Karalamalar-2: Being Human

One of the most common mistakes is tackling human as a “homo communis”. Of course, I accept that human-being has a social side, but it does not mean that human-being is made up the social side. That is why, even in most developed country/ society we can see unhappy people - even if it is utopian country -. In addition, we can see a happy person in the worst country/society - even if it is dystopian society -. In contrast, we do not see these examples on the utopian and dystopian literature. They focus on just “homo communis” in the society independently of human-being, but Although external reasons can affect people’ happiness, reductant understanding is not acceptable to understand the big picture. I think The Republic that is written by Plato has the same reductant understanding. There is a famous quotation about this topic. It is “Yesterday, I was smart; I wanted to change the world. Today, I am wise; I have changed myself.” (It is rumoured from Mawlana Jalāl ad-Din Rūmī. I do not know whether it is true or not). This well-known quotation shows us that happiness, wisdom, enlightenment   (whatever we call) stem from internal reasons rather than external reasons such as society, family, jobs and assignments that are in society. Interestingly, today “meslek” word in Turkish is used for a job of a person in society, but the root of the word is ”سلوك” in Arabic(It means “moving forward” in English). The سلوك word means reaching the truth etymologically, and “meslek” word used to mean a way of reaching the truth -especially in tasawwuf-. What we need to understand from here is that people used “meslek” word to specify the connection between a person and the truth, because they used to tackle human-being as a person, as a -maybe- “homo sapiens”, but now we are using “meslek” word to specify what duty of a person in a society is because we are tackling human-being as a “homo communis”.