  The theme of personal death is absent in Nishida’s early work on pure experience and self-awareness, and mentioned only abstractly in essays on the historical world and the self, for example: “In absolute dialectics, mediation as absolute negation is mediation as absolute death, living by dying absolutely” (NKZ VII, 314). In the last completed essay, “The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview” (1945), Nishida is more experiential. Death is not an event at the end of one’s life but penetrates life at each and every moment. It is the ever-present opening, so to speak, where one’s utter finitude can come to light. Insofar as this is the finitude of the individual self, it also implies a logic of individuation where the role of other relative selves is diminished. “I am myself by knowing my own death” (NKZ XI, 420) is both a declaration of existential self-awareness and a statement of what makes me uniquely me. What makes me an individual is not merely my differences from others nor my sameness with some essential core; it is precisely what most makes me not me, what negates me, in any moment of action. In this context, death signifies the self-negation of the finite self.