 While on the one hand Nishida becomes increasingly concerned with allowing for radical interpersonal alterity within the place of absolute nothingness, on the other hand he also consistently argues from early on that “consciousness” should not be thought to entail an unbridgeable epistemological subject-object split. Although he initially adopted, and adapted, the notion of “pure experience” from William James to express this nondual basis of knowledge (see Nishida 1990), Nishida later drops this expression in favor of the notion of “self-awareness” (jikaku). According to Nishida, self-awareness can be defined as a “self reflecting itself within itself” (NKZ IV,  215).[12]  Since absolute nothingness is not a “self” in the sense of a subject standing over against an object, any more than it is an ego with its own interested categories of perception, the self-awareness of absolute nothingness must be that of a “seeing without a seer” or a “knowing without a knower.” “Since there is no-thing that reflects, it is like a mirror reflecting the mirror itself” (ibid., 181).