La durée pure dans l’œuvre du jeune Tanabe Hajime : entre intuition et réduction

Abstract

Pure duration plays a central role in Tanabe Hajime’s early authorship. Through the 1910s, this Bergsonian concept is first used to characterize “pure” or “immediate experience” in such a manner that it can be integrated in the neo-Kantian framework, allowing Tanabe to rethink Rickert’s conception of “consciousness in general.” Turning towards a theory of time, Tanabe sees pure duration as the supra-temporal stratus of consciousness upon which phenomenological time, logical time, etc. are constituted. The question of how this fundamental stratus can be thematized in a methodologically sound manner leads Tanabe to endorse a “transcendental psychology” consisting in the “reconstructive subjectivation” that he finds in Natorp. He thereby distances himself from intuition as a philosophical method, and implicitly from Nishida Kitarô’s critique of Bergson. Pure duration is furthermore discussed in the context of the Fichtean Tathandlung. As the earlier concept of pure/immediate experience, the Tathandlung designates a primordial unity of act and content, subject and object, of which philosophy can however grasp one aspect alone. A tension remains, therefore, between the necessity of conceiving, with pure duration as a model, of a continuity between subject and world, and the methodological limitations of philosophy.