 Although Nishida comes to the idea of the place of absolute nothingness most directly through his confrontations with Kant and Neo-Kantianism, he does not shy from thinking this place in metaphysical as well as epistemological terms: nothingness is not merely a reflective, but is also a creative principle (NKZ IV, 238–39). As he writes much later, “absolute nothingness at once transcends everything and is that by which everything is constituted” (NKZ IX, 6). And yet, Nishida repeatedly tells us that, as no-thing outside of or other than the place of the coming to be and passing away of truly individual beings, absolute nothingness is not to be thought of as a “transcendent being.” Nor is it to be understood as the processional unfolding of a “potential being,” that is to say, as a kind of Hegelian “world Spirit” with its own cunning reason at work behind the scenes of its historical march toward self-realization. The absolute, according to Nishida, must be thought of as nothingness in order to distinguish it from all ontologies that would reduce the uniqueness and autonomy of truly individual beings either to a transcendent being or to an underlying teleological process.