The tension between "indigeneity" and "translation" in Turkish thought

Let us continue from where we left off in reflecting on the development of Turkish thought.

In fact, where we left off was a place where we should have opened a new chapter. The chapter on the role of translations in Turkish thought. At first glance we can see that translations make up a very significant total in Turkey's intellectual life, in its history and in its present. This total evidently disturbs some people. A palpable discomfort that people's being so interested in foreign ideas when they have their own native ones takes something away from us... As though the native product had an inherent privilege... This privilege perhaps is very natural, fed by a distance arising from the first feeling of strangeness people feel toward foreigners.

Let us also ask this: Can we say that Turkish thought exists on its own, is self-sufficient and needs to take nothing from outside? If we affirm such a claim for Turkish thought, we are bound to say that it is also valid for other thoughts. Then we are also saying that exchanges between thoughts can destroy the essential identity of a thought.

The judgment that the measure of correct thought is its nativeness is not a thought but a judgment, even a prejudice. An instinctive prejudice, fed by people's feelings of belonging, unquestioned, never pursued. Had people throughout history insisted to the end on being subject to this instinctive prejudice, there would have been no progress, people would have learned nothing from one another, and would not have partaken of any flash of truth produced by the clash of opinions. Yet even if it is fated that a human being is born in some place, what distinguishes the human being from the grass is not being bound to the soil. There is no such thing as thought reproducing itself without encountering other thoughts, without entering into an encounter with them.

From what period, and which thought, do those who today make native thought obligatory for Turkey say belongs to this place, to Turkey? Do they not see that even Islam, which is today the most fundamental element of native culture and thought, was born in Mecca, could not at first take hold there, and so began its journey by migrating to Medina, has continued this journey for 1438 years, and in between has stopped by us too and taken root here?

It is evident that a human being takes up a thought through an interaction, a schooling, an inheritance or a reading. During all these processes, each individual human being in fact reproduces his own adventure of thought in his own particular way. There is no question of thoughts being transmitted once and for all, for all times and for everyone in the same way. Everyone enters upon, or does not enter upon, his own adventure of thought on his own and for himself. Even when we feel ourselves very bound and obliged to the legacies of thought before us, we are in fact making a choice of our own. The whole responsibility for thinking or not thinking belongs to the last actor, the last receiver or consumer, so to speak. The thoughts that we inherit or do not inherit, cannot receive, bear no responsibility in this. The correlations drawn by those who link histories of thought with social developments are of course not entirely invalid, but one must not think of these as a fate for the human being either. In the end the human being himself adopts and consumes a thought or mentality that will make him passive. This is, again, another matter. To return to our real subject.

Today, in the reaction that presents translated works and thoughts as foreign and sanctifies native thought against them, a feeling of nationalism is undoubtedly also decisive. Self-admiration, megalomania and the prejudice of "we are enough for ourselves" can instill an introversion in thought too. If one looks at the genealogy of the thoughts or cultural codes to which those who put forward this reaction refer, it can easily be shown that they too in fact settled in these lands only a few generations ago through an interaction. After all, a human being is not born together with his own thoughts, and thought is a product that arises with the human being's course, journeying and interactions in life. That such a conservatism, quite apart from being unrealistic, seriously obstructs the development of thought is very clear.

A reaction to translations also develops on the basis of examples of wrong or bad translation. Personally I find these reactions too exaggerated. To approaches that presume a flawless translation of translated works, I would like to point out how the effect of translations considered merely bad can be so widespread and powerful. We hear in every era that all of Ali Shariati's books have been wrongly and badly translated, but a bad or wrong Ali Shariati text is circulating and being widely read, even widely understood. Even if he is misunderstood, it means we have a Turkey-specific Ali Shariati reality. We can say the same of Sayyid Qutb, Mawdudi, Marx, Althusser, Heidegger and Foucault.

However non-native all these works may be, and however extremely badly their books may have been translated, a strong level of "understanding" has formed in certain circles about all of them. Where and how did this level form, if not through the translations at hand?

Understanding and interpreting is the most fundamental level of human existence. Within this level, whether a human being understands a text rightly or wrongly is quite another matter. Indeed, who will evaluate this and how is also another matter. History is full of examples that many thinkers have produced very interesting ideas through misunderstanding another thinker. I called this "creative misunderstandings" in an article. Althusser's understanding of Marx; the understanding of Nietzsche and Heidegger by all the post-structuralist French thinkers with their bad German; Jean-Paul Sartre's book Being and Nothingness, written, for example, after reading Heidegger's Being and Time and drawing inspiration from it...

Even this last example is a typical instance of how a misunderstanding can turn into creative production. In the same way, al-Ghazali's understanding and critique of the Peripatetic philosophers, and, conversely, how those Peripatetic philosophers understood Aristotle, are all interesting examples of misunderstanding. Yet from the sum of these misunderstandings thoughts have arisen that no one can ignore...

Is human memory, afflicted by forgetfulness, not also afflicted by the fact that all of its knowledge rests on conjecture?

So then, what are we actually looking for in what we call native thought?