your efforts in that sense. Professor Tanabe often came back to a question you once put to him: why it was that we Japanese did not call back to mind the venerable beginnings of our own thinking, instead of chasing ever more greedily after the latest news in European philosophy. As a matter o£ fact, we do so still today.
I: It is not easy to go counter to that tendency. Such procedures, in good time, are smothered by their own sterility. But what requires our contribution is a different matter.
J: Which would be?
I: To give heed to the trails that direct thinking back into the region of its source.
J: Do you find such trails in your own attempt?
I: I find them only because they are not of my own making, and arc discernible only quite rarely, like the wind-borne echo of a distant call.
J: But I would gather then that in the distinction "Expression and Appearance," you are no longer basing yourself on the subject-object relation.
I: You will see it even more dearly if you attend to what I would now like to add to your mention of Kant's concept of appearance. Kant's definition is based on the event that everything present has already become the object of our representation.
[125]J: In appearance as Kant thinks of it, our experience must already include the object as something in opposition to us.
I: That is necessary not only in order to understand Kant properly, but also and above all else so that we may experience the appearing of the appearance, if I may put it that way, originarily.
J: How does this happen?