Abstract

The phenomenon of ‘materialism’ in the late Ottoman Empire has long been explained as the vehicle of fully-fledged modernization (i.e., Westernization and secularization) in allegedly essential opposition to tradition and religion. Amid growing intellectual interest in aspects of the individual such as mind, soul, brain, and emotions in the late Ottoman period, this paper shifts the explanatory focus from religious vs. nationalist ideologies to the discourse of ‘productivity’. It argues that before the discourse of national homogenization came to dominate intellectual writings in the late Ottoman Empire, a new language about the regulation of body and emotion was formulated with the aim of increasing labour productivity and rational conduct. The debate between materialism and spiritualism was embedded in this new language. The first section of the paper reviews relevant secondary literature to question what we know about the phenomenon of Ottoman materialism. The second moves on to the over-abundance of machine metaphors in materialist writings with particular focus on Abdullah Cevdet’s books on brain physiology, and in light of the spread of mechanistic views of human nature in the late nineteenth century. The final section presents Baha Tevfik’s problematization of sensibility (hassasiyet) as an obstacle to greater social harmony based on rational conduct as a case study of the regulation of emotion in the early 1910s, when interest in scientific and philosophical literature on human nature and the soul reached its zenith. This paper shows the ways in which Ottoman materialism became an important tool to imagine the individual as a unit of production, whose soul was rendered idle and whose emotions were subjected to regulation.