  The third stage sharpens the focus on the dialectical world as a place of mediation between interacting individuals as historically embodied selves. Nishida now conceptualizes the world as the historical manifestation of absolute nothingness. This stage represents what is for Nishida the most comprehensive and concrete standpoint, that of the historical world. The world unfolds “from the created to the creating,” not in a straightforward linear progression but out of an “absolute present” that in each moment holds together past determinations and decisions for the future. The historical world as such is a “self-identity of contradictories.” The self realizes itself not in knowing itself as distinct from other selves or things but through forms of self-negation. One form calls for the self to recognize the absolute other in its own core to relate truly to the Thou or other relative selves. Another form calls for one to give oneself over to things or “become one with” the things it would know—through “enactive intuition,” seeing them by interacting with them and interacting by allowing them to transform oneself. In this stage relations come to the fore: the relations between I and Thou, the one and the many, the expressive self and its expressions, the Japanese nation and other nations. Each of these relations constitutes a self-identity of contradictories and resists a monistic interpretation. This stage, understood heuristically, stretches from the final essays in The Self-aware Determination of Nothingness through The World of Action and The Dialectical World (collected as The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, 1934), seven volumes of Philosophical Essays (1935–45) and several political writings, on to Nishida’s last essay, “The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview”(1945). The final essay returns to the theme of religious awareness and makes more explicit the Buddhist references, as well as the Christian influence, latent in much of Nishida’s philosophy. The focus on death and finitude, while consistent with the idea of self-negation, suggests a shift of standpoint, but Nishida’s final reflections are too brief to be called a new stage in his philosophy.