Ways of not getting the commentator's beating

It is told that Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, on the occasion of a dialogue, said to Osman Yüksel Serdengeçti: "Until now only you have understood me, but you too understood me wrongly."

Is it possible that no one has understood this great master, who has been read for so many years, whose works have broken sales records, and nearly all of whose conferences, given as he traveled every corner of Turkey, were attended by hundreds of thousands? Should the "Master's" complaint of being so little understood, a Master whose works a certain generation grew up reading and counts among the writers who influenced them most, be attributed merely to a simple state of mind of his?

Recalling for a moment Necip Fazıl's superior eloquence and wit, we may judge that what he said was an exaggeration. Or, if this attitude were an incident that had befallen the Master just once, we could still maintain the same indifference.

Yet we see that nearly all writers, great thinkers, or many people who exert intense efforts to be understood, at some point fall into this feeling of "never being understood at all" or, at best, "being misunderstood," and complain of it.

What is the wisdom of this misunderstanding?

Why do so many people gather around one person in order not to understand that person? How do thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people crowd around one person and so insistently share a "non-understanding" or a "misunderstanding"?

If people do not understand someone, how can they so collectively "pretend to understand"?

There is no person who has stood out in universities, in literary circles, in our spiritual worlds about whom the words "the master was not understood" have not been spoken. But to what extent have all those people who speak of certain people not being understood themselves understood the people in question? It is probable that the interpretations those people put forward after so much lamenting do not present a profile of the masters in question that most people could find reasonable. It is probable that that person too consumes at once the credit he has opened for himself for the sake of the "not understood master." By saying that he understood that person best, in the name of that master, he opens for himself a field of power that feeds on that master's spiritual value.

Here, of course, the political, literary, philosophical or spiritual personality of the "not understood" or "misunderstood" person makes a difference. Especially if this person has a strong impression and influence on society, the effect of the power gathered around the theme of his being misunderstood can be that much stronger. Those who put forward an interpretation of a person different from the one normally widely understood must of course come forward with a very reasonable story. But however reasonable the story, understanding a person always keeps us open to an ambiguous field.

Writers' lacking wholeness has a great effect in this. Which writer has been able to persist steadily throughout his life in the line on which he started? Even writers who claim a high degree of consistency have made great zigzags in certain periods of their lives. The traces of these zigzags may or may not have been reflected in their writings. That we perceive a person, a writer, a writer's signature, as a total wholeness is one of the most important causes of our plurality in understanding. Because no signature presents a monolithic wholeness. Every signature is open within itself to every kind of production.

Moreover, many thinkers make the matter difficult by themselves insisting on this consistency. He claims that whatever he said throughout his writing life has consistency. Yet a significant part of consistency has to do with a unified story a person produces in his mind. A story that can be unified in a writer's own head about the course of his own thought may not have the same chance in other people's heads. Even if a person always claims his own consistency himself, he may not be able to secure it himself.

Sometimes others also attribute to a person more wholeness and consistency than he claims for himself. This is also a story close to that of the disciples who make the sheikh fly when he does not fly. From here, a supra-historicity, an absolute certainty and wholeness close to what is attributed to sacred texts is ascribed to the texts of a writer or thinker. When this happens, interpreting those texts too ceases to be everyone's business; interpreting them is a matter of authority, and this authority often turns into a field of power that a particular discursive formation sets up and maintains. Those who enter there without permission eat, in respect of those texts, not their fruit, if any, but at most a beating.

If we return to the "understanding" part of the matter, is there really nothing that those who find a way to enter the vineyard without permission and by chance escape the beating can eat and feed others from there?

This question probably takes us to a field called "creative misunderstandings." Let us continue with that later.