ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: “KEDİLER” BY SAMİ PAŞAZADE SEZAİ

Sami Paşazade Sezai, was an Ottoman author (1860 – 1936) who experienced the historical course of both the Ottoman and the Republican order. Sezai was considered to have attributed to the Western thought by his realistic short fiction that focused on usually ignored but bitter slight matters of social relations. His short story, Kediler (Cats - 1892), is one of his black-humour stories displaying man’s stance in private life and man’s relation to animals, especially to cats. What is aimed in this study is to discuss the recent orientations of environmental ethics, to add more to ecocriticism for establishing a clearly explicated base and view of life on earth. How do the current ethical codes manipulate man’s attitude towards Nature, and the non-human? A really challenging task, it is, for man, to manage to organize an ethical code to structure human’s renunciation of egoism and superiority complex and the ethical codes are at the base of the Postmodern approach, as a principle of criticism, interfering at those points where the Modernist Project comes to a deadlock. Man is prejudiced regarding Nature’s meaning and power in the physical and spiritual sense. Nature has been subjected to a hierarchical dichotomy as opposed to culture. Moreover, the whole social-economical system has been established as based on those hierarchies which prioritises, discriminates and ranks all species and living entities on this planet. In this sense, Nature is considered by man, as an extension of the fragmented, subverted and marginalized cultural and social life. Thus, in man’s mentality, those threats of the social life are disguised in forms of monstrous animals, dark forests with no way out, giant plants eating human flesh, simply, violence, to be depicted as Nature’s wild energies. This study probes the ways of reorganizing man’s relationship with the non-human, allowing every single living-entity suitable conditions according to its unique existence, in its domain of living.

Keywords

Ecocriticism, Environmental Ethics, Modernist Project, Postmodern Ethics, Sami Paşazade Sezai