Meaning of life, spirit and nature

For these reasons, I coined the term “life studies” instead of “bioethics” in 1988. The idea of life studies has gradually developed since then. In 1989, I published Brain Dead Person in which I discussed the topic from the viewpoint of life studies. I distinguished three concepts, namely, “my brain death,” “brain death of intimate others,” and “brain death of strangers.” I made clear the differences of the meaning of death in these threecases, and demonstrated that these differences might be the cause of ordinary people’s inconsistent attitudes towards brain dead persons in various settings. I also criticized the essence of modern medicine and scientific technology, and developed key ideas like “partism of modern medicine” and “efficiency and irreplaceability.” This book was the real first product of life studies.

Through research on brain death, I realized that there have been no empirical studies on the idea of life among ordinary people. Scholars sometimes talked about the Japanese idea of life and death, but their arguments were based on traditional Buddhist or Confucian literatures. It is not certain that today’s ordinary people share these traditional ideas. I performed research using open questionnaires and gathered nearly thousand responses from ordinary people. I published part of the results in the paper “The Concept of Inochi,” in 1991 (Morioka 1991) and made various interesting discoveries. Many Japanese grasp the idea of “human life” in relationship with that of “nature.” The images of “life,” “spirit,” and “nature” overlap with one another in their worldview. For many of them, environmental issues are conceived as problems of life. And here, too, their images of life vary. There is no such [189/190] thing as “the” Japanese idea of life. Interestingly, however, several patterns of grasping images of life were discovered. For example, there were many responses that suggested that life is interrelated on the one hand, and irreplaceable on the other. People seem to feel some dynamism between interrelatedness and irresplaceability. This research is still continuing and is one of the most important contributions to the field of life studies.

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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
(2004)
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