But the other major concern of Tanabe’s critique of Nishida was that, insofar as absolute nothingness is made into an unchanging basis or enveloping “place” of a system of reality, and insofar as it is seen as transcending the dialectical interactions among beings, then such a philosophy ends up falling back into a metaphysics of being after all. In order to radically think the idea of absolute nothingness, Tanabe argues, we must conceive of it rather in terms of “absolute mediation” or “absolut