 The critical lapse came when Tanabe irrationally proposed that the “relative absolute” of the Japanese nation-state could serve as a kind of “supreme archetype” for other nations (see THZ VI, 232–33). James Heisig writes that, in so doing, Tanabe “took a step that was fatal but really unnecessary, if not outright inconsistent with the principles of his logic…. According to his own logic, the community of the human race is to be made up of a community of nations that have found a way to transcend their specificity without transcending time and culture. Each nation may come about as an instance of the generic universal, but nothing in the logic of the specific allows any one instance to become an archetype for the others. It is as if Tanabe were quoting himself out of context” (Heisig 2001, 136–37; also see Heisig 1994).