  To say that culture is essentially religious means that it, too, is an “affirmation of the self-negating absolute” (NKZ XI, 458). Religion and culture are each framed in the singular here, as something essential to all religions and cultures in the plural. At this level culture and religion function almost as regulative ideas. They are not the result but the telos of the one world forming its self-identity. Nishida’s formulations recapitulate much of his theory of the historical world.  As the various ethnic peoples in the world become aware of themselves as constituents of a global world, that is, as they become “world-historical” nations, they mirror the formation of the historical world. As self-aware and globally historical, the world will be mirrored variously in each nation.