Competing Intellectual Currents within Modern Turkish Conservatism: The Bergsonian Connection

The philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) emerged during a critical juncture of European history as a reaction to the predominance of Enlightenment rationalism and positivism. Essentially, it strived to contest the peculiar convictions of these intellectual traditions and reintroduce the primacy of creativity, transcendence and human agency. As such, its influence had travelled across time and place. In modern Turkey, the thought of Bergson particularly influenced a group of conservative literati including İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978), Peyami Safa (1899-1961), Hilmi Ziya Ülken (1901-1974) and Mustafa Şekip Tunç (1886-1958). For these intellectuals, Bergson represented the face of the ‘Other West’ and they appropriated his ideas with the aim of transforming the starkly positivist and rationalist disposition of Kemalism while being firmly committed to the ideals of the Modern Turkish Republic. On a different side of Turkey’s intellectual spectrum, another figure also appealed to Bergson and his philosophy. It was Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983), who fiercely dissented the project of the republic for its pro-Western foundations and reconceptualized Islam as a totalizing ideology. Hence, through a critical cross-reading of different primary and secondary sources, the present article contrasts these competing currents of Turkish conservatism, their appropriations of Bergsonian philosophy and attitudes toward their society’s experience of the Turkish revolution and modernity.