The Absurd As Primer Human Experience: A Cross-Cultural Framework With Special Reference To The Ecstatic Absurd Of Anatolian Tradition

This article proposes that the absurd is not primarily a literary or philosophical movement. It is something older and more fundamental: a primer human experience, one that precedes rationality and persists across all cultures. Drawing on developmental psychology (Winnicott, Piaget), cognitive aesthetics (McGraw and Warren), and comparative literary theory (Guillén, Damrosch), the article argues that rationalization closes a field of experience available to the pre-rational child, and that aesthetic practices across cultures represent various strategies of return to this primer field. The absurd names this return. The article maps two principal cultural forms of the absurd in detail — Western Absurdism and the Anatolian Ecstatic Absurd — and draws on comparative examples from Daoist, Zen, and Trickster traditions to establish the universality of the underlying mechanism. Western Absurdism correctly diagnosed the failure of rationalism but, constrained by its own rationalist assumptions, could not fully cross the threshold it identified. The Ecstatic Absurd (Tr. Esrik Absürd) of Anatolian tradition is a dual-function aesthetic practice that simultaneously expands meaning beyond rational limits and creates a ferahfeza — an expansive protective space where the unspeakable can be safely articulated. The article argues that the Ecstatic Absurd is joyful where Western Absurdism tends toward existential anxiety because it constitutes a return — to the primer field where everything is possible — rather than a confrontation with void. It further introduces ferahfeza as a conceptual tool for comparative literary analysis: a linguistically-produced parallel space, distinct from Foucault's heterotopia in its ephemeral, performative character. The article concludes by proposing Ecstatic Absurd and ferahfeza as new analytical categories for cross-cultural literary and aesthetic research.