Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy) / quote 11 of 19
To be is to be within nothingness
Nishida initially formulated his logic of place or topos to counter Neo-Kantian epistemology that took knowledge to be the subject's form-ruled construction of an objective world. He sought not only to undermine the distinctions between subjective and objective but also to place both sides within a more comprehensive and concrete conception. [...] Nishida articulated the topoi also in terms of what we may call a me-ontology, from the Greek meon or non-being. The topos of being describes the world of nature. The topos of relative nothingness comprises the field of consciousness that is no- thing with respect to the things of which it is conscious. This nothingness however is still opposed to being, and so differs from the absolute nothingness that underlies both sides of the opposition. Here and elsewhere Nishida plays on the word for absolute in Japanese, zettai, which literally means breaking through or overcoming opposition. His premise is that the meaning of “to be” is “to be within”; the ultimate “within” is the topos of absolute nothingness.