Reason and Praxis Against the Sophistries of Despair: Rebuilding the World with the Contemporary Antigone, Ioanna Kuçuradi
Becoming an Active Subject Against the Apathy Laboratories of Late Capitalism: The Historical March of the Value-Creating Human Being
My young friends, my comrades, the new generation that is the unpostponable subject of history;
Today there is a black smoke being sprayed upon us from every street corner: Despair.
We are confronted with an epidemic of postmodern apathy (indifference) and nihilism, produced in the intellectual laboratories of late capitalism and injected into our minds through social media algorithms. The same refrain of surrender is constantly whispered to us: "The system is too big, you are too small. The world is heading toward destruction anyway; you cannot change anything. Look after saving yourself."
This is the most insidious epistemological illusion that the ruling classes use to turn the masses into passive objects. They have turned Fredric Jameson’s famous warning into a practical execution: they are trying to make the youth accept, as if it were a law of nature, the idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
As a Marxist philosopher, I believe that epistemology—that is, knowledge and the process of knowing—must be turned into a weapon precisely at this barricade. We must look at today with the same theoretical fury Lenin displayed in Materialism and Empirio-criticism as he tore to pieces the despair-spreading sophistries of subjective idealists and agnostics. In his Philosophical Notebooks, while passing Hegel through a materialist filter, Lenin wrote a tremendous note:
"Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it."
Changing the world is not harder than the destruction of the world! This is a colossal lie capitalism has invented to paralyze us. The antidote to this lie lies in a cry rising from these lands—in the life and the philosophy of values of Ioanna Kuçuradi, who brought philosophy down from its ivory tower and turned it into a guide for praxis (action). Come, let us expose, one by one, today’s brightly packaged sophistries of despair, and then, looking at the historical course of the lifetime that Teacher Ioanna engraved into these lands, let us raze them to the ground with that unshakable ethical barricade.
The Epistemological Anatomy and Exposure of the Sophistries of Despair
Today the dominant ideology sets up its stall upon three fundamental sophistries in order to take young minds captive. Without deciphering these, we cannot become active subjects.
Sophistry 1: "Everything Is Relative, There Is No Objective Truth" (The Post-Truth Illusion)
The system tells us: "Your truth is yours, my truth is mine. There is no such thing as truth, only perspectives." This liberal opium legitimizes exploitation, injustice, and human rights violations by placing them within the parentheses of "different points of view." If there is no objective truth, then the tyrant Creon is right, and so is the resisting Antigone!
- Kuçuradi’s Answer: Teacher Ioanna devoted her life to fighting this philosophical ignorance. She proves that values and ethical truths are not "relative" but, on the contrary, an objective field of knowledge. The teacher says:
"Evaluation is an activity of knowledge. To determine the value of an action or a situation is to objectively establish its connection with human dignity, with the possibilities of the human being as a species." In other words, my young friend: torture, exploitation, the theft of a person’s labor, or the plunder of nature is not "a relative opinion" but an objective violation of human rights! To know this is an epistemological rupture. The human being who possesses the knowledge of truth can no longer remain passive.
Sophistry 2: "Human Nature Is Selfish, This Order Will Never Change"
This sophistry tries to make us swallow the monster created by capitalist relations of production (homo economicus) as the "eternal and everlasting human nature." They say, "Man is a wolf to man, therefore solidarity and revolutionary transformation are impossible."
- Kuçuradi’s Answer: Kuçuradi does not see the human being as a given, frozen mold. In her philosophy, the human being is a potential that is "value-creating" and "capable of self-realization." The virtue of being human is not to surrender to biological or social conditions, but to bring forth what is "humane" within those conditions.
"What the human being is becomes visible in what they do and create, in the values they bring forth. The human being establishes their own value through their own actions." With Marx’s statement in the Theses on Feuerbach that "the human essence is the ensemble of social relations," Kuçuradi’s emphasis on the human being’s creation of value through action merges into a dialectical river. The human being is not born selfish; capitalism makes them selfish. Therefore, changing those relations will also liberate the human being.
Sophistry 3: "The System Is Too Complex, Individual Action Is Meaningless"
This sophistry pushes the human being into a kind of apathy, into a mode of "sitting at home and watching the world." They paralyze the will with the question, "With great structures, global finance networks, and military complexes out there, what will your little effort change?"
- Kuçuradi’s Answer: It is precisely at this point that Kuçuradi steps onto the stage with the concepts of "the knowledge of the singular situation" and "the active human being." Her words strike like a slap to the so-called intellectuals who hide behind grand theories and choose inaction:
"Changing the world begins with making the right decision in the singular situations you encounter at every moment, with not letting the human being be wasted."
The Dialectic of a Lifetime: Ioanna Kuçuradi’s Historical March and Turkish Praxis
So, who is the name behind this theoretical barricade? Those who seek her only on the covers of theoretical books are mistaken. Ioanna Kuçuradi is, in the fullest sense of the word, a sage within action, a historical subject who devoted her life to the struggle for humanization in these lands.
| THE PASSIVE HUMAN BEING | THE ACTIVE HUMAN BEING (KUÇURADİ) |
|---|---|
| Submits to the limits of the system |
Takes refuge in nihilism and apathy
Merely watches/interprets the world | Intervenes with knowledge of the conditions
Defends human dignity and worth
Transforms by building society and institutions |
The Epistemological Search That Began in Istanbul
In 1936, Ioanna was born in Istanbul, in the multicultural, contradictory, and rich heart of this geography. In the philosophy corridors of Istanbul University, she was nourished by the legacy of Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu’s "philosophy of the human being" (anthropology). Yet she refused to see philosophy as a "museum object" hidden in ivory towers. From a young age, she began to look with a philosophical eye at humanity’s concrete sufferings and injustices in this world. After completing her doctorate, she went to the heart of Anatolia, to Atatürk University. In the harsh winter of Erzurum, she carried the warm reason of philosophy to young minds.
An Institutional Revolution: The Philosophical Society of Turkey and World Rostrums
In 1974, during one of Turkey’s most turbulent periods, when class contradictions were at their sharpest, she founded the Philosophical Society of Turkey (TFK) in order to make philosophy a social barricade. This move was an institutional revolution that blew up the limits of bourgeois academia.
The teacher did not merely engrave philosophy into the institutional memory of this country; by being elected the first woman president of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP), she carried that resounding voice of reason rising from Anatolia to the rostrums of the world. She took philosophy out of the monopoly of the elites and turned it into a global shield to defend the rights of the exploited, the oppressed, and the silenced.
The Struggle for "Human Dignity" Against the State Apparatuses
As Marxists, we know the transformative and sometimes crushing power that the state apparatus—in Louis Althusser’s words, the "Repressive State Apparatuses" (law, police, prisons)—exerts over the masses. Kuçuradi’s greatest social praxis was precisely to march into the very heart of these apparatuses.
- Philosophy in Prisons: She entered the cold, alienated corridors of the prisons. She explained "human rights" to the guards, to the enforcement officers. Why? Because she knew that even in the darkest cells of the state, what would protect human dignity is the ethical consciousness of the public official there.
- Ethics in Police Stations and Courts: She ensured that ethics training was given to the police force, to judges, prosecutors, and medical doctors. She thrust the idea of "human dignity" like a wedge between the cold, Creon-like gears of the bureaucracy. She tore human rights away from the ornate and hypocritical papers of the bourgeoisie; she made it the living right of the person in the street, of the worker, of the prisoner.
Ioanna Kuçuradi as a Contemporary Antigone, and Social Praxis
In Sophocles’ Antigone, against Creon, who represents the blind law of the state and of power, there stands a very young woman who defends the unwritten universal law of humanity. When that woman refused the comfort of the palace and dared to bury her brother’s body, she ceased to be a passive subject and became the founding subject of history.
Ioanna Kuçuradi is the Antigone of the modern world. She stood up against tyrants, bureaucratic mechanisms, and the savagery of the market with that unshakable reason of philosophy. She did not practice philosophy merely as a hobby on a university rostrum. She built a monument of will in the most arduous spheres of life—like Pavel Korchagin in a Soviet novel (for example, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered) or like Pelageya in Gorky’s Mother.
Our teacher always reminds us that the consciousness of value and right action are the sole condition of being human. These unshakable words of hers are the hardest blow struck against modern apathy (indifference):
"The measure of a person’s worth is how much they contribute to the humanization of others."
"To act in accordance with ethics is not merely to obey ready-made rules; it is, in the concrete situation you encounter, acting upon the knowledge of that situation to bring forth what will not let human dignity be wasted."
A Call to the Youth: Your Future Is in Your Own Hands!
My young friends; tear up and throw away those glittering dystopias and apocalyptic scenarios that capitalism offers you. Changing the world is not an impossible task as in those billion-dollar cyberpunk films.
Being a revolutionary is by no means merely waiting for those great historical moments of rupture when barricades are erected. True revolutionism is transforming, as an active subject, the concrete space you are in—whatever sphere of society, whatever layer of life you find yourself in. Now look at yourself, and in the light of these words, imagine how you will transform the places where you are:
- If You Are in a University Lecture Hall: Raise the voice of objective knowledge and solidarity against the professor’s lies that praise the status quo and sanctify competition. Make the classroom not an arena of competition but a council of collective reason.
- If You Are in a Factory, an Internship, or an Office: Do not allow the alienation of labor or the oppression of the friend beside you. Against the tyranny of the foreman or the boss, organize the consciousness of rights by holding the hand of the one next to you.
- If You Are in an Art Workshop or a Neighborhood Assembly: Take aesthetics and life out of being a luxury consumer object of the powerful; make them the melody of the street, of the people’s awakening.
Remember that tremendous scene in Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother: when the factory workers raised the banner in the square, the vast river within Pelageya—who had until that day suffered in silence—began to flow toward freedom. That woman was no longer merely a mother; she was the mother of history. You, too, are the builders of this world’s future.
Conclusion: From the Spark to the Conflagration
Capitalism’s despair-spreading sophistries, that rotten-smelling nihilism seeping from ivory towers, are blown to pieces by Teacher Ioanna’s action and by her crucial observation:
"Human rights are the norms that show what the human being is and what they can become. To protect them is the determination not to let the human being be wasted in every singular situation."
Not letting human dignity be wasted! Here is where the whole struggle lies. Neoliberalism wants you to waste yourself, to waste your friend, to waste your future.
Refuse!
Combine Antigone’s noble, tragic will that would not kneel before tyranny with Kuçuradi’s objective, rational, and organized ethical consciousness. Your future lies not in the scripts the powerful have written, but in the praxis within your own hands. Transform every place you are in; humanize every relationship.
Do not forget: changing the world is far easier than waiting for the destruction of the world, and this is the sole, most sacred virtue of being human.
That philosophical spark kindled by the contemporary Antigones will turn, in your active hands, into that tremendous conflagration that will build the bright world of tomorrow!
In the light of this epic and historical march, what concrete injustice will the first epistemological blow you strike against the wall of despair of the powerful—in your own sphere, at school, in the street, or at the workplace—set out to transform?
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