  Similarly, we conceptualize the historical world sometimes as produced out of nature by human work and activity, sometimes as producing the individuals who interact in it, but we should think of it primarily as the mediating place of interactive creation. Individuals create their identities through their interactions in the world, and that world is continually created with them.  (Nishida’s idea of a mediating place finds a distant analogue in Einstein’s theory of gravitational space, where space is not independent of the physical objects in it but rather is shaped by them). The historical world forms itself through the actions of embodied individuals who mutually form each other. Adapting a phenomenological perspective, Nishida argues that the historical world as the most concrete topos of our reality must be the starting point for understanding the more abstract world of life and even more abstract natural world.