of whole/individual as found in Tanabe, nor is there any morally aesthetic sense that views egotism as base.

3 The Internalization of Negation: The Magic “Soku [即]”

In any case, Tanabe depicts a society that negates the egotism of the individual by force. As the logic of species was revised and developed, this negation became internalized within the individual. In other words, at first the individual resists the force that seeks to negate it from the outside. But human beings are not isolated individuals like animals, and in order to be sublimated into a social being equipped with a view of cultural values, it is necessary that we negate our own egotism and take on universality. To negate the self as an individual is to establish its communal character. Tanabe thus came to believe that “the true self is restored by losing itself.”

This true self “restored by losing itself” is described as the antithesis of the trend toward “self-preservation” that dominates the modern Western view of humanity. In contrast to a theory of society focusing on the preservation of the individual’s life, liberty and property, here the social order emerges as a “rational universal”. As I will discuss shortly, this is close to Hegel’s philosophy of the state, but in Tanabe the negative attitude toward the desires of the individual is stronger than in Hegel, and self-negativity or mediation through negation is given the significance of self-sacrifice in the moral or religious dimension. Tanabe is attempting to go beyond the individualistic and quantitative rationality of Western modernity.

On the other hand, however, society (the state) must also pass through the activity of negation. Only by being “negated” does the species community [種的共同体] become a whole society and achieve political legitimation. In this way Tanabe maintains that at first the coercive power of the community over the individual (the species substratum) and the self-interested action s of the individual collide head-on and cause conflict. But then, through the “self-negation” of both community and individual, there arises a social order in which the state (in this case an idealized “human nation”) and the individual are unified without estrangement. He describes this in terms of “state-qua[soku]-individual person” [国家即個人] and “whole-qua[soku]-individual” [全体即個体]. This term “qua” or “soku” [即], used with the meaning of “mutual unification” [sōsoku 相即]”,Footnote 1 also appears frequently in Tanabe’s later works, and here we must pay due attention to this magic word that at a single stroke overcomes both social conflict and logical contradiction.

Under this view, the state, while being a “whole [made up] of individuals on the basis of a contract”, becomes from the perspective of the individual an intimately familiar entity into which one can throw oneself in “self-sacrifice-qua[soku]-self-realization”. In a broad sense, this is a view of the state in terms of an organism, in contrast to the social contract approach developed in England. The social contract theory put forward by Hobbes and Locke presupposes the individual as a rational decision-making subject, and holds that such individuals, as a consequence of thoroughly pursuing their own self-interest, will feel an acute need for a social order that protects their own lives and property, and will therefore agree to establish a community to which they will voluntarily transfer or entrust their natural rights. In contrast to this approach, Tanabe tries to harmonize the species “substratum” (the pre-modern community subsisting prior to the individual) and the modern individual. This may be an anachronism inconceivable to Westerners. And yet even in the West circumstances differ depending on the degree of modernization, and in nineteenth century Germany, Hegel, too, constructed a view of the nation in terms of an organism and a pre-established harmony similar to what Tanabe is pursuing here.

Tanabe was unhappy with the fact that the logic of species was seen as supporting state nationalism [国家主義], ethnic nationalism [国民主義], and/or irrational totalitarianism. On the other hand, however, with his mantra of “control-qua[soku]-freedom” he also drew a clear line between his view and that of individualist liberalism. His point was that to the extent that Japanese citizens accept the necessity of yielding to state control and consent to it as autonomous individuals, this is in fact the optimal expression of the freedom of the individual. His wariness towards capitalist modernity is apparent here, laying the groundwork for the acceptance of “control” in the economic as well as the intellectual domain. Whether or not the slogan “overcoming modernity” intervenes is presumably not essential. But without discussing in what sense control, that is, explicit control through political authority, is necessary for the systematized society of the twentieth-century, and to what extent it is possible, we cannot come to any conclusion regarding its pros and cons.

4 The Ideal International Network

So far we have discussed the relationship between individual (individual persons) and species (existing ethnic states that developed out of species-tribal communities). Next comes genus, namely, the idea of an ideal human state.

Tanabe asserts that “…each ethnic state, taking the rational individuality of citizens who are its members as the medium, is able to possess human universality through individuals coming together to comprise it while at the same time being ethnic.” Having forcefully contorted the fundamental discord or conflict between state and individual with his logic of “control-qua[soku]-freedom”, Tanabe now attempts to logically overcome the conflict between states as well. Taken as they stand, one species (an ethnic state) and another species (an [other] ethnic state) would presumably simply oppose one another. But each species is composed of individuals (individual people = citizens). And individuals are, in Kantian terms, rational beings, and in this sense possess a universality that cannot be confined to a certain species = ethnicity. It therefore follows that “through” these individuals = citizens [国民], an ethnic state “while being ethnic at the same time… is able to possess human universality”. This is an extremely dangerous logic. We can perhaps glimpse Tanabe’s ambivalence in the way he says that an ethnic state “could possess” human universality. But a tear in his logic is already visible where he has not noticed it. To say that members of an ethnic state are citizens is a tautology. That an individual person who is a citizen possesses “rational individuality,” in Kantian terms, is also self-evident. But members of an ethnic state can become intoxicated with patriotism and engage in extremely irrational behavior. Citizen does not equal rational individual. Of course, Tanabe is referring to the rational individuality of the citizen “as medium”, and is not identifying their national character [国民性] or rationality. And yet this only serves to highlight the ambiguity of his concept of “mediation” [or: medium] and the dubiousness of his theoretical strategy. To put it another way, on the one hand Tanabe overestimates the rationality of the individual (and corrects this later in his philosophy of “metanoesis”), while on the other hand he underestimates the ethnic nature of the species substratum and its irrational potential. Of course, Japanese, Koreans, Serbians, Croatians, and members of all ethnic groups presumably possess “rational individuality”, but this does not mean that ethnic conflict did not occur in the past nor does it guarantee it will disappear in the future. Tanabe acknowledges the “impossibility” of “disinheriting the specific restrictions of ethnicity.” Yet he jumps straight to the possibility of an international network without adequately theorizing the complex role “specific restrictions” play in the actual world.

Tanabe began as a Kantian or neo-Kantian scholar, but in the context of the influence of Nishida Kitarō and his confrontation with Marxism, finally underwent a baptism in Hegel’s dialectic. Regarding the logic of species as well, Tanabe clearly acknowledges the “guidance” received from Hegel’s philosophy of right. On the other hand, however, he also spells out his differences with Hegel. For Hegel, the “world spirit”, as opposed to the ethnic spirit, is borne by heroic individuals like Napoleon (in the present this would correspond to “so-called leaders”), but Tanabe expects each and every “individual” to transcend ethnicity globally or universally.

5 Towards a “Logic” Committed to the Actual: Confronting Heidegger

In actual history, no matter how much people of culture or intellectuals strive for universal conciliation, the heartlessness of politics obstructs its realization. Tanabe assigned himself the serious practical task of “unifying through negation” this duality of culture and politics. As a result of this “motivation for speculation”, however, the initial theoretical strategy of the logic of species “was unable to escape a view that focused excessively on the side of rational humanity divorced from historical actuality”. I pointed out this flaw earlier, and Tanabe, recognizing it himself, engages in self-critique in the first section of the essay. The logic of species, which attempted to philosophically examine what sort of “rational principle” could be found in the “state control” that had intensified in Japan at the start of the Shōwa era, did not primarily cast its gaze toward “international relations between ethnic states” transcending national borders. Tanabe acknowledges this defect. To add to this, today we would presumably ask: Why limit international relations to only “ethnic states”? Would not regions that do not constitute states, or, conversely, coalitions that transcend [individual] states be objects of “international relations” as well? But let us put aside such questions for now. In any case, even while acknowledging the defect described above, Tanabe firmly rejects “the criticism that the logic of species gets no further than proposing an idea of what ought to be done [当為] that ignored actuality.” He does this on the following philosophical grounds.

Regarding the issue of how philosophical theory relates to political and social practice, Tanabe states that he is a follower of Plato and expresses his dissatisfaction with the existential philosophy of his contemporary Heidegger. Appearing at the start of the twentieth century, the logic of species was a new ontology that placed its primary emphasis on “social being” and “substratum”, and stands in contrast to the ontology of “substance” represented by Aristotle. Tanabe criticizes [the notion of a] “substance that exists apart from action and bears no relation to it.” For even if we assert that a simple substance is an objective reality, since it bears no relation to the subject, it is nothing more than a concept posited or asserted in this way. This would be the “old metaphysics” to which Aristotle belonged, the standpoint of a “noumenal identity” between logic and substance that has forgotten the mediation of acts.

On the other hand, Tanabe also asserts the inadequacy of an “expressive existence [表現的実存] with no mediation in its relationship to the substrative being of substance”, in other words, the standpoint of Heidegger. As is widely known, Heidegger held sway over the era in question with his Being and Time [Sein und Zeit] (1927). Tanabe traveled to Europe as a visiting scholar from 1922 to 1924 and studied phenomenology under Husserl at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger, with whom Tanabe became acquainted at the time, was a few years younger but would continue to be a major focus of Tanabe’s attention as a lifelong rival. Tanabe was harshly critical when Heidegger joined the Nazi party and gave his notorious inaugural address as rector of the University of Freiberg (1933). The point on which he again criticizes Heidegger in our text is that [in Heidegger’s approach] a subject (existence) lacking the mediation of a substratum becomes a mere “potential being of expressive interpretation” and “cannot help but wither into a subject of interpretive acts that are mere self-decision without content.” Heidegger’s existential individual can only discover and accept the “content” in which it is hermeneutically involved (here we might rephrase “content” as “cultural values”) as something contingent. It therefore follows that however heroic the existential decision may seem, it can only be a “formal act” divorced from content. The fact that beneath the shadow of their shimmering surface the slogans of “being-towards-death [死への存在 Sein zum Tode]” and “anticipatory resoluteness [先験的決意性 vorlaufende Entschlossenheit]” in Being and Time possess a hollow structure capable of absorbing the Nazi mentality has also been pointed out in recent critical studies, and Tanabe’s lucid assessment of Heidegger can be said to prefigure this kind of analysis.

But Tanabe had not specifically intended to make an ideological criticism. To the very end he was speaking of a new ontology. This was the standpoint of “absolute mediation”, in other words, the idea that every thing-event and every phenomenon exists in correlative relationships or interactions with others. “Beings preceding logic” had already been rejected in Kant’s transcendental idealism [transzendentaler Idealismus], but Tanabe laments the fact that in Kant the “principle of identity reigns” still and the “thing itself [物自体] that opposes via negation the subject’s volitional acts” is not actively grasped. Whatever the nature of actuality might be, it is not something that “exists in advance as an object of interpretation”, nor does it exist “separate from the formation of acts”.

As noted above, however, if this action were to haphazardly expose the passion of existence it would be empty and dangerous. Aims that are chosen must not be entrusted to “awareness of potentiality” [可能的自覚] as in Heidegger, but rather be properly tied to the content of thought. It is here that Tanabe is a disciple of Plato. The aim of an act is raised by the subject and at the same time possesses the character of a “necessary form”. What is needed is not a phenomenology that follows after phenomena, even if only slightly, but a “logic” that penetrates into the principle of the formation of the actual and at the same time raises it as the aim of practice. Tanabe also expresses this as the active being of “substratum-qua[soku]-subject”. Here he has in mind Hegel’s attempts in works like The Phenomenology of Spirit [Phänomenologie des Geistes] to develop a dialectic which stipulates that spirit is “substance and at the same time subject” and, without haste, stares at actuality in order to grasp and dynamically take part in it. On the one hand modern and contemporary nihilism and decisionism are thus impeached, while on the other hand “linguistic logic as an interpretation of substratum-less expression” (to which we might ascribe all contemporary discourse theories [ディスクール論]) is excoriated.

6 Does Absolute Mediation Fully Constitute a Logic of Difference?

Moving on, in the space remaining I would like to undertake a brief survey of section four of the text.

Looking back on the development of the logic of species, Tanabe states that he began by addressing the issue of the logic of social being mainly from practical necessity, and hit upon the concept of the species substratum as the key to resolving it. But he first reached the standpoint of absolute mediation in the essay Shu no ronri to sekai zushiki [“The Logic of Species and the Schema of the World”] (1935). From this standpoint he then reflected upon the logic of species at its foundation and added “important revisions” in Ronri no shakaisonzaironteki kōzō [“The Socio-ontological Structure of Logic”] (1936). What were these revisions?

At the start, species was conceived to be an immediate unity described in terms of a substratum standing opposed to the subjectivity of the individual. We might picture a pre-modern community suppressing and restraining the freedom of each member as [their] “substratum”. But as a result of having logically thought through the fundamental principles of this social contradiction and dilemma, Tanabe was led to extract the “principle of self-alienation” as the negative moment of absolute mediation. In other words, the community itself is not something like a substance that gives birth to individuals while existing without any premise. Nazism invented the slogan “blood and soil”, but while this was presented as deeply rooted in immediate life [直接的生命], it was nothing more than an abominable imitation of nature and a fiction. Everything is mediated and subsists in negotiation with other thing-events and phenomena. In the end, absolute mediation is a species of logic of difference that avoids identity logic (supporting some sort of immediacy). This may be a bit easier to picture if we think of it as something that highlights the elements in reciprocal repulsion within a network of reciprocal action and increases the mobility of the whole.

As a consequence of this revision of its trajectory, the species substratum was no longer seen to be an immediate unifying force. The bourgeois state, for example, is a species substratum. This state touts the fabrication that it is a political whole that protects every citizen, when in fact it oppresses one class of citizens, the proletariat, and represents the interests of another class of citizens, the bourgeoisie. As we can see in this example, the species substratum is constantly stirring up division in the shadow of the fabrication of unity. In the sense that while the actuality of division stands in opposition to the idea of unity, at the same time that one moment (the proletariat) stands in opposition to another moment (the bourgeoisie) it contains a two-fold opposition. Because the nature of the species substratum is to generate this opposition, Tanabe stipulates that species is the “moment of self-negation and principle of self-alienation”. This division or opposition must be overcome. The state becomes a true whole when class conflict is “sublated” [止揚] internally [domestically] and individuals come to “freely cooperate” with the state. And as such a state it should then presumably be able to work in harmony with other states to concretize the “human world” (corresponding to “genus”) as an “absolute whole”.

Genus is neither something generated from the unison of species that are forces of negation, uniting them for a common purpose, nor the force of an identity logic that allows such a united front to arise. The self-negation of species is something incomplete [a half measure]. Instead it must be “transformed into absolute negation through action”. In that case what exactly is absolute negation? What would a higher principle of negation that sublates the negative social phenomena of human beings (such as conflict) be? Tanabe looks for this not within society in the forces that drive social phenomena but rather in speculative ideas. In Hegel’s dialectics, spirit, after first dividing and becoming externalized, then once again restores its self-identity and internally returns to itself. Tanabe, however, revises its processual character and proposes a logic whereby “self-alienation is qua [soku ]{!}-self-return”. “So-called self-inhabitation” in Hegel is the idea, strongly idealist in character, that no matter how much spirit stands mixed with other thing-events and at first glance seems “externalized,” to the extent that as the subject of knowledge it does not lose cognitive control of its thing-events, it remains just as it is “within” the self. But in the case of Tanabe, who labeled this process with the single word “qua” [soku], has not the spirit fallen into an even more narcissistic self-occlusion? It seems to have [fallen in], notwithstanding the sense of responsibility felt by Tanabe, who entrusted his sincere efforts to directly address social conflict and logical entanglements to the intensity of the terminology of “absolute negation.”

Finally, I would like to take a look at the scientific development of the logic of species. That we tend to think of Tanabe as, in the end, not having departed from the framework of previous metaphysics or ontology is due to his admission of a “unifying structure of being” and assertion that clearly “the ontology of mathematics and physics constitutes a certain kind of correspondence to social ontology”. He stipulates this relationship of correspondence as “analogy.” This is reminiscent of the Vienna circle’s idea of “unified science” that emerged in the 1920s. But Tanabe, by first completing his “social ontology” and then attempting to apply “the logic of mathematics and physics” to this understanding of its social structure, in fact proceeded in a direction opposite to that of the Vienna circle’s physicalism. Here it can be noted that Tanabe, having transferred to philosophy after first entering the physics department at the University of Tokyo and having undergone the experience of teaching introductory science courses at Tōhoku University, was a pioneer of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics in Japan. He writes that he “…invoked analogies to the theory of relativity and the sequent calculus of intuitionism [直観主義の連続論] found in recent approaches to the foundations of mathematics, and ultimately tried to approach the dialectic of quantum mechanics.” This expansion into scientific theory, however, was by no means the product of amateur investigation. I should also note here that his interest in this area in fact remained vigorous until his final years; he published Sūri no rekishishugi tenkai [『数理の歴史主義展開』The Historicistic Development of Mathematics and Physics] at the age of sixty nine, and Sōtaisei riron no benshōhō [『相対性理論の弁証法』The Dialectic of the Theory of Relativity] at the age of seventy.