Abstract

When the fate of the Japanese people has been decided at the end of the war, the Japanese intellectuals cannot feign a naïve stance of innocence that would have mitigated pursed lips, silent pens and empty sheets of paper. And when some of them did take this recourse, or worse, tried to revise their earlier positions with regard to the Japanese’ involvement in the World War by tampering on their published works, Hajime Tanabe took the road less traveled and confronted the issue of flawed scientific philosophical position head-on; his is a genuine attempt at self-criticism that would put to question every inveterate beliefs one has held at the expense of an openness to a reality that is neither pre-given nor statically perfect. This paper, then, will be a reflection on Tanabe’s suggestion on what we should or could do if rationality has become pathological, if thinking can no longer contain the irrational, and if at the demise of philosophy, nothing remains but the haunting gossamer of injustice’s debris crying for recognition, demanding for an apology