From the Mountain of the Heart to the Turkish essence: a language's trial with metaphysics

Concepts such as "Anatolian Yeast" (Anadolu Mayası), "the Turkish essence" (Türk cevheri) and "opening up in the heart" (gönülde açılma), which we frequently encounter in Yalçın Koç's interview in the "Where Is Turkish Thought?" dossier of Türkiye Günlüğü magazine, are quite impressive at first glance. As a Turk, they please the heart. But things get confusing once you begin to ask what exactly these concepts explain.

For example, what is Anatolian Yeast? Is it the historical and cultural accumulation of a geography? The interaction of different peoples with one another? Or, beyond all these historical realities, a metaphysical essence that persists unchanged?

Koç thinks of Anatolia within a continuity extending from the Hittites to the Phrygians, from the Seljuks to the Ottomans. But the existence of communities that lived in the same geography in different periods makes it hard to say that they carried the same intellectual essence. Undoubtedly, a claim of historical continuity requires historical evidence. Seeing very different religions, languages and cultures as manifestations of the same yeast may be possible only by dressing history in a ready-made metaphysical mold instead of explaining it.

Moreover, the historical richness of Anatolia was born precisely from the encounter of these differences with one another. To reduce the historical experiences of the Rum (Greek Orthodox), Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs and Turks to a single essence is not to do justice to this plurality.

The real problem, however, is the privileged capacity for thinking that Koç attributes to Turkish. The agglutinative structure of Turkish, its power of word derivation, its richness of meaning are of course important. But bless whoever can see in what respect these features make Turkish superior to other languages, and what, with this capacity, Turkish has so far made the world accept or could make it accept.

Truly, I too see the capacity that Yalçın Koç attributes to Turkish for opening up the Word that is Seal in the Ancient Moment (Kadim demde Hatem olan Kelam). I have no objection to this, and indeed none arises. But this is essentially a property of all languages. To think that it is a property of Turkish alone contradicts, first of all, God's attribute of being the Lord of all human beings and His justice. A notion of a kind of chosen people is the delusion of the Children of Israel; Muslims, for their part, become God's chosen servants not in the name of a race or language but to the extent that they bear the mission of the trust (amanah). God says that He sent His message to every people in that people's own language; therefore it means that the Word that is Seal in the Ancient Moment can be opened up in all languages. Yalçın Koç, or those who expect a miracle from him in the name of Turkish, should be certain whether the Word they feel opening up from Turkish is truly the Word of God.

The way to test this property expected of Turkish is to ask genuinely illuminating questions about other languages, for example: what of the Arabic root-and-pattern system, the literary and mystical expressive capacity of Persian, the history of philosophical concept production in Greek, the grammatical and intellectual richness of Sanskrit? Is the depth of meaning carried by the Turkish word "gönül" richer than the intellectual universe formed by the Arabic concepts qalb, fu'ād, ṣadr, lubb, baṣīra, and the Persian concepts dil, sūz, dard and ʿishq? By what criterion? On each of these concepts you can experience developments even richer than in Arabic. The master also says that the word gönül cannot be translated into another language. Of course, the failure of some words to be translated into another language with the same force is generally a problem of translation. It is not only that things cannot be translated from Turkish into another language; sometimes a very rich content of meaning in English cannot be translated into Turkish without being distorted. But to translate Gönül Dağı correctly one must first have understood its Turkish correctly. The person conducting the interview understands the Gönül Dağı to which he attributes such deep worlds of meaning no more than "The Mountain of Heart" in English or "Montaña del Corazón" in Spanish. Yet here there is a heart that overflows with rain, storm and flood, that flows from the core of the soul, that is wounded even when it finds the beloved. Gönül Dağı is also the poem of a heart that is seared and scarred. The sound and meaning possibilities of Turkish offer us this association. But to grasp it one needs not to attribute a metaphysical superiority to Turkish but to truly listen to what the türkü (folk song) says. Other languages too have their own mountains of the heart, wounds of the heart, worlds of love and separation. The greatness of a language lies not in claiming that it alone can say what other languages cannot, but in being able to join, with its own voice, in the common experience of humanity.

If you do not even see this nuance within Turkish itself, how will you translate it into another language and expect the same unfolding from there? Walter Benjamin said translation is distortion; there is no escape from this, but there is also no sense in attributing a miracle that no other language has to a language on the basis of this distortion.

A language's having a word of its own does not mean that another language cannot grasp the same truth; it only means that you do not have an experience related to that language, and therefore that you cannot feel it in that language. But you cannot ignore the experiences of those who do feel it, let alone claim a privilege against that experience... The differences of languages are different possibilities of thought; they do not by themselves create a hierarchy of superiority among them.

There is also an interesting paradox in Koç's criticism of Western thought. He opposes the universalization of its own concepts by Greek-Latin-Church thought. This criticism is of course justified; we too say it constantly. It is indeed a serious problem that the West presents its own historical experience as the history of thought of all humanity. But what is the point of constructing a Turk-centric metaphysics while opposing Eurocentrism? Is objecting to a civilization's absolutizing of its own historical experience while attributing a privileged capacity for truth to the language of another civilization not repeating the same error in reverse?

More importantly, the Turkish in Koç's thought is in reality the Turkish that was formed through history by encountering and mixing with other languages. With Islam it fed on Arabic, Persian and other languages; it developed its world of thought through these encounters. Who can say that the Turkish of Yunus Emre is entirely independent of Mevlânâ's Persian, of Ibn ʿArabī's Arabic, of the conceptual world of the common Islamic civilization? The greatness of Turkish lies not in bearing an untouchable essence independent of other languages, but in having become a magnificent language of thought and literature by encountering other languages. To see this there is no need to attribute a divine miracle (keramet) to Turkish or to any other language. The scientific impasse of the Sun-Language Theory was that it presented a national desire as linguistic reality. The similar danger in Koç's approach is that it elevates a cultural belonging to the rank of metaphysical truth and creates a chosen race and language. Heavy philosophical terminology does not make a claim any more true by itself. Sometimes it merely builds a wall of concepts, hard to scale, around an unproven claim. The real question still stands: which property of Turkish enables it to unfold divine truth better than other languages? Without answering this question, all the metaphysics built on the "Turkish essence" will not escape being a philosophical echo of the Sun-Language dream of the 1930s.

TO GOD WE BELONG AND TO HIM WE SHALL RETURN.

Cevat abi (Özkaya), one of the founders of Pınar Yayınları, a pioneer of every kind of beneficial activity and a most valued figure of our community, has completed his journey in this transient world and passed on to the eternal realm. As with Kemal Kelleci, I was separately saddened by his passing, and since I was again abroad, I was separately grieved not to be among his friends in seeing him off on his last journey at his funeral. With his stance, his life, his dignified and steadfast struggle, his humility and gentlemanliness he was like a star, and with his wisdom and conversation like a spring (pınar). I pray abundant mercy from God for him, and offer condolences and patience to his family, to the Pınar community and to all friends of the heart.