In memory of Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu

How many people in Türkiye are there, I wonder, who have adopted the academy, science, and more specifically sociology as a puritan commitment and way of life, even as a mode of existence, and who, so to speak, have answered the requirements of the virtues contained in all these qualities as a "calling"?

Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu, whom I met in the corridors of ODTÜ in 1990 and who would later have a place in my academic formation to the extent of giving direction to my intellectual and scientific life, was someone who, without any exaggeration, answered all these virtues with this seriousness. He looked strange. I would soon learn that this appearance was a sign that he was coming from afar, but even before that, a manifestation of the dissidence that had sent him far away. As part of the share that fell to the universities of the fascist practices that September 12 blew over all of society, he had been dismissed from his teaching post, subjected to the famous 1402 that was created. Very few besides himself probably felt what difficulty and anguish this brought to his life. He had set out at that time on a journey that would carry his existence even further into exile; he had gone to America to "hold on," until 1990, when he would return to his post in the ODTÜ Sociology department.

When he returned, he came back with a horizon that had widened immensely, with an excitement that immediately put one under his influence, and with a bagful of new subjects and problems. With his courses on Heidegger, Gadamer, Lukacs, and the sociology of art and literature, he had created successive horizon tours and waves of excitement in the department. Together with his close friend Prof. Bahattin Akşit, he was probably the most important representative of the ODTÜ Sociology tradition that had begun with Mübeccel Kıray's distinctive style and seriousness. In his new period he combined the puritan work ethic he brought from this tradition with an awareness of the deep epistemological problems of the science of sociology, but, as always, with great anxiety.

Nalbantoğlu closed his eyes to life last week, watching the death approaching from the relentless illness that had gripped him for about four years. A person often receives news of his own death along with the deaths of others; he sometimes takes this news to heart and sometimes does not, but in the end, like every mortal, he lives his own death. As he often cited from Heidegger, human existence is continually a being toward death, and carries the consciousness that every passing moment brings one closer to death. Nalbantoğlu, who taught the lesson of this, probably lived this process far more deeply and far more intensely than most people.

Nalbantoğlu complained about universities being reduced from a scholarship that seeks the knowledge of truth to an information technology that directly produces knowledge for the market. Characterizing this search for truth with the type of the "Absent-minded Thales," Nalbantoğlu was also satirizing today's prevailing conception of the university with the type of "Shrewd University Inc." This expression, referring to the story of the famous ancient Greek philosopher who, while studying the stars in the sky, did not see the pit in front of him and fell into it, also presented, in one respect, his stance against the normal flow of everyday life, his marginality, his dissidence, as an entirely normal manifestation of an authentic academia effort, of a search for truth, of scientific excitement. When, through similar types, the type of the scientist cut off from the realities of life was accepted as the basis of authentic scientific activity, it was actually necessary to accept, as required by its definition, that the university be provincial in relation to the continuing flow of everyday life and to the positions and media where the ordinary flow of life takes place.

As his colleague Prof. Sencer Ayata pointed out at the commemoration held in the ODTÜ Architecture lecture hall, the loneliness he lived as the inevitable result of his search for truth in his academic life manifested itself much more clearly in the names who found a warm friendship in him. His closest friend Erdoğan Yıldırım and Ulus Baker, who passed away 4 years ago, for example.

After Ulus's passing I wrote: "With Ulus's death, one more of the stars, which have unfortunately already thinned out considerably, in Türkiye's left-socialist and also broader intellectual sky has slipped away."

And now one more star...

Inna lillah wa inna ileyi raji'un