Getting to the Heart of the Matter: Sōseki’s Excursion into the Split Subject and Translation’s Rescue of the Humanities

Abstract

This essay takes the current crisis in the humanities as its starting point, shifting away from the popular view that the humanities are imperiled by hostile elements from outside academia and a general suspicion of their worth to a deeper and more lasting problem. This larger crisis is that if the humanities are allowed to continue to languish, the North American academy eventually will be left with a knowledge gap. Future generations will be unable to develop humanities-based skills. Although the author has no solution to this problem, he emphasizes one aspect of the humanities: the value of reading world literature in translation. Arguing that important insights can be gleaned from reading outside one’s own field, he draws on Natsume Sōseki’s modern classic Kokoro. Kokoro unveils for the reader many things about Japanese culture in the transition to modernity, including a tension between two subjective tendencies: individualism versus relationality based on filial obeisance. That such insights can be gained from reading in translation is a strong argument for the humanities as well as general education.