  It is clear that Nishida proposed his various topoi not as static contexts terminating in an ultimate genus, but rather as a dynamic process of contextualization or world-formation. This always implied the temporality of the “self-aware” world, and not merely time as a dimension of the physical world.  Nevertheless, Nishida did not explicitly take account of the historical nature of the world until the early 1930s, after his critics, in particular his younger colleague, Tanabe Hajime, and his former students, Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, turned his attention to the historical dimension of reality and human action. The critics suggested that Nishida ignored the world determined by individual human action by replacing individual human subjectivity with trans-individual experience or consciousness and eventually shifting human agency to the world as a universal. In response, Nishida began to articulate the world as a dialectical universal. The basic idea is that the world is a place of mediation between acting individuals. It is not a transcendent topos that one-sidedly determines individuals but a topos that arises with them through their creative interactions. There are two sides of this idea to consider: the world and the interacting individuals.