Nishida on Well-Being: Reflections from Medieval Buddhist Philosophy

Join us for a workshop with Takushi Odagiri (M.D. Tokyo, Ph.D. Stanford).

Nishida is one of the most influential twentieth-century Japanese philosophers. Influenced by Fichte and Hegel, Nishida’s work is often compared with Lebensphilosophie [philosophy of life], the philosophical trend that arise around the turn of the 20th century. His main works include An Inquiry into the Good(1911), Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917), Place(1926), and The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview (1945).

This workshop will discuss Nishida’s ideas of well-being, which is closely related to his philosophy of life and the environment. There are two seemingly contradictory ideas of well-being in his thought, unity and self-negation (or “dialectics”). According to Nishida, although well-being is defined by the unity of experience, it is more fundamentally characterized as self-negation. Drawing upon Medieval Buddhist philosophy, the speaker will discuss these notions in Nishida’s early essay from An Inquiry into the Good (1911), and his late essay Logic and Life (1936).