'The dialectic of enlightenment' in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute, which satirizes the absurd situations of intellectuals and institutions aiming to establish a new, Western civilization, has a common intellectual background with the joint work of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Both works question the concepts of "reason" and "Enlightenment" in the face of Western civilization, which was destroyed after the world wars, and show the results of excessive meanings attributed to human mind, science, progressivism and innovation. In this thesis, the staff of the Time Regulation Institute was examined in the light of the findings in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the First Chapter, Tanpınar, Adorno and Horkheimer were briefly introduced with their works and a summary of the Enlightenment breakthrough was made. Halit Ayarcı's confession of "deception" was associated with the concept of the Enlightenment and a general view was presented about how and under what conditions the Enlightenment deceived itself. In the Second Chapter, the characters of the novel, which were brought to the forefront by the "The Time Regulation Institute" was associated with the course of the "Western Enlightenment" and some concepts put forward in criticism of Enlightenment by the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Halit Ayarcı's representations of the "Western Enlightenment" itself and the other representations of "positive sciences", the "culture industry" and power were examined. In the third chapter, the period before the "Institute" was examined in the context of myth and tradition, under the name of "Oriental Enlightenment". During this review, Western Enlightenment concepts were also referred and representatives of the two Enlightenment types were compared with each other. The characters were associated with "myth", "objective reason" and "bourgeoisie"; "Şehzadebaşı Coffeehouse" took part in the study as the academic circles of the years of World War II. "The Spiritualism Society" took part in the study as a contradictory "scientific phenomenon". Finally, firstly, the stages of "erasure of the individual" formulated by Horkheimer were examined through Hayri İrdal, and then it was focused on how Hayri İrdal represented the concept of "reason" in the presence of dilemmas. With this thesis, it has been tried to prove that the Time Regulation Institute does not contain a local satire specific to Turkey, instead it includes an international and transcendent criticism of the Enlightenment itself. Keywords: Tanpınar, Adorno, Horkheimer, The Criticism of The Enlightment, Hayri İrdal, Halit Ayarcı, reason.