「世間・運命観」と東アジアの情報社会 : 技術・人工物・ロボット・災害・プライバシーと日本・アジア的価値観

Abstract

One can posit that Japanese people currently live in two realms of society at the same time: Shakai and Seken. In contrast to Shakai, which is society in relation to values and ways of seeing things imported from Western modernity, Seken is a traditional and ingenious realm/aspect of our society where the meaning of 'a good-virtuous life' is important. To put it differently, Seken is a cultural-existential Ba (place, space, locus) where people share various views on life or the world itself from cultural-existential perspectives. The term Seken itself emanates from Buddhism. It derives from the Sanskrit word loca. Se means time or transient situations of this world/life and Ken means in-between, space, place, locus, i.e., the transient Ba consisting of transient human activities and the place where these activities are done. In Japanese history, these views were combined with other views coming from Shinto, Confucianism, the praxis of internalizing the human mind in the tradition of literature, Kokugaku, Bushido, and others. These combined views bestowed on forming the criteria, 'What is a good-virtuous life?' This paper discusses the implication of the findings concerning Seken derived through my previous research. These studies were conducted in Japan and other 'Far East' countries and we discovered that Seken-related meanings or some perspectives similar to Seken exist in the minds of people in the 'Far East.' We also found that Seken-related meanings and some other views on 'roboethics,' 'privacy,' 'publicness' and others form a kind of a network of understanding in Japan and the 'Far East.'