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(4) Relativization of reason
At the same time, it is very characteristic that the word “why” is gradually being disused by people. In science, generally, emphasis is placed on reproducibility and logicality; and conclusions are drawn by accumulating visible evidence. While Japan is dubbed the world’s number-one manufacturing superpower, today its people’s interest in science is gradually waning. What is more, even a distrust of science is spreading among the people.
Interestingly, that does not mean that people are escaping from science or fearing it out of ignorance. Rather, people are feeling that way, after relating their own experiences and intuition to what those at the leading edge of science are telling them. The people are listening to professionals in science, who are confronted by the limits of science, talking very sincerely and earnestly about the need to transcend the framework of science. Those professionals include competent doctors, physicists, economists, agriculturists, and others. That is, those at the leading edge of science are beginning to tell genuinely that things could no longer be fully understood by reason alone; that there are just too many “whys” in the world that could not be answered; and that science by itself could never fully explain the whole world. I think this has been a major driving force in relativizing the reason of people in Japan. Also, the return from a modern view of life and death to a traditional one is basically a phenomenon caused by the relativization of reason.
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(Date published / 公開日： 3/16/2021)
(Date last updated / 最終改訂日: 3/16/2021)
