Abstract:

In his work titled Poetics, Aristoteles focuses on the concept of katharsis and the role that theatre plays in relieving people of their emotions, and entertaining and educating them. The idea of educating the public by engaging was developed in the XIX century in the West. In Turkey, the importance of writing in educating society was realized during the Tanzimat years, when modernisation began. The intellectuals of the period used literary genres such as novels, theatre and short stories to save the country from backwardness and reactionary. Thus, an enlightenment movement arises. The Turkish enlightenment, which began in the early years of the Tanzimat and gained momentum in the 1870s, continues even though it slowed down during the reign of Abdulhamit the Second. Hüseyin Rahmi, who started his career as a novelist in the “Istibdat Devri”, where writers gave works under the shadow of severe censorship, tried to purify the Turkish nation from dogmatic mentality, reactionism and superstitions with his novels written during and after the transition from a theocratic understanding of the state to the secular Republic. One of the most important indicators of these efforts is the Mad Philosopher, the subject of this study. In his work written in the early 1930s, Hüseyin Rahmi, taking power from the Republican regime, wants to enlighten the reader on different topics such as religion, fate, economics, education, the wrongness of hatred and murder, and the negative consequences caused by ignorance. The study revealed whether Hüseyin Rahmi successfully themed the topics he covered to give the idea of enlightenment.

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