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CHAPTER 1
The Receptions of Heidegger in Turkey
Zeynep Direk
Philosophy has played an important role in the modernization of Turkish society. This is not only true for modern Turkey as a secular state but also for the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. In contrast to older forms of philosophical discourse intertwined with Muslim theology, Western philosophy provided a non-Islamic milieu of reflection. After the reform of universities in 1933, the practice of philosophy was cut off from all connections within Muslim theological culture. The prominent positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach was invited to design the first department of philosophy at Istanbul University, which gave rise to all secular philosophy in Turkish academia. Jewish and German professors taught in Istanbul University before and after the Second World War. The German philosophical tradition formed the first generation of Turkish philosophers. Among them, the most prominent are Takiyeddin Mengüsoglu, a student of Nicolai Hartmann; Macit Gökberk, a historian of philosophy in the Hegelian and Marxist tradition; and Nermi Uygur, a phenomenologist in the Husserlian tradition. All three were educated in Germany. We could also add Ismail Tunali, a specialist in aesthetics, and Bedia Akarsu, a specialist in ethics. Bedia Akarsu, the only woman philosopher in this generation of philosophers, introduced Max Scheler's philosophy to Turkey.
When we consider this generation, which dominated the philosophical scene before and after the Second World War until the 1970s, the absence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy is remarkable. In an atmosphere where G. W. F. Hegel, Nicolai Hartmann, Edmund Husserl, and Max Scheler were studied, Heidegger's absence is in need of explanation: Germany's defeat, the fall of Nazism, and Heidegger's ban from teaching by the French authorities until 1952 could be among the causes. After the Second World War, Turkish doctoral students sent to Germany could not encounter Heidegger's philosophy in academic institutions. Only those who went to France to study philosophy and discovered Sartrean existentialism, such as Selahaddin Hilav, had a chance to acquaint themselves with Heidegger's philosophy.
Heidegger entered the French philosophical scene through Emmanuel Levinas's commentaries in the late 1930s, with the publication of En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. However, Levinas's contribution made its real impact after the war due to Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt's recovery of Heidegger. The second important wave of the reception of Heidegger in France was through Jacques Derrida's work, which made its impact on the English-speaking world in the 1970s and 1980s. Derrida made it clear that the existentialist reception of Heidegger was based on an anthropological reading, which neglected the questions of being and historicality. The existentialist reception had focused on the existential analytic in Being and Time. In contrast, during the second phase of Heidegger's reception, the focus shifted to the destruction of traditional ontology and later the destruction of metaphysics: in short, the question of being and the ontological difference.
Heidegger entered Turkey through the first wave of the reception of French thought in the 1950s and 1960s and also through a second wave from the 1990s until today. In this chapter, I will initially discuss the first wave of the Turkish reception of Heidegger's philosophy in intellectual circles by specifying its main problems and themes. Then I will look at the second wave in Turkish academia in the 1990s. In this reading, Heidegger is invoked along with the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, for a critique of the cultural industry. Last, I will scrutinize the reception of Heidegger by Islamist intellectuals outside academia and speculate about why Heidegger has been so influential on them. Rather than being a new phase of reception, which can be philosophically and temporally associated with the receptions of Heidegger in the Western world, this trend originates in the Islamicate world. With a specific interest in Heidegger's task of Destruktion, critique of modernity, his thinking of historicality, the problem of authenticity/inauthenticity of a people in a historical sense, and his reflections on religion, the holy, the sacred, and God, Islamist intellectuals found the possibility of casting Islamic religious self-expression in the idiom of Western philosophy, and still distancing themselves from it. In short, it is a desire to philosophize from one's own cultural and religious standpoint, from where one is, that is, from the Islamicate. I argue that Heidegger is invoked in order to seek ways for fashioning a new Islamic cultural politics. He is appealing to Islamist intellectuals because he is useful in disrupting the domination of modernity over "traditional" Islamic culture. Heideggerianism gives a new public appearance to intellectuals who want to distinguish themselves from "Westernized elites" and takes on an Islamic identity or at least expresses sympathy with cultural Islamism. Heideggerianism makes these intellectuals interesting and intriguing because their discourse does not sound traditional. On the contrary, it is Islamism with a hyper-Western allure.
THE EXISTENTIALIST RECEPTION OF HEIDEGGER
During the 1950s and 1960s, existentialism made an impact on Turkish intellectual life outside academia. Its influence lasted until the 1980s and was most remarkable in Turkish scholarship. The philosopher Hilmi Ziya Ülken published the first article on existentialism in 1946. Between 1946 and 1960, a number of intellectuals discussed the meaning and fundamental tenets of existentialist philosophy. F. Hüsrev Tökin, Nurettin Nart, Oguz Peltek, Mete Sar, Seyfi Özgen, Dogan Kilic, Mehmet Seyda, Orhan Duru, Demir Özlü, Önay Sözer, Nusret Hizir, Aslan Kaynardag, Osman Oguz, Peyami Safa, Atilla Ilhan, Serif Hulusi, Basar Sabuncu, Muzaffer Erdost, Ferit Edgü, Fikret Ürgüp, and Pulat Tacar were all part of this discussion. From a philosophical point of view, none of these readings of existentialism were as philosophical as Joachim Ritter's and Nusret Hizir's interpretation of existentialism.
In 1950, the German philosopher Joachim Ritter, a professor at Istanbul University, gave conferences on existentialism titled "Zum Problem der Existenzphilosophie." In these conferences, Ritter addressed how the war atmosphere that had invaded Europe since the 1930s had made the foundations of European philosophy tremble. The loss of solid foundations meant the loss of confidence in Western philosophy, which was previously viewed as a voice and path to truth. According to Ritter, existentialism is a reaction against totalitarianism — a process that society undergoes in which the individual risks losing her being. Given that the individual fails to find her being in the society or community, she risks losing her identity or ipseity. Hence, the loss of the individual being in the masses is also the loss of the communal identity (Sittlichkeit ) to which the individual may belong. Ritter quotes Emmanuel Mounier, who said that "existentialism is a philosophy of despair in which life and being lose their richness." According to Ritter, existentialism asks if there are other possibilities for humanity to overcome the totalitarianism that imposes itself in the technological age.
Nusret Hizir, who started his career as Reichenbach's assistant before accepting a position at Ankara University, became a renowned philosopher of logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science in Turkish academia, introducing Sartre's thought in its relation to Husserl's phenomenology to the broader public in several articles published in the intellectual review Yücel in 1956.7 He argued that Sartre was not faithful to phenomenology. Husserl's phenomenology employed the phenomenological method, which required setting aside all the constructive theories for a description of the phenomena through which it is possible to accede to essences. In contrast, Sartre defined being in itself as "inexplicable and contingent." He arrived at this conclusion not through phenomenological descriptions but by means of reasoning, inference, and reduction to absurdity. Hizir emphasized that this determination of being in itself conflicted with and went against the anti-intellectualist tendencies that were found in Sartre's existentialism. Hence, he read Sartre as a philosopher who created an anti-intellectualist philosophy without being able to avoid using intellectualist instruments. Sartre's philosophy remained paradoxical. According to Hizir, philosophy is a rational system, and Sartre risked the confusion of philosophy with literature. In relation to Sartre's Being and Nothingness, Hizir speaks of Heidegger as well and tells the reader that being-in-itself corresponds more or less to what Heidegger calls das Seiende while being-for-itself is equivalent to Dasein. Arguably, this poor reading of Being and Time is not due to Hizir but comes from Sartre's first reading of Being and Time. Das Seiende translates as a being, which Heidegger analyzes at different layers of his ontological analysis as Dasein, zuhanden (ready-to-hand), and vorhanden (present-at-hand). Dasein is the basis of the existential analytic that rests on a refusal of a philosophy of subjective consciousness for the sake of investigating the being of this being and hence the possibility of raising the question of the meaning of being. This reading of Nusret Hizir indicates the confusion or miscomprehension that marks the first phase of the reception of Heidegger's philosophy. In the first place, what distinguishes his philosophy from philosophical anthropology? Most notably, the question of the meaning of being is completely missed. Heidegger is read as if he were a humanist and as if his thought primarily aims to explain the being of Dasein. Second, the challenge of Heidegger to modern philosophy as a philosophy of subjectivity has not been given any weight in interpreting him.
In the same year (1956), Peyami Safa, a prominent intellectual of Turkish Islamism, published an article on existentialism in the intellectual review Türk Düsüncesi. Safa associated existentialism with the individualism prevalent in the modern Western societies that he described as decadent. Although he identified himself as a religious intellectual, he was open to a synthesis of East and West. In contrast, his right-wing followers, especially after the 1980s, represented him as defending the Turkish-Islamic civilization against Western domination, which came with the charge of corruption. Serif Hulusi, a left-wing intellectual and a socialist, made use of the same argument to criticize existentialism. Hulusi criticized existentialism because it covered over the fundamental problem of economic inequality, whereas Safa's problem concerned cultural identity, which he believed Turkey suffered from since the 1930s. Safa could be read as critical of atheist existentialism rather than existentialism in general. His Islamic mysticism is combined with the personalism of Christian existentialists that he read in French.
HEIDEGGER IN TURKISH ACADEMIA IN THE 1990s
In the early 1990s, the interest in the hermeneutical tradition, especially Gadamer's Truth and Method, paved the way for the discovery of Heidegger's "ontological hermeneutics" in Being and Time. After the military coup of 1980, Turkey crushed activists, students, and intellectuals on the left. Surely, political organizations and prominent figures of right-wing politics suffered as well. Members of political organizations were either in prisons or in exile as political refugees. After decree number 1402, Turkish universities were purged of professors who voiced their political views. The left-wing intellectuals gathered around publishing houses where they could self-critically engage with their own experience. Most of them read foreign texts in English. Coming from the leftist tradition, they discovered the Frankfurt School, and Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment was widely read. Further interest in the Frankfurt School made Habermas an intellectual celebrity. Gadamer entered Turkey through a debate with Habermas, who criticized him in 1967, when he addressed the question of the methodology of the social sciences. After the 1980s, this debate gained attention and Truth and Method introduced Heidegger as a must-read.
This second phase of the reception of Heidegger in Turkey belongs more to theoretical studies in sociology than philosophical research. In the department of sociology at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Hasan Ünal Nalbantoglu taught and organized reading groups on Heidegger. His first collection of essays on Heidegger, Paths, appeared in Turkish as an outcome of the reading group. Nalbantoglu did not have a formal philosophical education and did not do empirical research in sociology. He taught sociology of art and other subjects. As a sociologist, he made use of European philosophy, Kant, Arendt, Adorno, Gadamer, and Heidegger in order to articulate sociological experience in Turkey. Nalbantoglu refers to Heidegger in his reflection on Turkish modernity, contemporary academic life, and the commodification of academic knowledge. His works on Heidegger are at the intersection of philosophy and sociology. I will now briefly explain how he applies Heidegger's thought in order to explain contemporary culture understood as a historical epoch.
Modern Turkey was born of the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a nation-state and managed to be politically sovereign after the war of independence against the European military powers. Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, saw himself as making a radically new beginning and instituted Turkey as a secular republic that set itself the goal of making progress for the sake of attaining "the level of contemporary civilizations." Although Nalbantoglu was not a liberal and subtly supported Kemalist secularism — as a reader of the Turkish sociologist Serif Mardin — he acknowledged the sociological trauma people had experienced because of their break with the cultural past. Religion is a discourse that establishes the social bond, and there is room for doubt that scientific culture and official ideology could replace it. The scientific real and the real in the religious sense are not the same. Moreover, one would be construing a thin identity if the relation to history is governed by the command to forget the religious culture that is responsible for cultural backwardness. At the heart of Turkish modernity lies a command to forget, the psychological weight of which Nalbantoglu as a Heideggerian had to acknowledge. However, Nalbantoglu remained silent on these issues that would be the distinguishing mark of the Islamist receptions. Instead, he focused on the experience of time to show how forgetfulness and the loss of the self in the pace of our capitalistically organized life blind us to our own possibilities. According to Nalbantoglu, Turkish society is tormented by the difficulty of distinguishing between its proper and improper possibilities. We are disoriented not only as individuals but also as a society. Even if the society is organized in accordance with the forms of rationality (Max Weber), the problem of time remains unresolved.
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Excerpted from "Heidegger in the Islamicate World"
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Copyright © 2019 Kata Moser, Urs Gosken, and Josh Hayes.
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