 But the other major concern of Tanabe’s critique of Nishida was that, insofar as absolute nothingness is made into an unchanging basis or enveloping “place” of a system of reality, and insofar as it is seen as transcending the dialectical interactions among beings, then such a philosophy ends up falling back into a metaphysics of being after all. In order to radically think the idea of absolute nothingness, Tanabe argues, we must conceive of it rather in terms of “absolute mediation” or “absolute dialectic.” absolute nothingness must be thought, not as an enveloping place, but as the very movement of “absolute negation,” a movement which originates in the self-negation of absolute nothingness itself. Tanabe writes: “Since the absolute, as nothingness, must act as an absolute mediating force, it presupposes relative being as its medium. In contrast with the doctrine of the creation of the world maintained by the theist, or the theory of emanation propounded by the pantheist, [for] historical thinking the absolute and the relative, nothingness and being, are interrelated each with the other as indispensable elements of absolute mediation” (Tanabe 2000, 27; Tanabe 1986, 23).