My Individualism and the Philosophical Foundations of Litera. Natsume Soseki
comments on the composition of Werther.
In other words, we have serialized essays that still maintain the surface appearance of speeches, for the sake of maintaining the non-linear, digressive style, as well as the guise of spontaneous order. Despite their revised and expanded character, Sōseki keeps using references to the historical speech in order simultaneously to provide humor and to excuse the gaps in argumentation. An example would be when he exclaims “the lecture has deviated from its main subject and has fallen into the very center of a muddy ditch. Let us quickly return and continue our progress in a straight line!” or “However, as I do not have time to explain this to you in detail, I am going to cut short my remarks.”
Both essays, but particularly “Foundations,” express Sōseki’s disdain for traditional forms of social hierarchy, including the precedence of university professors. Sōseki took the unprecedented step of renouncing his prestigious professorship at Tokyo University in 1907, the same year that he published “Philosophical Foundations”; instead, he decided to publish his writings with the Asahi newspaper. And again, in 1911, three years before the publication of “My Individualism,” he once again gained public notoriety for declining to accept the government’s Doctor of Letters degree. His digressive style and references to the reverence in which professors are (wrongly) held, help enhance his reader’s sense that we are encountering his own self-re-enactment. As readers, we are encountering his literary personality in action. Sōseki wants his reader to understand that he is presenting perceptions rather than analysis—that he is an artist rather than a philosopher.
Sōseki’s extreme degree of self-referentiality can be surprising or annoying to readers, but also became one element of his trademark style. Self is always at the center of his writings: at one point in “Foundations,” when he is about to “dissect” a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V, he stops and suddenly decides to “dissect his feelings” instead, because he says he understands them better than the poem. Although by the end of this particular essay, Sōseki suggests ways in which we can transcend the self through “correspondences” with readers (when we strike sympathetic chords or ideals), our inescapable solitude and therefore self-referentiality is at the core of his understanding. The fact that identity issues are so central to all of his writings is certainly one reason Sōseki’s work resonated so well with his Meiji audiences—and may also account for his popularity today.
Art Beyond Naturalism
“Foundations” begins with a strong statement of human isolation—the ailment for which literature provides a temporary cure, or at least occasional relief. Human beings are in a state of disunity seeking unity, or isolation seeking community. As we discover by the end of this essay, human isolation and the temptations of solipsism drive the artist to art, and the author to write literature. Literature, if it succeeds in achieving “correspondences” with readers achieves a form of community.
To make his case, Sōseki posits a psychological model which includes three modes of mental operations that mediate the experiences of the senses and emotions (and that “originate from the ego”): namely, intelligence, perception, and will. While this model is far from complete, it helps us understand Sōseki’s sense of the place of the artist within the world of ideas. Different human activities, professions, and inclinations naturally give preference to one of these three mental operators, as he calls them. Those who “cause their intelligence to be exercised are people who have a clear understanding of our relationships with objects and beings outside ourselves; we normally call them scientists or philosophers.” Will is the realm of many practical, active professions, such as “soldiers, politicians, tofu merchants or even carpenters.” And while the man of letters must, according to Sōseki, also have both practical skills and philosophical skills, perception is his most defining characteristic: “People who exercise their perception appreciate relationships with objects or beings with enthusiasm.” Through their perception, artists observe reality and transform it, endowing the world around them with feeling. Sōseki goes on to claim that there are four ideals by which we respond to the works of these operators, and according to which we prioritize them. These ideals are “Truth,” “Beauty,” “Goodness,” and “Sublimity” (see chart, p. 19). In a work of art, for example, “one of these four categories will stand out more clearly than the others.” These ideals, he says (though he never fully develops them in the essay), vary according to period, individual, society, and other contexts; therefore, moments in history can be defined by their dominant ideals.
The dominance of Naturalism in Japan, although never explicitly named, is in his thoughts as he developed this psychological model, and is in the back of Sōseki’s mind whenever he mentions “Truth” and “Intelligence” in the body of the essay. For Sōseki, the artist exclusively devoted to Truth and who values only intelligence and not perception robs the artistic experience of part of its potential. Art, according to Sōseki, does not have to represent all four ideals, but can become misshapen: audiences can become “color blind” by an emphasis on one ideal that seeks to “actively attack and demolish another ideal.” Naturalism’s exclusive devotion to Truth, in other words, is pursued to the detriment of other ideals, impoverishing the literary experience.
As an oblique response to Naturalism’s de-emphasis on style or “technique,” Sōseki adds an interesting section where he compares two literary passages: one from Defoe and one from Shakespeare, one in prose and the other in verse. The meaning of the two passages when paraphrased seems equivalent, he argues, but their emotional impact, their involvement of the reader, and artistic quality differ greatly: Shakespeare’s use of Etonymy and poetic condensation forces the reader to become involved in interpreting meaning, and thereby forces the reader into a participatory role in Shakespeare’s creative process, allowing us to encounter a perceptive genius at work. Shakespeare “adjusts our spectacles to suit our vision,” while Defoe’s meaning is visible “with the naked eye” from “a long way off.” Defoe’s description “walks and drags its feet all year as if it had wooden legs”; it does not require imaginative participation from the reader or involve any poetic reconfiguration of reality.
The essay develops the psychological model in order to illuminate both the dangers of the current, “narrow” approach to literature by suggesting the broad spectrum of approaches that one can have. Part of his purpose is to inspire a new generation of artists to re-infuse art with the ideals of Goodness, Beauty, and Sublimity, by freeing them from the pressure of the single-minded devotion to Truth, from the attachment to Western fashion, and from the practical concerns of prestige and advancement. Sōseki culminates “Foundations” with a moving description of his ideal for art and the artist:
“If, through the continuity of awareness which we have discussed, a correspondence is established between our work and one person in a hundred, or even one person in a thousand, and if we have made a small contribution to the enhancement of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and the Sublime, which will illuminate the essence of our work like flashes of lightning, we will leave traces difficult to efface. If, progressing even further, we are able to attain the ecstasy that produces the reducing influence—because the spiritual power of arts and letters can exercise a great and intangible influence on society—we will have fulfilled our mission by obtaining eternal life in the human story.”
The Social Benefits of Solitude
Written near the end of the Meiji period, as Japan was reaching the zenith of its territorial expansion in Asia, Sōseki’s famous essay “My Individualism” continues in his quest to liberate the Japanese artist toward such social goals, yet this essay resonates with a more sober sense of social and political dangers facing Japanese culture as a whole. Rather than focusing on the enthusiastic imitation of the West, Sōseki is now concerned with what happens when that imitative drive is converted into a desire for national or domestic homogeneity; when a mistrust of foreigners paradoxically leads to a mistrust of Japanese citizens.
Sōseki’s concern is with a generalized “anxiety” or insecurity that may lead one to become either one of “Panurge’s sheep” (part one of the essay) or a tyrant (part two of the essay). The slavish follower will be afraid to assert his own individual opinions or perceptions, while the tyrant will not allow others their own individual perceptions. These