  Gradually Nishida came to recognize the importance of embodiment for human interaction and communication, and introduced the notion of the expressive or historical body. The body is not primarily a physical object and product of the natural world, but a historical subject and co-creator of the world. Insofar as the many historical bodies of the one world differ from each another, they too form a “discontinuous continuity.” Nishida was fond of calling this type of totality, which holds together differences without sublating them into a higher unity, a “self-identity of contradictories.”