 As Nishitani and others have pointed out (see NKC IX, 212ff.; Nishitani 1991, 161ff.), Tanabe’s criticisms often fail to do justice to Nishida’s thought, and we should not forget the impetuses Tanabe acknowledges having received from his erstwhile mentor. Yet, on the other hand, his criticisms were not without their point, and his provocations certainly did serve as counter-impetuses that spurred Nishida on, not just to clarify, but also to further develop his philosophy of absolute nothingness (see Sugimoto 2011; Kopf 2004). No doubt in large part due to the persistent attention given by Tanabe to the historical world, to the irrational element of the specific through which the individual and the universal must be mediated, and to the dialectical relations between finite beings, Nishida gradually moved toward a much more dynamic conception of absolute nothingness as the self-determination of the dialectical world, a self-determination which takes place only by way of the mutual interactions between individual persons and things.