People and Culture in Republican Philosophy

Abstract

Human has been subject to different definitions in the historical processes. The variability in the starting points while investigating the nature of the human has brought about the differentiation of the results achieved. All these cultural processes, produced by human beings and therefore related to humans, have also differentiated our world view, our conception of the universe, search for ideals, and good life experience. Human philosophy, which investigates the issues related to human and human existence in the integrity of existence, has dealt with all aspects of cultural structure. From this point of view, we can express culture as an effort to create a background for existence or as another name for sublimity. The construction of the meaning of life within life rather than a theoretical framework or meta-narratives reflects the characteristic of culture. The philosophical approach, which bases on what makes human different, started to show itself at the end of the 19th century. This situation has led people to explain in a holistic way based on anthropological foundations, especially despite the definitions made on the positivist and progressive values of the Enlightenment. The human philosophy that emerged in this direction, in the most general sense, has started to deal with the biological and cultural origins of the human as a cultural entity, the values that provide its existence, the institutions and traditions. The replacement of the "political" with the "cultural" in ideologies after the 19th century caused the main field of struggle in the formation of identity to shift to the cultural field, and this situation increased the importance of the issue. With the key role of culture and the definition of human being made accordingly, the coordinates of existence have been repositioned. The situation in question has led to great transformations in Western thought, especially in the understanding of human connected to the philosophical approach. In Turkey, on the other hand, we can see the debates on Turkism, Islamism, and Westernism, which started with the Constitutional Monarchy and continued with the Republic, and were labeled with philosophical content, as debates involving culture, civilization and value designs, rather than political debates. We can also detect that many of our thinkers have shown an interest in “culture” as a concept and reality and have offered important insights, thoughts and suggestions about culture. We can say that these searches reflect the effort to reduce the tensions between tradition and modernity experienced in the Republic of Turkey and to determine the use of the options within the culture that will lead our people to unity within themselves. Thus, instead of conflict, it is aimed to shape the meaning pattern, harmony and balance of life with culture in mutual harmony. From this point of view, our study focuses on the initiatives of our earlier philosophers such as Hilmi Ziya Ülken and Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu in the aforementioned context, but also considers the approaches of our later philosophers (such as Nurettin Topçu, Bozkurt Güvenç and Doğan Özlem) to the issue, and tries to deal with the problem of culture and human in a comparative way. It aimed to focus on the possibilities and limits of the reconstruction of the Republican period Turkish thought as a cultural philosophy. At the end of our study, we can state that despite some valuable studies mentioned above, a systematic and integrated cultural philosophy could not be put forward because the subject of researching human as a cultural entity in the philosophy of the Republic did not receive enough attention, and in this context, more original studies related to the dominance of our culture are needed.