Scientific Thought of Lafcadio Hearn: A Case of Interpreting Japanese Art
Scientific Thought of Lafcadio Hearn: A Case of Interpreting Japanese Art

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on Lafcadio Hearn’s scientific thought. His absorption in Herbert Spencer is well-known; and he tries to use Spencer’s theory positively in understanding Japanese culture, especially in understanding its religions, Shinto and higher (dogmatic) Buddhism. More specifically, the author concentrates on Hearn’s understanding of Eastern (Japanese) art, especially in the contexts of his references to science. While Western painters attempt to paint a particular model precisely, Japanese painters tend towards deformation or abstraction, based on their own recollections of the model, which Hearn addresses in his essay ‘About Faces in Japanese Art’. With the aid of ‘one of the living greatest naturalists’, Hearn maintains that Japanese paintings have succeeded in extracting the essence of the objects scientifically. He argues that both abstraction in Japanese paintings and scientific data extraction seem to share a similarity. Hearn’s lifetime coincides with the heyday of modern science; reliance on scientific knowledge and proof increased dramatically, on an unprecedented scale, in his day. It is therefore possible to argue the existence of a connection between his position with respect to art and the social and cultural conditions into which he was born. Therefore, even though traditionally Hearn’s works have been examined within the field of ‘literature’, a trans-disciplinary approach to his work seems to offer a new vista on Lafcadio Hearn’s thought.

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