  We conceptualize the formation of the world as history, but must think of history in terms of the logic of place and not simply as a temporal process. At any moment the world in process mirrors the indeterminacy or openness of absolute nothingness and contains the conditions for novelty and future possibilities; however it also encompasses everything that has already been determined. In Nishida’s words, the historical world proceeds “from the created to the creating.” And it so proceeds not in a linear fashion, as if viewed from some point outside the world, but rather “in” every moment or, conversely, out of an “eternal now” or “absolute present” that describes the topos of its continual creation. This present in its absolute presence is the place where history can happen precisely because it enfolds the past, though is not entirely determined by the past, and it holds the future as infinite possibility. It is eternal or absolute in the sense that it contains infinite time by negating (fixed) time (NKZ VIII, 76ff.). Viewed in terms of the absolute present—the ever-present juncture between a determined past and an open future—the world appears as a “continuity of discontinuities.”