 Tanabe finally came to his senses and, in a striking metanoetic turn, renounced these political assertions and dove into the philosophy of religion. Philosophy as Metanoetics, the first parts of which were delivered as lectures in 1944 before the end of the war, was composed not only as a personal self-critique, but also as a call to self-critique on the part of the entire nation, and indeed ultimately as a call for an “absolute critique” of human rationality as such (see the Preface to THZ X; Tanabe 1986). It is the last of these that is the central theme of the book: the idea that the human reason is inevitably driven to antinomies through which it must repeatedly die to its own self-power in order to be reborn again through the workings of an Other-power. It is nevertheless true that “one looks through that work in vain for any admission of guilt for particular actions or statements that he had made” (Heisig 2001, 151). In any case, Tanabe’s public (if vague) repentance was no more successful than the silence of other Kyoto School thinkers in convincing the majority of postwar Japanese academics to refrain from throwing the baby of their philosophical insights out with the bathwater of their political misadventures.