  Similarly, if self-awareness is to be an awareness of more than merely oneself, it cannot be interior to the self alone. Modern epistemology’s solution was to split the world (the totality of all there is) in two, mind and nature, and then to see the mind as a mirror of nature, and ideas as representations of real objects.  Nishida’s solution was to see the world as mirroring itself in all the things “in the world.” Whatever is “in the world” is a mirroring of the world. In this sense it is the world that is “self-aware” or self-reflexive; and there is no outside to it. An individual’s “self-awareness” is a partial mirroring of the world; Nishida later described the individual self as a focal point of the world. While he was still thinking in terms of consciousness, however, Nishida avoided pinpointing awareness and spoke of the world as a field of consciousness to indicate the extension of the term beyond the individual self. This field is similar to Kant’s Bewußtsein überhaupt, in that it functions as the condition for the possibility of particular acts of consciousness, but unlike Kant’s notion that turns everything into an object of consciousness, its reflexive structure allows it to take itself into account without making it another object.