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Philosophy in... Turkish

Writer's picture: Jonathan EgidJonathan Egid

Updated: Jan 24


“How could it be possible that over one night they simply decided ‘now we will use the Latin alphabet instead of the Arabic!'”

Kadir Filiz completed his Ph.D at Radboud University, Nijmegen and taught at Boğaziçi University, in addition to editing the Sabah Ülkesi Magazine. In this interview, Kadir provides an overview of philosophy in Turkish from the present all the way back to the earliest inklings of writing in Turkic languages, with special attention to 'the language revolution' of the early twentieth century, in which Turkish purged Arabic and Persian from its grammar and lexicon, and the more famous 'alphabet reforms', which replaced Arabic with Latin characters. Along the way we discuss the parallel traditions of 'Western' and madrassa style philosophising in Turkey, the reception of Reichenbach's positivism and Derrida's experience lecturing in Istanbul.


I – The Language Revolution


Hello and welcome back for another episode of ‘Philosophising in’ the first episode of ‘Philosophising in’ which is coming to you from SOAS, formerly the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Today we're going be speaking about ‘Philosophising in Turkish’. Our guest, Kadir Filiz is in Istanbul. I thought we would start today by talking about the philosophical atmosphere in contemporary Turkey. So could you tell us, Kadir, what are people reading philosophically in Turkey today?

 

In Turkey, people are reading mostly similar books to what philosophically inclined readers might read in the West. There are some popular writers of philosophy, for example, Byung-Chul Han, a Korean philosopher based Germany, Simon Critchley or other philosophical bestsellers which one can find in London, New York or Berlin. There is a quick translation of these texts into Turkish when they appear in foreign languages. Philosophy readers in Turkey are interested in reading foreign texts in Turkish, mostly translations of contemporary philosophical, and popular philosophical texts. Of course, philosophers also write in Turkish, but I can say that translations are always more appealing than philosophical texts written originally in Turkish.

 

Every kind of Western (by the way, when I say ‘the West’, ‘Western’ or ‘Westernization’ I don’t mean to attribute to them some essence. Rather I mainly follow their usage in Turkish) philosophy is read in Turkey. However, it is not common to find detailed works on world philosophies in Turkish, for example African or Indian philosophy. You can find a variety of different philosophers, following the world trend, from the popular names to non-popular ones. Philosophical translations have increased in the last few decades in Turkish.


This is notable because what is called ‘Western’ philosophy came to Turkey at the end of nineteenth century and at the beginning of twentieth century. The translation in philosophy had a huge function in the Turkish language and for the modernization (or we might say the ‘Westernization’) of Turkey for at least 150 years. Translation had a really significant role in the Turkish history of modernization, especially in the reception of philosophy and science in academia and society.

 

So is it still the case today, as it was a hundred years ago, that the major appetite of the philosophy reading public in Turkey is for reading foreign ideas translated into Turkish? That seems to suggest a really significant role for the translator of philosophy. Is the contemporary philosophical translator into Turkish someone that conceives of what they're doing as transmitting foreign knowledge and foreign ideas? Is there any sense that the translator of philosophy is doing something philosophical themselves, or are they just a messenger?

 

As a translator of philosophical texts myself I have some first-hand experience! To be honest, the role of the translator has changed massively in Turkey compared to say, fifty years ago. Back then, those who learned foreign languages were mostly people who studied in foreign colleges in Turkey, some of them who were labelled ‘white Turks’, that is Turks educated in foreign languages, generally at the famous French and American schools such as Robert College and Lycée de Galatasaray. They were in many ways quite special people, in large part because it was rare for Turks to learn foreign languages at that time. These well-educated, kind of elite translators were making the ‘West’ or ‘modernity’ available to less-educated Turks.

Lithograph of the Yeni Cami Mosque from the Bosphorus

 

Still today, in Turkey, even compared with other Muslim majority countries, Turkish people know foreign languages less than, for example, Egyptians or Palestinians, because we haven’t had direct experiences of colonialism. Language education was not very good in Turkey and not many people were able to read in English in universities, certainly not to read philosophy. But if I compare the situation right now with forty, fifty years ago, more people can speak English, French, German, or other languages, and therefore there are more translators than in the past. In a way, one can say that there is a more equal atmosphere of translation nowadays.

 

However, rather than translators, the most important issue about translating into Turkish is the language itself. The Turkish language experienced an unnatural purification process that made philosophical language weak, a kind of unnatural construction. It is called ‘Language Reform’ (labeled ‘Language Revolution’ in the official history), and it was put forth during the 1930s by the new Turkish Republic as one of the measures to create a new Turkish nation after the Ottoman State.

 

This reform aimed to purify the Turkish language from Arabic and Persian influence. According to the state founders’ mentality, since Turks needed to be westernized, using so-called Islamic languages (Arabic and Persian) would not allow them to be enough ‘Westerns’ or one can also say ‘universal’. The aim was to create a new Turkish nation which was Western, secular, developed, civilized etc.

 

The language reform was based on fundamentally racist theories. Just as racism aims to create a pure race, nation, the reformers dreamed of a pure language. After the 30s, the language congresses were made by the state to create new concepts and establish a relation with the Turks’ pre-Islamic ancestors. This new ‘pure’ Turkish language refused to use almost all classical philosophical terms coming from centuries and also newly invented terminology in the last 50 years at the end of the Ottoman Era in Turkish. You can see the details of the language reform in Geoffrey Lewis’s great book The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. As he well described, the language reform was a big catastrophe, but at the same time it was successful; it reached its goal. However, this success impoverished the Turkish language, it lost many words.

 

Can you explain more about the causes of this ‘catastrophic success’?

 

The basic motivation of the language reform was the ‘purification’ of the Turkish language: Turkish words of Persian and Arabic origin were thrown out. Instead of these Arabic and Persian origin daily words, scientific and philosophical terms, linguists of that time created many new words and terms by drawing on the archaic Turkish of pre-Islamic times. Some of these newly invented words and terms are still used, are part of contemporary Turkish; some of them were also forgotten.

 

You can see its effects clearly after the 1950s in the texts of the new generation of educated people of the modern Turkish Republic. The educated class of Turkey became ignorant of anything written before fifty years ago; if you didn’t have a special education, you would be unable to read those texts. This artificial and superficial understanding of Westernization created big troubles for the story of philosophy and its language in Turkey. They assumed that a secular, so-called ‘Turkish’ philosophy could become possible under this new a state approved philosophical language. But it was a total failure to dismiss philosophical and linguistic history of the past.

 

The outcome of this intervention to the language is still determining the trajectory of philosophizing in Turkish. We cannot speak about contemporary philosophical language in Turkey without discussing the language reform. This rupture on the Turkish language generated a tension between so-called old Turkish (or Ottoman language) which is composed of mostly Arabic and Persian in philosophical terminology, and a new, ‘purified’ Turkish that is based on the new invented terms (taken from the pre-Islamic Turkish and also Western languages). This tension led translators to use different terminologies of philosophical language in Turkish according to their political stance. For example, one the one hand, more secular, ‘Westernized’ and Turkish nationalist (some of them from these ‘elite’ people I mentioned above) authors and translators preferred to use newly invented philosophical terms. On the other hand, if you use certain Arabic words and concepts, some of which also existed in everyday Turkish speech, you could easily have been labelled an ‘Islamist’, ‘Ottomanist’, religious, whatever else. This tension could easily show itself in the different philosophical terminologies in texts about Islamic philosophy, and in texts about Western philosophy, too.

Photograph of the cortege from the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Turkish Republic in 1933. The banner displays three words (kel [bald], gül [rose], gel [come]) written identically with Arabic letters, but differently in the Latin alphabet

 

As a result, the Turkish philosophical language was a kind of artificial language that an ordinary reader wouldn’t understand at all. I can well remember that when I was a high school student and then at the beginning of my bachelor, I wanted to read some philosophy, texts translated forty to fifty years ago, in Turkish. I couldn't understand these texts at all. The language did not make sense. Fortunately however, the situation is changing now.

 

So even though you were reading in your mother tongue, some of these really old fashioned Turkish terms, that the translators had come up with to replace Arabic or Persian terms because they didn't want to sound like they were ‘Islamist’ or ‘Ottomanist’, but this was in fact making it impossible even for you as a native speaker to understand.

 

Yes indeed, and for many native speakers! But now with my generation, maybe in the last 20 years translators don't have this kind of worries. The general situation is a bit better now. In the last twenty or thirty years, translators have started using these two different terminologies in one and the same translation, so I can say that a common and reconciled philosophical language has been emerging in Turkish, or at least it is in the making.

 

I mean that in a philosophical text, one can find philosophical terms coming from so-called ‘pure’ Turkish and also from Arabic and Persian originated words. Interestingly, this is true not only for Western philosophy, but you can see this trend also in the language of translators of works of Islamic philosophy into Turkish. So we are going to have a kind of common language in all different political and social camps of Turkey. And of course this makes it easier to understand philosophical texts. I can see that general readership in philosophy can understand this new generation translators’ texts much better than translations in the past. I hope that Turkish will develop a more stabilized philosophical terminology in the future.

 

Its interesting you say that because we're already starting to get a really clear idea I think of what's unique or special about the Turkish case here. So of course in many languages, the translation of philosophy means that you take on new words. So in English, we borrowed words for ‘rationality’ or ‘ethics’ from Greek and Latin, whereas you're describing a way in which translators would either take over a word from Arabic or Persian, maybe coming up with new words from Turkish. But you didn't mention that whether there were any cases of say if you're translating a work from French or you're translating a work from English or German, or is that when new Turkish words are invented?

 

First of all, for example in English, some philosophical terms borrowed or adopted from Greek and Latin centuries ago have been used throughout centuries; they got a history in English too. There was a similar process in Turkish, borrowing terms mostly from Arabic and less from Persian. After the second half of the nineteenth century, Western philosophy had started to come into Turkish, and translators at that time used this already-established philosophical terminology. They even created new philosophical terms from the language they already used, in order to find equivalents of the new terms coming from French. Sometimes they left terms as they were used in French. By the way, the term philosophy in Turkish – ‘felsefe’ – has this kind of history. It is from Arabic. Arabic translators of Greek philosophy in the 8th century used it in Arabic as it was used in Greek, ‘falsafa’.

 

Today, translators in Turkish still invent new words for the terms, especially coming from phenomenology or so-called post-modern and post-structuralist philosophy, just as new terms are also invented in French or German. When you need to translate them into Turkish, you sometimes create new terms from Turkish language or you leave them as they are in Turkish. For example, as a translator, my preference is to leave them in Turkish as they are in other languages.

 

Can you give me an example?

 

For example, Derrida’s ‘déconstruction’ in French and ‘deconstruction’ in English, which is easy enough. I also translated it as ‘dekonstrüksiyon’ in Turkish, but other scholars use ‘Yapısöküm’ in Turkish. It is difficult to translate exactly into English; ‘Yapı’ (its root comes from ‘to do, yapmak’ in Turkish) means ‘construction’ and ‘söküm’ is in place of the prefix ‘de-’, which we don’t have any equivalent for in Turkish. So ‘söküm’ is a noun which is made from another verb ‘sökmek’, which has many meanings, but the most general one is‚ ‘to dismantle’.

 

When Derrida came to Turkey, some scholars explained this translation to him, and he liked the idea because ‘sökmek’ gives some senses similar to the prefix ‘de-’ but also some other positive meanings. For example, when a child learns a language, or an adult learns a new language, we use this verb ‘sökmek’ – ‘dili söktü (it literally means ‘dismantled the language’)’. I think that Derrida liked this usage of the verb.

Jacques Derrida giving a speech at Boğaziçi University, 1997

 

Anyway, for other examples, I can mention the Turkish translations of ‘empiricism’, ‘phenomenon’ and ‘hermeneutics’. I prefer to use them as they are, so in Turkish ‘ampirisizm’, ‘fenomen’ and ‘hermenötik’. You can find these terms’ ‘pure’ Turkish versions too in some translations.

 

Let's talk about those historical roots because I think many people, one of the only things that they will know in any great detail about the period you were talking about in the early philosopher translate is the great linguistic reform in the time of Atatürk, where Turkey switches almost overnight from writing in an Arabic sort of script into a Latin one. Could you tell us about how that affects the discussion of philosophy you've been talking about?

 

As I was just speaking of Derrida, let me tell you a story that I heard from my senior professors. When Derrida came to Istanbul at the end of 90s, a young professor, Ferda Keskin told him about the language reform – and also the alphabet reform that had happened shortly before the language reform. Derrida was astonished of hearing about these reforms made on the language. You can find his ironic comments about it in his Istanbul Letter to Catherine Malabou. He was writing about how these reforms were so shocking and traumatic: how could it be possible that over one night they simply decided ‘now we will use Latin alphabet instead of the Arabic alphabet’ by the new authority as a process of ‘Westernization’! Derrida’s astonishment can be seen as an example of how this intervention into language had deep effects on philosophy and the way of thinking in general. It was something catastrophic that a language can experience.

 

There had always been cultural exchanges with the West on different levels. We must not think of two different culturally isolated environments that did not hear from each other. I don’t even mention political and economic exchange between them. However, the character of this cultural encounter started changing in the nineteenth century.  We can think of two periods of an encounter first with the West or Europe until almost the beginning of the nineteenth century and then after the nineteenth century.

 

Before the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state was kind of seen as an equal political power with the other European countries and mainly technological and scientific, but also sometimes philosophical texts were read and discussed by some scholars in Ottoman Empire. For example, The French astronomer Noel Durret’s work Novæ motuum was translated into Turkish in 1660s by Tezkireci İbrahim Efendi. Jacques Cassini's Tables astronomtques was translated into Turkish in 1789. Later, at the beginning of nineteenth century, an Ottoman scholar, Hüseyin Rıfkı Tamani (1750-1817) who also got some education in London, translated texts on mathematics from English and wrote books on engineering too. Rather than philosophy, these books were translations of scientific works. Scientific novelties in medicine, mathematics and engineering happening in Europe were followed by some scholars in Ottoman lands. This situation in early modern period had also continued in the nineteenth century, but the relation started changing at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Ottomans’ approach to Europe up until this period did not feature an idea of ‘Westernization’ or ‘Europeanization’, because politically their self-image was not in a lower position than the Europeans. One can see this feeling of equality, or even superiority over the Europeans in travel accounts of Ottomans about Europe until the beginning of nineteenth century.

 

II - Transcontinental Philosophy


So what's the fundamental reason for this change that we have in the nineteenth century?

 

As Ottoman political power declined they were watching all various changes in European countries: constitutionalism, republicanism and so on, military reforms, engineering and technological advantages. They wanted to follow the example of what is going on in European countries and eventually Ottomans started to feel a need to follow the West, a need for Westernization in many different areas. Mainly it started with military, educational, governmental and juridical reforms. Its most concrete fruits appeared by the declaration of the Tanzimat (Imperial Edict of Reorganization) in 1839. The Ottoman governing system became more ‘westernized’; it turned into a constitutional law, the idea of citizenship appeared etc. 

 

And naturally, the Ottoman intellectual and philosophical atmosphere was also affected by all these changes. In this period, ‘Western’ modes of thought, and literature, started to be followed among Ottoman scholars and philosophers. They started learning French. In the midst of these political turmoil in Ottoman lands coming from inside by reforms and also from outside through colonization, nationalist movements in Greece, in Albenia, in the Arabic lands and so on, Ottoman scholars and elites tried to understand Europe in an intellectual level. For example, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, a reformist Ottoman statesman, had a correspondence with Auguste Comte in 1853. In the face of an idea of a superior ‘West’ and the description of the Ottomans as the ‘sick man of Europe’, Ottomans brought forth different responses to these changes among Ottoman intellectuals. 

 

How does this manifest itself in terms of the language program then?

 

These new modes of thought had directly affected the scientific and philosophical language of Turkish. First of all, the source language had changed from Arabic to French. After the second half of the nineteenth century, new terminological dictionaries had appeared in Turkish in medicine, military, governing, botanic, mathematics mostly looking for new terms derived from French in Turkish. For example, at the end of nineteenth century, the dictionary of two Armenian authors, Tıngır and Kirkor Sinapyan, tried to find Turkish equivalents for forty thousand terms of French in almost all scientific areas. We can see the first Turkish translation of a ‘Western’ philosophical text at that era, in 1854 Fénelon’s Abrégé de La Vie des Plus Illustres Philosophes de L'Antiquité (Evvel Zaman İçinde Azamü'ş-şan Olan Filozofların İmrar Etmiş Oldukları Ömürlerinin İcmalidir) by an Armenian translator called Cricor Chumarian. It was a summary of Ancient Greek philosophy.


View of Istanbul after Antoine de Favray


Then we can find some translations of Voltaire and other French literary and philosophical texts in Turkish. At the end of nineteenth century, there were some more translations from French, but they were not main texts of philosophers, such as the works of Hume, Kant or Newton etc. They were mostly summaries, or popular philosophical texts of those times. There is also an exception: Descartes’ Discourse on Method was translated into Turkish in 1895. In the last decades of nineteenth century and the beginning of twentieth century, some other texts were translated into Turkish and also we can mention philosophical dictionaries at those times, from Western languages to Turkish.

 

Do you have any idea why so many of these earlier translators seemed to be Armenian?

 

It is not a coincidence. The non-Muslim populations of the Ottoman Empire had more contact with Western countries – in their colleges or schools they were able to learn French or English, got Western style education long before Turks. Indeed, the best colleges in Turkey were established by French, German and American missionaries and so on. These missionary schools were only permitted to convert non-Muslims by the Ottoman State, so their students were mainly non-Muslims. People educated in these schools were more familiar with Western languages than the average Muslim population. Especially Armenian translators and intellectuals did important translations for Turkish language. Non-Muslim population played an important role in the modernization of the Ottoman Empire.

 

Can you tell us about the situation of philosophizing in Turkish in early modern Ottoman empire? What kind of linguistic intellectual world did they live in? Presumably they would have known both Arabic and Turkish very well, but which language did they discuss and write their philosophy in?

 

I mentioned some points about the emergence of Westernization and modernization in politics and in philosophy during nineteenth century. Of course, before the encounter with the western philosophy, in Ottoman lands, there was a long tradition of philosophy in madrasas. The philosophical activity in the Ottoman lands was the continuation of Islamic or Arabic philosophy, they followed this philosophical tradition by its education. Thus philosophy in the Ottoman lands could be seen as a subbranch of Islamic Philosophy or Arabic Philosophy. The literary production of philosophical texts was mostly done in Arabic by Ottoman scholars up until the modern Turkish Republic. Arabic was a lingua franca for Muslims, and also Ottomans.

 

Although they read in Arabic, scholars also discussed ideas in Turkish. For example, according to a historical record from the end of sixteenth century (the era of Murad III), a madrasa professor had a philosophical debate with an Iranian scholar in Turkish on Plato’s ideas. Then the Turkish scholar accuses the Iranian that he couldn’t understand the issue because of his lack of Turkish. Then the Iranian told him: ‘thanks to God, I am not Turkish and I don’t understand Turkish well’. Anyway, they were discussing in Turkish by reading mostly Arabic texts.

 

However, at the same time, some scholars had already started translating texts from Arabic and Persian to Turkish, and also started writing scientific and philosophical texts in Turkish, from the fifteenth century onwards. It started with more practical sciences such as medicine, geography, accounting, astronomy, religious sciences, political philosophy; not all people interested in these sciences were scholars. They had more practical use in daily life. Two centuries later, I mean in the seventeenth century, one could find more texts in all sciences, and in philosophy and logic in Turkish. The first philosophical monography in the tradition of Arabic philosophy in Turkish language was written by Mehmed Ladikî at the end of fifteenth century. It was Porphyry Isagoge’s translation from Arabic and this translation is not only a translation in modern sense but also with commentaries. There were many Arabic terms in this translation used in Turkish language.

 

The notion of “Ottoman Philosophy” is something very new, invented almost fifty years ago for more political reasons than philosophical ones, in response to claims that there was no philosophy in Ottoman times. I think that we don’t need to invent a special term for “Ottoman Philosophy” because philosophical activity in the Ottoman lands was mostly the continuation of philosophy in Arabic tradition. In this traditions one can mention many great scholars and philosophers such as Davud Kayserî, Molla Fenârî, Taşköprizâde, Kemal Paşazâde, Hasan Kafi Akhisarî, Gelenbevî, Kâtip Çelebi, Yanyalı Esad Efendi etc, prolific and multifaceted scholars who wrote not only on philosophy but in other sciences, religious sciences too. They wrote in the philosophical canon of Arabic philosophy on the issues of, being, essence, existence, logic, politics etc. Kâtip Çelebi in particular is also famous for his polemical texts on analyzing his own time and his classification of sciences.

 

They were also not enclosed in their own intellectual environment, circles but also encountering foreigner scholars, travelers from other Islamic lands and Europe. Istanbul was an important centre of culture and science. As you know, Ottoman lands were so vast, for example Esad Efendi was from Ioannina (Greece now) and learned Latin and Greek before coming to Istanbul. He translated Aristotle’s Organon and Physics from Latin to Arabic. His teachers in Ioninna were from the school of Padua of Italy, and through this interaction in his reading of Arabic philosophy, he was interested in turning to Ibn Rushd rather than Ibn Sina. He was also one of the first scholars in Istanbul to mention new tools used in natural sciences in Europe at the beginning of 18th century.

 

One of the main reasons that Arabic was used as the language of philosophy in Ottoman madrasas is related to the status of language in classical Islamic philosophy. The role of language in classical thought assumes that the difference in languages does not have an effect on the reality in mind, for grasping the thing in itself. By this inference, the language had a ‘tool’ status in Ottoman mind. In the classification of sciences (for example by Taşköprizâde), the language is not a science as such but as a tool to philosophize. However, this does not mean that the language was not an important factor. Rather it is something that someone must know for a proper understanding of religion and being. It was Arabic for Turkish scholars too. One must also mention that this Arabic was not the daily Arabic of the marketplace, it was something like a symbolic language for doing any science in Islamic geography for centuries. The language of philosophy as Arabic has been refined for centuries, acquiring a role of a gate to eternal truths for scholars of madrasas.


How do you feel early thought systems (both pre-Islamic and after the adoption of Islam) influenced the initial development of philosophical ideas in the Turkish language?

 

If we understand the meaning of philosophy in a broad sense, not only limited by its Western conception of origin in the Ancient Greek or a Greek invention, rather as thinking about the world, human being, death, how to live, manners, nature etc, you can find earliest sources in Uyghur Turkish written in pre-Islamic times around 8-10th centuries. These texts were mainly translations of some Buddhist ‘sutras’ and Manichaeism texts from Chinese. Some texts also include Taoist themes together with Buddhist ones (for example, Sekiz Yükmek Yaruk- 佛锐天地八踢神咒經 / Fo shuo tian di ba yang shen zhou jing). One can see these translations as religious texts in the modern sense, but they were also philosophical treatises about how to live, self-realization, ethics... etc. However, it must be also said that these texts don’t have any foundational role on establishing a written Turkish language of philosophy. The pre-Islamic thought systems for Turks didn’t have a direct effect, or text-based effect, on philosophy for the Western Turkish (they were written in the Eastern Turkish language) until the twentieth century. They were not even known in Istanbul among scholars until the last century.


Mustafa Kemal Atatürk teaching the Latin alphabet

 

But apart from, and parallel to the madrasa as an educational institution, in the Ottoman history of thought, a very vital role has always been played by Sufism and Sufi poetry. Tasawuf (mainly known in English as ‘Sufism’) offered a ‘philosophy as a way of life’, and along with its theoretical canon, it was experienced commonly, in many dimensions of everyday life, in oral and written literature and also as music. In Sufi lodges, poetry was recited and sung, and it also reached the uneducated and illiterate classes of people, both in rural and in urban environments. These literary works present interpretations of the cosmos, of the human being, the relation between God and human being… the main topics of metaphysics as first philosophy in the classical philosophy. Sufi poetry had a strong effect on the formation of Turkish language. For example, the exegesis in Turkish of Ibn Arabi’s famous and central book Fusus al-Hikem was made at the beginning of 17th century by a scholar and sufi called Abdullah Bosnevî. Ibn Arabi’s thoughts and this book had a huge philosophical impact on thinkers for centuries. Similarly, roughly in the same era, we can also find the first Turkish exegesis of Rumi’s Masnawi by Şem’î Şem’ullâh. Its appearance in Turkish also shows that there was a significant Turkish philosophical language used in the commentary of these texts.

 

III - Universities and Universalism


Let’s come back to the twentieth century of philosophy in Turkish. As you mentioned, in the face of the Westernization, Turkish philosophers were more interested in western philosophy, and classical philosophy had started of losing its power.

 

At the end of nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth century, some Turkish philosophers who read and translated Western philosophy were materialist and positivist thinkers such as Baha Tevfik, Abdullah Cevdet, Beşir Fuad, Rıza Tevfik, while some others were insisting to not loose the philosophical tradition coming from Arabic and the Islamic heritage. But in all groups of philosophers, one can find an amazement for the West. According to their mind, the old, sick Ottoman state was not able to challenge technological, scientific and philosophical developments in the great Western countries.

 

At the same time, there was a common disquietness about philosophy of madrasa tradition, coming from within the Arabic tradition. The first modern version of university with a philosophy department, Darülfünun, was opened in 1900 in Istanbul. Before that, there were some other western types of schools in medicine and engineering, for military. In Darülfünun, scholars were acquainted with ‘Western’ philosophy, but they aimed to make a Turkish philosophical language by using the classical Turkish philosophical terminology coming from mostly Arabic and Persian. For example, Babanzade Ahmed Naim Bey wrote a dictionary of philosophy in Turkish to seek Turkish equivalents for ‘Western’ philosophical and scientific terms (from Arabic and Persian, and sometimes French). This tradition of writing philosophical and scientific dictionaries after 1880 was a great attempt to generate a Turkish philosophical language which is familiar with Western notions and terms. Many modern institutions were established at the end of Ottoman state and these institutions continued in the modern Turkish Republic, although Turkish Republic assumed a great hiatus between the old and the new in all areas. This will be a key to understand the situation of philosophy in Turkish.

 

We can find some partial translations of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Voltaire, some histories of philosophy, methodology books. These attempts were historically very important and a great deal for understanding what is going on in Europe. However, the philosophical texts written in that era did not have a strong philosophical quality because they didn’t present a strong argumentation, or challenging ideas. You can mostly see various currents in those years, but generally, two poles among intellectuals and philosophers had more supporters. On the one hand, radical supporters of Westernization, seeing the classical philosophy as worthless, insignificant, the reason for the decline of Ottomans, philosophy etc. On the other hand, some so called ‘old-style’ intellectuals supported an encounter with the Western ideas, feeling a need for reformation, also promoting going back to our own heritage, religion, tradition in order to preserve their identity etc.

 

At the same time there was also a common wish to create a philosophical language in Turkish, and both sides did not hesitate to appeal to possibilities coming from already-existing Arabic and Persian words in Turkish. Almost all intellectuals and philosophers felt the need of a transformation of philosophical language in order to incorporate French terms into Turkish.

 

So maybe Derrida shouldn't have been so surprised that they all changed overnight, because in fact, they didn't just change overnight. You had the intellectuals as the kind of vanguard who had to go first.

 

In a way, you are right that Derrida shouldn’t have been so surprised. However, his comments are mostly about the alphabet reform. And the way these reforms done by the new Republic was traumatic and catastrophic. It was quite different than an intellectual discourse or struggle. It was made by the tone that the political power declared that from now on, we are going to use Latin alphabet and we are going to use new terms. Of course, it would take some time to apply it to the language, and to see its fruits, because language is not something that can be easily constituted by the officials or the law. And also all these people who were already used to write in so-called old language couldn’t leave the terminology and words in a moment. At the same time, by the new political atmosphere, some of them, on purpose, tried to use the newly invented words after the language reform. There were also some justifications of these reforms by the official history, for example, it is said that Arabic alphabet was not suitable for the Turkish language, or it was difficult to learn Arabic alphabet, that’s why the rate of the illiterate people was so high in the Ottoman State, etc. There is a nice book, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey by Nergis Erturk, discussing it in a deeper way. 

 

So do you think that it succeeded in having the effect of totally changing the direction of the intellectual outlook of so much of the Turkish population, but that it did so in a way that they hadn't imagined – instead of simply opening up a world of modern European learning, they cut themselves off from another incredibly rich tradition?

 

Yes, but I think that it was not such an innocent idea, it was done according to the program of Westernization that includes mainly secularization and modernization, and creating a Turkish nation, not to mention violence and overcontrol, and also the situation of non-Muslims or other minorities. The cultural, social and political connections with the past were aimed to be cut in harshly (that’s why some people call these reforms ‘revolutions’). It is funny but a historical fact that even classical Turkish music was banned at that time. This is mainly because they saw the past as the source of the ‘undeveloped’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘unsecular’ etc. station. You can find, in the text of intellectuals, in 1930s and 1940s, even at the end of the Ottoman Empire that they saw the Islamic heritage, or this kind of heritage as the source of all problems of the Turkish people.

 

So, it wasn't by accident at all?

 

Yes sure! For example, regarding the contemporary situation of philosophy and its education in universities, another important event is the university reform made in 1933. The new Turkish Republic made some reforms of the university which was opened at the end of Ottoman times. Many so-called old-mind scholars and philosophers lost their jobs in 1933 and a new first philosophy faculty of Turkey in Istanbul University was established in 1933.

 

The new philosophy faculty was established under the chairman of German positivist philosopher Hans Reichenbach. Reichenbach’s positivism was a great matching for the new Turkish Republic with what they had in their minds as philosophy. In the opening lecture of the philosophy department in 1933, Reichenbach spoke as if philosophy was going to exist for the first time in Turkey. This new department adopted a new philosophy curriculum which was similar to the European ones in the 1930s. ‘Islamic philosophy’ didn’t have a place in this new definition of ‘philosophy’ and its history.

Galata from the compound of Süleymaniye Mosque

 

On the other hand, a new pure Turkish philosophical terminology had been fabricated by some other scholars, ‘yes-man’ of the republic who wanted to have positions in the new republic. Reichenbach understood philosophy as a teleological means to reach new science and technology. However, new philosophy students of Turkey couldn’t understand him well because they hadn’t heard names such as Hume, Kant, Hegel etc before. In order to turn away from this positivistic current in philosophy, some philosophers of the new generation turned their face to Hegel, to Bergson etc. These philosophers – such as Macit Gökberk and Mustafa Şekip Tunç – aimed to find a new Turkish identity through something other than positivism… In the text of these philosophers, you can recognize a feeling of backwardness, aiming to reach Western ways of thinking etc. I think that this has been a recurring pathology in modern Turkish thought.

 

In the same vein, in the fifties new Islamic theology faculties were opened by the Turkish Republic and they had a department or chair for Islamic philosophy. It was a kind of return of ‘suppressed’ philosophical understanding (one can read Turkish philosopher Zeynep Direk’s article on the issue of secularism in Turkey). Again, the education of old-style philosophy had begun. However, it was suiting the mentality of the republic, because theologians are interested in Arabic philosophy, the religious one, it is a kind of not genuine philosophy, a murmuring about the past. The ‘genuine’ philosophy was in philosophy departments, following the western ways of thinking, and it was secular. The understanding of philosophy was based on this dichotomy, and it is still in a way a valid distinction and bifurcation of philosophy in Turkey.

 

You would study Western philosophy in a philosophy department but if you wanted to study Islamic philosophy you had to go to a theology department?

 

Yes, exactly, and it is the source of many current problems; you are faced with two different worlds. It created its own camps and political agendas. These political camps were also using different philosophical languages, terminologies and there was no proper communication between them. Philosophy departments were accused of being atheist, positivist, secular, western etc. And Islamic philosophy departments in theology faculties were blamed of being religious, narrow-minded, reactionary, anti-modernist, old-minded etc. All clichés were valid. Yet, at present, the picture is slightly different from the former years that I have just tried to describe. In theology departments and philosophy departments, you can find both traditions of philosophies. However, in the current situation, you can find many theological faculties in Turkey as a kind of ideological reaction to what happened before. There are still remnants and specters of the past and the former pasts on philosophy and politics in Turkey.


Amazing how much that has changed then over the last hundred or so years. You know the pendulum has swung from one side and right back to the other


Yes, the use and presentation of Islamic philosophy by some scholars have a similar ideological function in the new political and social climate of Turkey. Some scholars consider ‘Islamic Philosophy’ as a response to the crisis of the West, giving it an anti-modern discourse for their political views. This is also a poor, ideological and reactionary use of philosophy. It can be thought as the re-emergence of the suppressed. It is the point I want to come to. Philosophy was and is used for political agendas by different camps in Turkey even in the scholarly level.


Absolutely it sounds in both cases like the philosophy was used to political ends it's just that the political ends completely changed.


I should also say that, beyond these political ends in philosophizing, you can also find philosophers who are interested in western philosophy and Islamic philosophy, and try to understand one of the traditions without ignoring the other; rather they are interested in reading each other. Moreover, philosophers sometimes happen to use a common philosophical Turkish language that is not formed according to a political agenda. This is very important. Turkish philosophical language has been going on a better path that is used by different political camps. It is not an exaggeration to say that the current situation of philosophical atmosphere gives more hopes than the recent years.

 

I wanted to ask you one really question which has been in my mind the whole time since you started to talk about your own work as a translator of philosophy and to the structure of the Turkish language and to the different ways that the reforms worked about whether the claim is true that Latin is easier to learn an Arabic text or anything like that. What are the kind of challenges that the Turkish language might pose to the translator of philosophy?

 

We can mention two different technical challenges. One is about the syntax and the other about terms. In Turkish, there are not many subordinate clauses. We cannot make longer sentences by adding new clauses like in French or in German or in English without disturbing the main clause. To return to the new way of writing at the end of Ottoman Empire by using French terms in Turkish, it also affected the syntax of language in Turkish language, I can say, they start writing in Turkish similar to French. That's why it so strongly affected sentence construction so on. A new language has appeared in philosophical language, not only by new terms, also by the syntax, I can say. There is still a similar situation in Turkish.

 

Because Turkish is an agglutinative language, where you add one on to the other – you don't couch one clause within another, right?

 

But they forced language to make this kind of longer sentences. And I heard that Arabic language had similar story at the end of the nineteenth century. They intellectuals wanted to write in Arabic as they wrote in French. And so they changed the style of language. As we spoke about in detail, after the language reform, new terms were invented in language congresses made by the state. Some of these terms are used today, some of them not, but there is a tension to choose the proper term in Turkish. As in my first translations, I was always asking myself ‘which term should I use the Arabic one or the Turkish one?’ For example, I was asking myself if I should translate ‘substance’ as ‘cevher’ (from Arabic) or ‘töz’ (a newly invented term from the Archaic Turkish). Both are correct translations of the word and are used in contemporary Turkish. However, over time, you get a preference about terms and in some way I am used to learn where to use the old-fashioned terms where to use newly invented terms.

 

Overall, I am quite happy about translations in Turkish in last 20 years, but they are of course not enough. Translations of main classical works of Western philosophy are still lacking, for example Kant, Hegel, Husserl etc; there are only some texts by them exist in Turkish so far. However, a good amount of contemporary philosophy has been translated. Also there is a significant interest in Ancient Greek texts in Turkish. Before Ancient Greek texts were translated from French to Turkish in the 1940s and 1950s, but in last 20 years, they were translated into Turkish from Ancient Greek. There are also translations from contemporary Arabic thought to Turkish. These are all good signs showing that things are going to be better. In short, Turkish language is still in the making of a philosophical terminology and its own story.


Many thanks for your time Kadir,


(With special thanks to Fatih Tığlı, Mehmet Arıkan and Elmin Aliyev)


Kadir Filiz completed his Ph.D at Radboud University, Nijmegen and taught at Boğaziçi University. His dissertation, published in 2024, focuses on the phenomenology of the event. His fields of interest are phenomenology, hermeneutics, decolonisation, Islamic philosophy and as well as the related topics between different philosophical traditions. He works on various aspects of Eurocentrism in phenomenology and in the conception of philosophy. He is a translator of various philosophical books and articles from English, French and German into Turkish.  He is also one of the editors of Sabah Ülkesi Magazine published in Germany in Turkish.


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