Professor Sueo Takeda: A Japanese Philosopher Who Wrote Two Books in German (1)

竹田壽恵雄教授：ドイツ語で２冊の著書を残した哲学者 〔１〕

Sueo Takeda (竹田壽恵雄1915 – 1998) was one of distinguished Japanese philosophers who wrote their books in European languages. He received the best education in philosophy at the Tohoku University under the supervision of Dr. Satomi Takahashi before WWII and later at Kyoto University under Dr. Tokuryu Yamauchi. For many years, Takeda served as professor of philosophy at Shinshu University, Matsumoto, Japan. He also gave lectures at the University of Bonn as visiting professor in 1962.

The books I am going to introduce here are his two books, Kant und das Problem der Analogie: Eine Forschung nach dem Logos der kantischen Philosophie (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) and Die subjective Wahrheit und die Ausnahme-Existenz: Ein Problem zwichen Philosophie und Theologie (Elementa 23; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982) .*1) 　These books were written in German, although the other books, including a novel entitled Haishin [背神Against God ], were published in Japanese for the Japanese readers. In his works, as we can see in these two German books, Prof. Takeda developed his not only philosophical but also theological insights. Interestingly, however, we cannot know if he was a Christian or not, despite his obvious sympathetic expressions to Christianity .*2)

*1: Unfortunately, this book was suffered from the so-called “double-publication,” i.e., the book was bound with another book cover entitled Die Idee der Chrono-Ontologie by mistake. If you or your libraries have the wrong title book by this author, you can ask a correct cover book for replacement to the publisher: Rodopi, Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
*2: According to his daughter Prof. Mariko Takeda, the author Sueo Takeda never received baptism: Personal communication.


In the first book, Kant und das Problem der Analogie: Eine Forschung nach dem Logos der kantischen Philosophie (Kant and the Problem of Analogy: A Research into the Logos of Kantian Philosophy), the author attempts to give us a new interpretation of Kant, focusing on the problem of “analogies of experience” derived from the concept of Kantian philosophy, which has been regarded as one of the most significant and notoriously difficult problems depicted in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Takeda, maintains that, as Jesuit theologian and philosopher Erich Przywara once wrote, analogy is not a restricted and weak logic of Kantian philosophy but a strong and strict logical system (Takeda calls the system “Logos” in some Japanese way of usage) for the sufficient interpretation of Kant’s philosophical systems.

According to Takeda, the word “Logos,” which has developed itself in the history of philosophy, is an index of the human ideology or world spirit in history. Logos develops by itself due to the maturity of human beings and the world. Therefore, the history of Logos is the topology (the science of place or location = Topos) of human beings and the world. However, this is not the Hegelian history of dialectic development. The Hegelian system itself is rather regarded as a temporal (limited by time)Topos of the development of Logos (1-2).

The book consists of four main chapters: (1) Thing-in-itself and “the theory of experience,” (2) Analogies of experience and idea, (3) Teleology, and (4) Transcendental logic and Analogos. The author, however, posits some premises in his Introduction to the design of his discussion prior to the main chapters above, which are somewhat strange to the Westerners, i.e., an idea that the development of human mind is the evolution of Logos. This Logos, according to Takeda, closely relates to the interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in terms of the analogy.

To be continued.