Ownness--the Selfness of the Self--Is Revealed

For in spite of the elimination of self-will, private property, and private opinion, for the first time the unique individual who cannot be eliminated comes to light. "Ownness"--the selfness of the self--is revealed. Critical liberalism tries through its "criticism" to eliminate from the individual everything private and everything that would exclude all others. But the ownness of the individual is immune to this purging. Indeed, the person is an individual precisely because he or she excludes from the self everything that is not self.

--Keiji Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara, SUNY Series in Modern Japanese Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 115.