 In his middle period, inaugurated by the first formulations of the idea of “the place of absolute nothingness” in From That Which Acts to That Which Sees, Nishida’s thought was characterized by a shift from his earlier voluntarism to a kind of intuitionism of pure seeing without a seer (see NKZ IV, 3–6). In his later period, however, Nishida’s epistemology became much more dynamic and dialectical; rather than “pure seeing,” his key epistemological phrase then becomes “action-intuition” (kōi-teki chokkan). Although self-emptying still plays a vital role, this is understood not as preparation for a passive intuition, but rather as an active process of “seeing a thing by becoming it.” In other words, intuition happens only in the midst of the dialectical process of acting upon and in turn being acted upon by things.