By Can Öztaş
Hegel’s owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk. İoanna Kuçuradi, who died on Oct. 2 aged 89, spent much of her life trying to make philosophy arrive earlier.
She leaves behind books, generations of students and an unusual number of institutions. She founded Hacettepe University’s Philosophy Department in 1969, built human-rights programs in Turkey and later presided over the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. She helped bring the World Congress of Philosophy to Istanbul in 2003. World Philosophy Day also grew from an initiative of the Turkish Philosophical Society she led.
She took philosophy to places where it is rarely invited. Government committees, ministries, prisons, police training, schools. Questions about value, dignity and freedom followed her there.
WHEN THE STATE ASKED A PHILOSOPHER
In 1994, when Turkey’s human-rights record was under intense scrutiny, Kuçuradi was asked to chair the Prime Ministry’s Human Rights High Advisory Council. She later headed the National Committee for the UN Decade for Human Rights Education.
For Kuçuradi, human rights were also a problem of judgement. She spent much of her philosophical work distinguishing values from value judgements, knowledge from assumption, the human being in front of us from the categories we place around them. These may sound like matters for the seminar room. In a police station or courtroom, the distinction becomes less academic.
There is a revealing passage in an interview she gave to Selin Ongun at T24 in 2010.
She recalled that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had given her assignments concerning human rights. Then she made a point of adding that the ministry had never instructed her on what to say.
It is worth lingering over that sentence. The state asked a philosopher for her knowledge without first supplying the answer.
She worked with governments of several political colors and became the spokesperson of none. Her value to the state lay precisely in her independence from it.
There are many ways for a country to be present in the world. One is to produce people whose authority does not depend on the office they hold.
THE WORK THAT REMAINS
Kuçuradi often spoke about the interruption of Turkey’s human-rights initiatives. The council she led was dissolved in March 1996, 17 months after her appointment. Governments change, councils are created and abolished, priorities shift. Such is the mundane life of the state. Her remedy was a national human-rights institution founded by law, so that it could not be dissolved at a government’s convenience. Turkey founded one in 2012. In 2016 it was abolished, by law.
What her career showed was something more durable. A university could speak to a ministry without becoming its annex. A scholar could enter public life without entering its hierarchy. The state could ask for knowledge it did not control and hear an answer it had not written in advance.
Her understanding of human rights followed the same logic. Rights were neither ornaments for international meetings nor vocabulary reserved for those opposing the state. They concerned what happens when one human being acquires power over another: at a police desk, behind a prison door, in a classroom, before a judge.
Hence the decades she gave to education. She wanted public officials to understand human rights before they had the opportunity to violate them. It is cheaper to explain rights to a police officer than to explain to Strasbourg why he never learned them. And she wanted philosophy taught because a society that cannot distinguish knowledge from belief, or value from prejudice, eventually pays for the confusion.
She never promised that philosophy would cure politics. Asked in that 2010 interview whether more philosophy education might prevent Turkey’s political crises, she allowed only that balance might be restored sooner. The world would not become a paradise, she said. Perhaps more people might simply live in conditions more worthy of a human being.
It is a characteristically modest ambition.
There will now be conferences in her name. Perhaps a lecture hall. Turkey has often been better at naming rooms than at preserving what was learned inside them.
The harder question is how to keep alive the relationship she represented: between knowledge and public life, independence and service, criticism and belonging.
Kuçuradi spent her life asking how we should evaluate human beings.
Turkey now has to decide how it evaluates her.
