 Nishitani’s first book, The Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity, sought a more originary conception of the human subject than had been developed in modern Western philosophy. In general, for Nishitani, modern “subjectivity” remains bound by a reifying attachment to things and ultimately to the ego. Nishitani did recognized certain advances in the direction of a truly “radical subjectivity” in modern ideas such as that of individual “autonomy.” For example, the Kantian idea of the ethical “person,” which opens itself to a universal standpoint by way of a negation of the self-will of the ego, suggested for Nishitani a “kind of standpoint of ‘non-ego’” (see NKC I, 60). However, the autonomy of the Kantian ethical subject can also be seen as asserting a sublated form of self-will, namely in its will to form as well as to conform to the universal. Nishitani finds profounder intimations of a truly radical subjectivity in both Meister Eckhart’s mystical theology and Nietzsche’s radical atheism, which each in their own way go beyond, or dig beneath, attachments to and sublations of egoity. Ultimately Nishitani returns to the language of Zen Buddhism to express his conception of the “radical subjectivity of non-ego [muga]” as a “subjective nothingness” (shutai-teki mu) (NKC I, 88).