Author: Bojin

Here is a late 20^th century philosopher who works mainly within the canon of analytic philosophy. Sometimes he announces, not undramatically (self-consciously following Nietzsche), that philosophy is dead, and sometimes he falls back to a more ‘modest’ claim that most of contemporary analytic philosophy has gone bankrupt. Metaphysics and epistemology should have long been abandoned, because the former is infected with problematic Platonism, and the latter, Cartesianism. ‘Part of my ambition,’ he says, ‘to paraphrase Freud, is to help it come to pass that where epistemology and metaphysics were, sociology and history shall be.’ Instead of being the first philosophy, philosophy of language has been wrongheadedly invested in the notion of representation, which, as he sees it, is so thoroughly contaminated by disastrous collateral commitments that we should abandon it altogether, like burning the leper’s rags. He also has fundamental problems with the way analytic philosophy is done: for him, good philosophy is rarely about producing rigorous arguments, but primarily about creating interesting new vocabularies. As he puts it: ‘a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.’ Mostly importantly, it is producing cultural changes, rather than discovering truths, that should be the aim of philosophy.

These doubtlessly radical claims, liberating for some and outrageous for others, come from Richard Rorty, possibly the most controversial figure in late 20^th-century analytic philosophy. While his radical stance remains more or less consistent throughout his academic career, the way he reasons for it has undergone several major changes. Eventually he settles on a line of reasoning that he calls ‘anti-authoritarianism’, which becomes the master idea underlying his cluster of radical theses. The central idea is rather simple: philosophy should be liberating, it should free us from any authority we have no reason to be responsible for. This sounds all very well in moral and political philosophy, but how does it become an all-sweeping meta-philosophical force in Rorty’s hands?

Here is a broad sketch of Rorty’s thoughts. According to him, the only kind of authority we have good reason to recognise comes from our fellow human beings. We are only responsible for our peers; there is no authority external to humankind. The problem of most contemporary philosophy, as Rorty sees it, is that it recognises an authority over and above humankind: namely, that of the external world. Once we see the world as having an intrinsic nature or unique structure, one that we could only discover or fail to discover, only represent more or less accurately, then we have already ceded our authority to something external – it is in the nature of representation that it must be responsible to the represented, must take the represented as the authority. Suppose I see a tree in front of me. For Rorty, I have absolutely no responsibility towards the tree when I try to think about it, conceptualise it, describe it. I have no responsibility to ‘get it right’, on its own terms. What I have is a responsibility towards other people to whom I’m describing the tree: my description had better serve their interests, needs and wants, whatever those are.

He sometimes calls this view ‘pragmatism’, sometimes ‘humanism’, and for him these are merely two sides of the same coin. As he sees it, his view is continuous with the spirit of the Enlightenment: according to the canonical narrative, the Enlightenment liberates us from theological authority. We used to recognise some kind of deity as the source of our moral and political authority, but after the Enlightenment we came to realise that human beings are the only source of moral authority. If some actions are morally wrong, they are not wrong because God says so, but because they violate some standards stemming from human virtue, dignity, or wellbeing. Rorty calls this ‘humanism’, and proposes that we go one step further:

For Rorty, the idea that matter, spirit, the self or other such things have an intrinsic nature that in principle is in no way dependent upon our activities of knowing and that we attempt to represent in increasingly better ways, represents the secular descendent of a conception which should not have survived the era of the theological world-view from which it emerged. (Jacques Bouveresse)

Accepting that idea, Rorty suggests, is casting the world in the role of the non-human Other before which we are to humble ourselves. (John McDowell)

Despite having reclaimed our moral authority, our cognitive authority remains external to us in this post-Enlightenment world. The task of philosophy, now, is to further liberate ourselves and take back our cognitive authority, to bring humankind our of its adolescence into full maturity. What the Enlightenment does to religion, Rorty now proposes to do to metaphysics and science: we give up the notion of absolute truth, and replace it with justification (to our peers); we give up the notion of objectivity, and replace it with solidarity (with, again, our peers). For intelligent and discursive beings like us, conversation is the highest good; when repetitively charged with unseriousness because he ‘merely’ wants to agree with his peers, Rorty replies every time: what’s so ‘mere’ about that?

With this master meta-philosophical idea in place, Rorty’s general take on philosophy starts to come into view. If the world is not something that we can accurately or inaccurately represent, then truth as correspondence (between our beliefs and reality) has to be abandoned since there is nothing for our beliefs to correspond to. As he puts it, we don’t copy the world, but cope with it; there is only one right way of copying, but lots of ways of coping. A crucial way of coping is conceptualising: we use concepts to describe and redescribe the world so that we can reach better understandings of it. As with coping, for Rorty, there are a myriad of ways of conceptualising; the ground to evaluate them is not accuracy, but pragmatic usefulness. Good philosophy, as with good literature, generates new ways of describing the world, or, as Rorty likes to put it, creates new ‘vocabularies’ that haven’t been thought of before. If we, following the later Wittgenstein, sees our language as a toolbox rather than a mirror, we might see a new vocabulary as a new tool added to the toolbox, enabling us to cope better and more flexibly. In the Nietzschean spirit, Rorty claims that philosophical arguments are mostly futile: for him, you can’t rigorously argue someone out of a philosophical framework; you can only redescribe, and redescribe attractively, so that other people might see the virtue of your vocabulary and come to adopt it. Same for Rorty’s picture of science (which sounds especially provocative in a school of philosophy that models itself on science): it is just another vocabulary that we find useful for all sorts of pragmatic purposes, but it no more describes the world ‘as it is anyway’ than poetry. He does not deny that scientists like Galileo are significant, but he reinterprets that significance: for him, Galileo is someone who found ‘a tool which happened to work better for certain purposes than any previous tool.’

Given his fondness of vocabulary creation and conversation, Rorty’s vision of politics is determinately liberal: the goal of politics, as Rorty sees it, is to create and protect a safe private sphere, free from cruelty, humiliation and oppression, where people can freely converse and create new vocabularies. ‘Our overarching public purpose,’ summarises Brandom, a student of Rorty’s and a fellow pragmatist, ‘should be to ensure that a hundred private flowers blossom.’

Where does all this leave philosophy, one might ask worryingly, if Rorty’s radical vision comes true? Rorty answers: this is liberating for philosophy as well, curing it from its Platonic, Cartesian and Kantian sickness. It no longer has to play the alienating role it used to, or to provide a ‘foundation’ for all human knowledge, by creating this Other, this external authority that grounds our knowledge. It tears apart the Cartesian veil, which opens up a gap, a distance between us and the world. And when this happens,

we would be left with less encouragement to cling to the pathos of distance. We should be more Nietzschean in our willingness to say “Thus I will it” rather than “Thus the Intrinsic Nature of Reality obliges me.” We should be more “humanist” in the sense of that term which Heidegger endeavored to make pejorative – more willing to take power into our own hands.

Now you, the analytically trained philosopher, might be inclined to respond: yes, let’s grant that his advertisements are not misleading, that his vision is indeed liberating. But then the crucial question is whether it is true, and he has not yet provided any argument that the traditional picture is wrong and his is right.

I could imagine Rorty shrugging at this charge. Remember, his ‘vocabulary’ vocabulary applies back onto his own view: by putting forward his philosophy Rorty is essentially creating a new vocabulary, a new option, a new tool in the toolbox. Whether it’s true is neither interesting nor relevant to him; he would regard anyone who puts forward that question as remaining in the grip of philosophical authoritarianism. What matters for him is whether people (both in the present and future) find it useful and enlightening, whether it gives people freedom to say and do things that they didn’t know before, and whether it makes a genuine contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind, which, according to him, is our only pathway to liberation and maturity.

[This article was originally published by the Phi Magazine, liberation issue, to be found at phimag.org.]

Karl Marx once criticised the idealism of his time by remarking: the point is not to understand the world but to change it.[1] Amia Srinivasan echoes in The Right to Sex, as a poignant reminder to contemporary feminism that risks becoming increasingly abstract and theoretical:

At its best, feminist theory discloses the possibilities for women’s lives that are latent in women’s struggles, drawing those possibilities closer. But, too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particulars of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have too much work to do. [2]

This remark, as I see it, makes clear the background relative to which Srinivasan’s philosophising takes place, and without an understanding of which objections can easily be misplaced. Among the mixed reception of the book, there are concrete criticisms on the more substantial points, like Rae Langton’s concern for Srinivasan’s distrust of legal powers,[3] and Sally Haslanger’s reservations about Srinivasan’s neglect of social theories (both will be discussed in more detail later).[4] But a more common criticism stems from a general dissatisfaction towards the lack of answers, of theoretical unity, and thus of comfort, which Srinivasan explicitly rejects the need to provide. For her, The Right to Sex is a book that points out intricacies in our social practices, raises a plethora of problems, and questions any ready-to-hand, once-for-all solutions. It attempts to ‘dwell, where necessary, in discomfort and ambivalence’, and to confess, where necessary, her confusion and hesitation. ‘These essays do not offer a home’, she writes in the preface, anticipating dissatisfactions, ‘But I hope they do offer, for some, a place of recognition.’[5]

The book is composed of six essays, interconnected but also relatively independent. The first addresses the issue of rape, and calls on the notion of intersectionality to explicate the myths behind it. The second essay is concerned with pornography and the increasing (mis-)educational effect pornography has on the younger generations. It also touches on the topic of a political critique of desire, which is extended in the third and fourth essay. These two interconnected essays begin with the case of Elliot Rodger (who, being desperately sexually frustrated, killed 6 people and injured 14 others during a misogynistic terror attack), and go on to discuss the ways in which our (sexual) desires are shaped by problematic social, political and cultural forces, and how we could free ourselves from them. The fifth essay shifts the focus to student-teacher relationships, and argues that the wrongness of them is not (as is traditionally conceived) rooted in a failure of consent, but rather a pedagogical failure. The end of the essay questions the effectiveness of stricter university regulations, which blossoms into the sixth essay, likely the most controversial one in the book. There she objects to what she calls ‘carceral feminism’ – feminism that appeals to the power of the state in order to achieve gender justice – based on the observation that it often harms the most vulnerable group of women.

In this review I pick up and discuss three relatively distinct themes in this book. The first is anti-carceralism rooted in the recognition of intersectionality; the second is a political critique of desire; the third is the lack of theories and the emphasis on practical reason. All of them are controversial among feminists. This review aims to explicate these themes and discuss some objections and concerns without settling the question either way.

Anti-carceralism and intersectionality

It would be best to start backwards, with the last essay where she offers the most systematic critique of carceralism. There she begins by contrasting two feminist approaches to prostitution: one advocates for its abolition because it sees prostitution as a ‘distillation of women’s condition under patriarchy’,[6] a perfect symbol for patriarchal inequality and oppression; the other proposes to decriminalise prostitution because it is the best way to concretely protect the prostitutes, seen as a particularly poor and vulnerable group of women. Srinivasan sides resolutely with the latter group: she agrees that symbols sometimes matter, but argues that when the demands of symbolism stand in tension with that of the real women, we should never ‘mess over people in the name of politics’.[7]

For clarity of discussion, here I reconstruct her argument for anti-carceralism (about prostitution) as an argument with three premises:

• P1: Criminalising prostitution can neither abolish nor reduce prostitution.
• P2: Ceteris paribus, the lives of prostitutes would be better if prostitution is legal.
• C1: Given P1&2, criminalising prostitution generally makes the lives of prostitutes worse without making other lives better.
• P3: The wellbeing of real people is more important than symbolic value of politics.
• C2: We should decriminalise prostitution.

P2 and P3 are straightforward. P2 is a relatively uncontroversial fact, and P3 is treated just as an assertion. P1 is supported by two reasons: first, historical and empirical evidence suggests that criminalisation does not work: ‘The criminalisation… of sex work has never, in practice, got rid of prostitution. Sex work has thrived under every legal regime; what has varied are the conditions under which sex is bought and sold…’[8] Second, there is an underlying explanation of why this is so: ‘under current economic conditions many women will be compelled to sell sex, and… under current ideological conditions many men will buy it’.[9] Wealth inequality on the one hand, patriarchal ideology on the other; the law, as Srinivasan sees it, is impotent compared to these two deeply entrenched socio-economic powers.

This draws on a broader discussion of intersectionality, which, as Srinivasan points out, is not the mere addition of two orthogonal forms of oppression; rather, it says that ‘any liberation movement… that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group… have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.’[10] There (Chapter 1) her example is: only to stress ‘believe women’ (which, as she notes, carries the implicit injunction ‘don’t believe men’) is likely to make black men more vulnerable to false accusations. In the second essay, the example is that attempts ‘to legislate against porn… invariably harm the women who financially depend on it the most.’[11] Here, in the context of prostitution, the intersection between sex and class means that abolitionism – the doctrine that focuses on what the oppression of women have in common – will only serve the women that are least oppressed, while harming those in the lowest social class, those that are forced into prostitution.

This argument can be challenged on two fronts, and both have been done by Haslanger and Langton. On P3: sometimes symbols are more important than Srinivasan seems to assume. Sometimes symbolic victory is precisely what we want because it will have more profound, long-term impacts: it might help to transform social consciousness. Langton refers to the Hart-Devlin debate on homosexuality to illustrate the fact that legal consciousness may precede and lead social consciousness.[12] Haslanger concurs: ‘the relationship between law and culture is complicated and variable, and feminist legal theorists and critical race theorists have been developing social theory for decades to address the very question she [Srinivasan] poses.’ Langton also points out that the symbolic value of the law is probably its main function: the point of having a legal system is more about its deterring power than the actual punishment of the criminals. On P1: while it is true that prostitution cannot be wiped out by legal changes, it is also an exaggeration to say that the law is completely impotent against prostitution. It might still effectively control the scale of prostitution. Haslanger adds: ‘The law may not be our friend, but it can be useful, and we surely don’t want it to be our enemy.’

It is noteworthy that both the argument and objections are made on pragmatic grounds. Srinivasan criticises carceralism as being unrealistic: it does not attend to the actual lives of prostitutes. Langton and Haslanger retort that Srinivasan is actually the one being unrealistic: yes, changing the law is probably not the best way, and certainly not the most fundamental way, to address the problem of patriarchy; nonetheless, it is our most practical way to redress imminent injustices. Social consciousness is our end goal, but usually it takes much longer for it to change.

A political critique of desire

We can criticise our beliefs for failing to fit the world, says traditional epistemology, since it is in the nature of our beliefs that they aim to correspond to the world. However, it continues, a parallel critique cannot be made for desires, because it has a different ‘direction of fit’: desires aim to change the world to fit our desires. They were used to be taken as given, and not quite susceptible to criticism (for either political or epistemological reasons). So how is it possible for us to offer a political critique of desire?

The first step is to notice that our desires are mostly not innate, not something that we naturally have and are born with; they are largely shaped by socio-cultural powers. The desire to eat is biological, but the desire to eat certain kinds of food and not others is socio-cultural; the desire to have sex is biological, but the desire to have sex with certain kinds of people and not others is even more socio-cultural. And these structural powers can be oppressive, hierarchical, and thus, susceptible to political critique.[13]

Take the case of Elliot Rodger. His misogynist terror attack was largely due to his desperation with being an ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) and deemed ‘unfuckable’ (Srinivasan’s term). But by whom? Not by any woman simpliciter; but by the ‘hot sorority blondes’, as he writes in his manifesto.[14] Implicitly he is appealing to a ‘hierarchy of fuckability’, which is ‘a racialised hierarchy that places the white woman above the brown or black woman, the light-skinned brown or black woman above the dark-skinned brown or black woman, and so on.’[15] It is indubitably a social construction, and a highly problematic one. To criticise that hierarchy is, to a large extent already, a political critique of sexual desires.

Similarly, pornography is one of the major forces that shape our sexual desire (given the fact that a majority of people receive their chief sex education through watching it), and commonly subjected to feminists’ criticism. Pornography commonly depicts women as submissive, depicts them as enjoying being submissive, and depicts submissive women as attractive. Through the lens of pornography, women’s resistance is commonly interpreted as consent. Pornography inculcates – often subconsciously – a desire for a certain kind of women, which, as Srinivasan and many other feminists argue,[16] cannot simply be treated as a matter of personal preference. The desire is shaped by patriarchal powers, reinforces the subordinate status of women, and encourages us to see rapes as consented sex. It can, and should, be subjected to a political critique.

However, it might be worried that a political critique of desires also carries political dangers and undesirable consequences. People often have the natural and understandable desire to be left alone, especially when facing the coercive power of communities or governments. If my desires are to be criticised, and, further, to be disciplined, who will do the disciplining? We have seen in history, repetitively, the disastrous consequences of governments or communities telling people what they should or should not desire, or what are the right things to feel.[17]

Srinivasan, given her anti-carceralism, is well aware of that danger. She warns against using governmental powers, and sometimes against ‘telling people to change their desires’ as well. Instead, she suggests that we ask ourselves ‘what we want, why we want it, and what it is that we want to want’,[18] and that through self-reflection and consciousness-raising, the critique of desire could be truly emancipatory rather than disciplinary. But then a further worry arises: feminism targets at a structural evil (patriarchy) rather than specific individuals; putting too much personal responsibility on individuals risks obscuring the fundamental need for a structural solution. To this worry Srinivasan responds: ‘to say that a problem is structural does not absolve us from thinking about how we, as individuals, are implicated in it, or what we should do about it… What does it mean to say that we want to transform the political world – but that we ourselves will remain unchanged?’[19]

In summary, I see three dimensions on which we need to walk a fine middle way. First, between taking our desires as given and disciplining them politically, we need to find a middle way of an emancipatory critique of desire, which might consist of a blend of consciousness-raising, self-reflection and a political ideologiekritik. Second, between treating sexual preferences as undiscussable and the misogynistic logic of ‘sexual entitlement’ (that is, seeing ‘fuckability’ as a social good that should be fairly distributed), we need to ‘dwell in the ambivalent space where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question’.[20] Third, between replacing a political and structural struggle with a personal one and absolving the individuals the responsibility of self-reflection, we need a balanced blend of self-critique and recognition of the structural nature of the feminist project. How to tread this middle way is a delicate question answerable only, in her (and my) view, by practical reasons. ‘We do not know [the answer]’, she writes at the very beginning of the book, ‘let us try and see.’[21]

Practical reasons

As is noticed from the start, the book does not contain much argumentation or theorising. This is probably to be expected given that it is not strictly a book of academic philosophy; it also aims at the general public, calling for actions and demonstrating what Haslanger calls the ‘feminist critical consciousness’. And this is doubly expected because the wrongness of most instances in the book is so apparent that we can easily condemn them without needing an overarching normative theory. However, Haslanger notes that while normative theories are not necessary or even relevant, social theories are crucial for Srinivasan’s end. For without a ‘theory that offers an account of how societies – or at least the societies we are interested in – work’, what concrete actions should we take to make the world a better place for women?

Haslanger focuses, again, on Srinivasan’s anti-carceralism and emphasis on social and cultural changes. The recognition that we need fundamental cultural reforms is not a new message; it has been made by feminists over and over again. The crux is to point out what to do and where to go next. As Haslanger notes, probably most feminists agree that ‘the work of social reproduction must be the work of society’,[22] or that ‘the law [cannot] transform the most basic terms of engagement between women and men’,[23] but how helpful is that observation? We need, Haslanger argues, an understanding of how societies (what a complex institution!) work and how societal changes are possible to know what to do next. She asks: ‘I fully embrace the idea that we begin with a feminist critical consciousness, but where do we take it? Or where does it take us?’

This is not a call for theoretical unity or comfort. Haslanger fully agrees with Srinivasan’s point that feminist politics should not provide a home for comfort. Her point is, again, pragmatic: what is the best way to do feminist movements? Is it helpful to have a social theory that guides us? Would we be lost without it? In defence of Srinivasan, she need not deny the usefulness of social theories altogether. She might point out that this is more of a difference of emphasis than a substantial disagreement: she might be content if the book helps to raise the social critical consciousness, and it need not provide a step-to-step guide for action.

But there might be more to a mere difference of emphasis. Srinivasan’s emphasis of know-how suggests that she might have some doubts about the guiding effect of social theories. Here is an indicative passage: ‘The answer to the question, I take it, is a practical one – a matter, as philosophers like to say, not of knowing-that, but of knowing-how. Know-how is to be found not through theoretical investigation but through experiments of living.’[24] Here she might be suggesting that, in this messy and ever-changing reality, theoretical rationality cannot provide much help; rather what we need is the Aristotelian phronesis, the practical rationality: we need to try and see what works, keeping a flexible and open mindset. Because of idiosyncratic contexts, practical knowledge is often a kind of ‘tacit knowledge’, to borrow the term from Michael Polanyi,[25] that is ‘suggestive and illuminative rather than explicit and determinate’.[26] In these cases theories cannot guide action; we can only do piecemeal theorising as we go along. If this is the right interpretation, then the difference between Srinivasan and Haslanger is a profound disagreement on the relation between theoretical and practical rationality, a disagreement which goes back for more than two thousand years and which I, for sure, cannot seek to resolve here.

[This review was originally published in Critique, issue. MMXXII.]

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• [1] Marx, Karl, (1888), “Theses on Feuerbach”, Marx/Engels Selected Works, Progress Publisher, Vol.1, p. 13 – 15.
• [2] Srinivasan, Amia, (2021), The Right to Sex, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, xvi.
• [3] Remarks made by Rae Langton during sessions of a feminist discussion group. Same for all references to Langton below.
• [4] Haslanger, Sally, (2021), “Feminism and the Question of Theory”, The Raven (Fall 2021). https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/feminist-critical-consciousness-and-the-question-of-theory/ Same for all references to Haslanger below.
• [5] Srinivasan, op. cit., xv.
• [6] Ibid., p.151.
• [7] Ibid., p.159.
• [8] Ibid., p.154.
• 9] Ibid., p.151.
• [10] Ibid., p.17.
• [11] Ibid., p.60.
• [12] The debate centred around the issue of decriminalising homosexual behaviour in a time where homosexuality is still regarded as morally wrong by the majority of people in the society. For an illustrative discussion, see Cane, Peter, (2006), “Taking Law Seriously: Starting Points of the Hart/Devlin Debate.” The Journal of Ethics, 10(1/2), 21–51.
• [13] As a sidenote, Langton argues that we can also criticise and transform the more innate desires. Xenophobia, as her example goes, is probably a natural disposition given our tribal evolutionary history, but we might wish to change that.
• [14] See ‘Elliot Rodger Manifesto: My Twisted World’, contributed by Lauren Johnston, at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-elliot-rodger-manifesto
• [15] Srinivasan, op. cit., p.103.
• [16] For example, see MacKinnon, Catharine, (1993), Only Words. Harvard University Press.
• [17] Kundera’s novels provide some great illustrations for this point.
• [18] Srinivasan, op. cit., p.100.
• [19] Ibid., p.101.
• [20] Ibid., p.90.
• [21] Ibid., xi.
• [22] Ibid., p.175-6.
• [23] Ibid., p.178.
• [24] Ibid., p.102.
• [25] Polanyi, Michael, (1966), The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday & Co.
• [26] Gadamer, Hans-Georg, (1989), Truth and Method (2^nd edition). Sheed and Ward.

A philosopher is only sincere when he lives as his philosophy commends, or, conversely, when his philosophy reflects who he truly is. By this criterion, Frank Ramsey is probably one of the sincerest philosophers ever lived. His pragmatic and humanistic philosophy is, to a great extent, a beautiful reflection of his vigorous and enthusiastic personality; consequently, some knowledge of the latter will corroborate an understanding of the former. This is what Cheryl Misak’s brilliant biography of Ramsey enables us to do: it delivers a delicate balance between the intellectual and the personal aspect of Ramsey’s life, situates his philosophical works in the context of his life, and thus provides us with a profound understanding of what Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy is about.

The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with Ramsey’s childhood, and introduces the intellectual background in Cambridge at the time. The second recounts his undergraduate life, his impressive presence as a young prodigy in Cambridge, and his emotional struggles during the period. The third focuses on his astonishing achievements in philosophy, mathematics and economics during the half decade he had before his death.

Misak in general deals with these incredibly wide-ranging academic topics at ease and makes them highly accessible to the readers without much professional knowledge in the area. Wherever she feels inadequate, she resorts to relevant experts in the field and asks them to write a page-long exposition of the topic which she then puts in the ‘boxes’ of her book. The boxes, however, are less impressive than the other contents. They are too short to supply much information for both the layman and the professional: the former will find it too compressed and the latter may find it too cursive. Other than that, the book is a brilliant masterpiece. It combines width and depth, the personal and the academic, and is written in a suitably lucid and concise manner. This review provides some background to the book and knits some key points in it so that its gist makes better sense to the readers.

Ramsey is, without much doubt, one of the greatest pioneers of pragmatism. It is therefore useful to first explain what pragmatism is. Following Daniel Williams,[i] I see pragmatism as consisting of the following three pillars:

1. Primacy of the practical,[ii] or the replacement of “copying” by “coping”.[iii] According to pragmatists, what we do is prior to what we say, and saying is a kind of doing. By uttering sentences in a language, we do not attempt to represent the world “as it is anyway”;[iv] rather, language is primarily a special kind of act, in order to communicate, cooperate, and cope with the vicissitudes of the world. This is pragmatism as anti-representationalism (championed by Richard Rorty): language is not a mirror that reflects the world;[v] rather, it is (according to the Later Wittgenstein) a toolbox that we use to serve our various practical ends.[vi]
2. Human contingency. Pragmatists deeply recognise the contingency of our own perceptive and cognitive faculties, and encourage us not to project our own productions onto the world (common examples: morality, causation, induction, time…). As William James famously puts it, ‘the trail of the human serpent is… over everything’.[vii] This is echoed by contemporary pragmatists like Huw Price, whose pragmatism as global expressivism seeks an understanding of our language and vocabularies in terms of our “contingent, shared dispositions” and “practical stances”.[viii]
3. Social pragmatism about normativity.[ix] For pragmatists, all normativity is ultimately derived from social facts. That is to say, there is nothing divine above us, nothing that we should be responsible for other than our fellow human beings. The more obvious example is moral phenomenon, whose normativity is more commonly seen as social. The less obvious examples are intentionality and meaning: for pragmatists, both are normative (one can believe or speak rightly or wrongly), and therefore both are social. A certain term means what it does (which implies that we should apply it in this way) simply because we – the language community – do use it in a certain way, and there is nothing over and beyond this fact that could endow anything with normativity.

I see these three pillars as being underpinned by the common theme of humanism. It is humans that have all kinds of practical ends, that have contingent faculties and contingent languages, and that are essentially social beings. While the “metaphysical” philosophy concerns itself with objective reality, absolute truth and external facts, the pragmatist philosophy focuses on the human perspective, human ends and human choices. Ramsey is a pragmatist insofar as the emphasis of human perspective and the concern for human wellbeing lie at the centre of his philosophy. As he himself puts it: “My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.”[x]

There are multiple examples, throughout Ramsey’s unfortunately short life, that can testify to this claim. In very early stages of his academic career (when he was still an undergraduate), he argued against John Maynard Keynes’s account of probability and justification of inductive inference, on the ground that both probabilistic and inductive inference are psychological rather than objective.[xi] For Keynes, probability is an objective relation between any set of premises and a conclusion, something we can directly perceive and cannot be further analysed. Ramsey, on the other hand, is suspicious of any property that is both objective and unanalysable; he reverses the order of Keynes’s explanation, and argues (more extensively in his later “Truth and Probability”) that probabilistic knowledge is to be understood in terms of subjective degrees of belief, which were to be measured by one’s willingness to bet. Similarly, contrary to Keynes’s attempt to underpin induction by his hypothesis of limited variety of properties in nature, Ramsey argues that we should believe in induction simply because it is a good habit and it works, and despite that we cannot give any non-circular justification for induction, “In this circle lies nothing vicious”.[xii] This is surely a kind of pragmatism: for him, it is our psychology and our habits, instead of properties of nature, that underlie our various practices of inference.

Another telling example is Ramsey’s treatment of truth and propositions. He famously proposes a deflationary account of truth, which claims that all we need to know about truth consists of the following platitude: ‘a belief that p is true iff p’ (this is vulnerable to the Frege-Geach point that truth predicates can be embedded in complex sentences. However, Ramsey’s insight inspires modern pro-sentential and minimalist theories of truth which survive and thrive). This simple analysis, however, only constitutes a small part of the analysis of truth; the main heavy-lifting work is to be done by asking what it is for a belief to be a belief that p. For Ramsey, this is to be spelt out in functionalist terms, in terms of its place in the complex web of causes and effects,[xiii] of what tends to produce the belief and what the belief tends to produce, and thus of what the belief is disposed to do for us. This highly original pragmatist analysis of truth and meaning helps to lift the mysterious veil in front of these two concepts, and inspires later (broadly speaking, pragmatic) philosophers to develop more sophisticated accounts along these lines (such as Putnam’s functionalism,[xiv] Millikan’s biological version of success semantics,[xv] Horwich’s[xvi] and Price’s[xvii] minimalism, etc.).

Apart from the more theoretical endeavours, Ramsey’s pragmatism is also reflected in his enthusiasm and involvement in political movements. During his undergraduate times, he actively participated in the post-war socialist movements (as a member of the Cambridge University Socialist Society) and became increasingly concerned with the welfare of the working class. His later works in economics (tax and savings) and his academic engagement with Keynes and Pigou are, to a great extent, motivated by concerns of social justice and utility optimisation. And in political and moral philosophy, he encourages us to always focus on the realistic questions (‘What is the world like? How to make it better?’) instead of abstract ones (‘the so-called paradox of self-government’), as the latter could only lead us to ‘fairy tales’ instead of truths.[xviii]

As Misak notes and stresses throughout her book, Ramsey’s pragmatic philosophy which places humanity at its centre, at least in part, stems from his vigorous and passionate personality. The general point is powerfully illustrated by Fichte: ‘a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.’[xix] The ‘soul’ of Ramsey, as Keynes describes in his obituary, has a boyish enthusiasm, a ‘spontaneous gurgling laugh’, an honesty of mind and heart, and a relentless curiosity towards all sorts of knowledge (philosophy, mathematics, logic, economics, politics…).[xx] Naturally, this kind of personality gives rise to a vigorous philosophy centred around humanity and a concern for its wellbeing. This is manifested most clearly in one of Ramsey’s most famous passages:

Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way that mine didn’t. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you.

This paragraph can be further illustrated by putting Ramsey in contrast with Wittgenstein, even though they eventually get to similar places. The early Wittgenstein is “the king of representationalism”, as Robert Brandom puts it:[xxi] in Tractatus he gives the most elaborate account of how languages and thoughts represent the world. The Later Wittgenstein, to the contrary, is “the king of anti-representationalism”: in Philosophical Investigations he entirely refutes his previous work and develops a highly pragmatic account of language, truth, and the world (which is close to, but more sophisticated than, Ramsey’s view on these matter; it is only natural as Ramsey died so young). Misak argues, in this book, that Wittgenstein’s subversive change is to some extent due to the influence of Ramsey. In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and lived with Ramsey for a while, and during the time they exchanged a lot on their philosophical views. As Misak documents in detail, Ramsey’s critique of the Tractarian project during this time is a substantial factor which leads Wittgenstein to see his previous project as indefensible and come along to the pragmatist side.

However, despite all this, they still differ in their philosophical temperaments, rooted in their different personalities. Wittgenstein is constantly unhappy or even painful. He recommends “serious thinking”, reverence, and purity. He, as Frances Marshall describes, does not find the world his friend. He wants to get to the bottom of “essence” of all things. Ramsey, on the other hand, is constantly smiling and delightful, light and irreverent; he sees Wittgenstein’s problem as profound ones, but decides to answer them on a human scale nonetheless. When they eventually reached a similar place, Wittgenstein anguished and bemoaned, while Ramsey being cheerful about it. Wittgenstein found it a depressing truth that our rule-following behaviour might not be rationally justified and merely “something animal”; Ramsey, however, delighted in precisely this fact, in seeing nothing divine and essential, in being able to live lightly and pragmatically. As Ramsey wrote, foreshadowing his later conversation with Wittgenstein: “The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you.”

And finally, it is useful to place Misak’s new masterpiece in more context in order to better understand it. Misak is a pragmatist herself, and indeed one of the most famous contemporary pragmatists. As Brandom comments, no one has done more to transform and improve our understanding of the tradition of pragmatism than what Misak has done (and is doing).[xxii] In her 2013 book, The American Pragmatists,[xxiii] she distinguishes two substantially distinct strands of American pragmatism: one runs from C.S. Peirce to C.I. Lewis and then to mid-20^th century analytic philosophers like Wilfried Sellars and W.V.O. Quine. The other runs from William James to John Dewey, and finally to Richard Rorty. She recommends the first, the “rationalist” strand, emphasising the importance of logic and rigorous thinking, and sees the second – the “romantic” strand – as the regressive wing of pragmatism, commending literature and art as superior to science and logic.

Then, in her 2018 book, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein,[xxiv] she quite originally identifies a line of influence from Peirce to Ramsey, and Ramsey to Wittgenstein. Approaching the end of his undergraduate days, Ramsey came to read some works by James and Peirce. He, like Russell, did not think much of James, but he thought that a lot can be learnt from Peirce’s pragmatist perspective (especially his account of belief). He recorded his understanding and approval of Peirce in his diary in 1924, and acknowledged Peirce’s influence explicitly in his later paper “Truth and Probability”. Misak accurately identifies the influence, as well as Ramsey’s influence on Wittgenstein, and thereby separating a strand of pragmatism which she calls Cambridge pragmatism, represented by Ramsey and Wittgenstein in the early 20^th century, and later taken up by Simon Blackburn and Price in the beginning of 21^st century.

Her new work on Ramsey, as I see it, can be best understood as a continuation of her effort in identifying and synthesising the rich pragmatist tradition. Pragmatism is not only a philosophical theory; it is a way of thinking about the world and ourselves. It is a meta-level framework that changes how we see and live our lives. This is a point that, in its nature, cannot be made in a purely theoretical way; it has to be illustrated with convincing examples, and this is what Misak’s previous works – and in general, the previous literature on pragmatism – lacked. Ramsey is the perfect example that Misak eventually found. By telling a story of his life and philosophy, Misak not only exposes how pragmatism is closely connected to life, but also establishes an epitome of a true pragmatist, one who is often smiling and delightful, honest and open, who has a profound love for life and for fellow human beings, who focuses on the practical and the realistic rather than the abstract, who has a relentless curiosity and enthusiasm towards all kinds of experiences and knowledge, and who, in Joseph Schumpeter’s memorable words, has a “sheer excess of powers”.[xxv]

[This review was originally published in Critique, issue. MMXXI.]

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[i] Williams, Daniel, (2018). “Pragmatism and the predictive mind”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17(5): 835-859.

[ii] Brandom, Robert, (1994). Making it Explicit. Harvard University Press.

[iii] Rorty, Richard, (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press.

[iv] Williams, Bernard, (1986). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Routledge.

[v] Rorty, Richard, (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton University Press.

[vi] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.

[vii] James, Williams, (2000). Pragmatism and Other Writings. Penguin Books.

[viii] Price, Huw, (2011). Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford University Press.

[ix]A term copied from Robert Brandom’s lectures on pragmatism in 2020. See https://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/.

[x] Ramsey, Frank, (1925). “On There Being No Discussable Subject”. Published posthumously under the title “Epilogue” in Ramsey (1931).

[xi] Ramsey, Frank, (1922). “Mr. Keynes on Probability”. The Cambridge Magazine 1/1: 3-5.

[xii] Ramsey, Frank, (1926). “Truth and Probability”. Published posthumously in Ramsey (1931).

[xiii] Ramsey, Frank, (1927). “Facts and Propositions”. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 7: 153-70.

[xiv] Putnam, Hilary, (1992). “The nature of mental states”. The philosophy of mind: Classical problems/contemporary issues, 51-58.

[xv] Millikan, Ruth Garrett, (1989). “Biosemantics”. The journal of philosophy, 86(6), 281-297.

[xvi] Horwich, Paul, (1998). Meaning. Oxford University Press.

[xvii]O’Leary-Hawthorne, John, & Price, Huw, (1996). “How to stand up for non-cognitivists”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74(2), 275-292.

[xviii] From some notes Ramsey made in his undergraduate times.

[xix] Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, (1982 [1797]). “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge”. In The Science of Knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, 3-28.

[xx] Keynes, John Maynard, (1972 [1930]). “F.P. Ramsey”. The Economic Journal 42/172: 140-57, page 154.

[xxi] From his lectures mentioned in note ix.

[xxii] From his lectures mentioned in note ix.

[xxiii] Misak, Cheryl, (2013). The American Pragmatists. Oxford University Press.

[xxiv] Misak, Cheryl, (2018). Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oxford University Press.

[xxv] Schumpeter, Joseph, (1933). “Review of Keynes’ Essays in Biography”. The Economic Journal 43/172: 652-7.

Wei lights up when she catches sight of dolphins in the Bosporus. Look, she turns to Bo, dolphins again. Where? Bo lifts his gaze, casts it wide across the strait, where boats have been coming and going for millenniums. He was chewing on a line of ancient Chinese poetry that went, a thousand sails having gone past, none of them was. Was what? There! She shouts and points. He follows her gaze to find a fin, elegant, smooth, breaking out of water. Then another one, and yet, another, all southbound, none rushing, heading into the Sea of Marmara. They look with wonder, but not as much as the first time they saw a dolphin together, which was also the first time they saw each other. Nonetheless they go on to declare their sense of wonder to each other, until they could think of nothing more to say, and then they fall silent, each finding it slightly awkward, each vaguely hoping the other would tacitly find it pleasant, or at least tranquil.

Eventually the dolphins cease to appear. There are only so many dolphins after all. And when they retrieve their attention they find the couple that was happily grilling things with their kid a few steps away now fighting. Or so it appears. They rise from their foldable chairs. They point at each other. They speak with high-pitched voices reeking of disdain. The food on the grill rack now sends off a burnt smell, carried by the wind to Wei and Bo. It’s interesting to see people fighting in a foreign language, says Wei, cuz you don’t know what they’re doing, you can only see and understand so much. But look at the kid, says Bo, barely three or four years old. Wei nods, and then shakes her head. Why do people fight at all she says. They always do, he says, but why bother with kids. The kid now stands, naturally, by his mother, not crying as you’d expect, not even looking helpless. The dad turns away. He climbs up from the rocks to the pavement, and then crosses the road, not looking at the traffic lights, not looking back. The mom makes an attempt to go after him but then decides against it. The kid tries to hold on to her legs. She pushes him away. Then she starts to say angry-sounding things to him. Now he looks a little helpless. On the grill rack the meat has turned all black. Bo says he doesn’t want to watch this anymore so they get up and climb up to the pavement and walk away. 

Cats run by. They’re said to be the heart and soul of Istanbul, its guardians, its prophets. One with a bright orange colour lingers around Bo’s feet, following his steps to no particular destination. He bends down and gently pats it. Why bother to have kids, he says, when you can just raise a cat. That’s a responsibility most people are so not qualified to take on. Why bother to have relationships, Wei says with a half-baked irony, when you can settle for a situationship. It’s true though, Bo turns to her, with all his childlike sincerity that makes her feel almost sorry for her irony. Most people, he goes on to say, are not qualified to make that promise too.

At night they go south, to the Sea of Marmara. So that we may see those dolphins again, Wei says. Of course it’s improbable, of course it’s very dark and all, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. By night the wind is gentle but salty, the weather moderate, a little chilly even, given that summer has already begun. More people are grilling things by the sea and this time they actually smell good. I’d imagine it’s like that in your hometown, says Wei. It is, says Bo. But I’ve never been, she says. It’s honestly very boring, he says, there’s nothing but the sea. But it’s the sea you grow up seeing and swimming in all the time, she says. True, he says, and of course I’m very fond of it, but that doesn’t make it any special I guess. I’d still want to go, she insists. Will you be there when I go? Maybe, he says, but you know, I’m barely going back home these days. She puts her arm around his neck and kisses it, gently caressing it with her lips, rubbing it wet. A tinge of saltiness on her lips, she says, go back for me one day, show me your sea. I’m showing you this, he makes a gesture forward, and this is better if I must say, and if not better with the view, better with all its history and glory. But it’s not yours, she says. No it’s not, he says. They went taciturn for a while before he says, okay, I’ll be there for you, this much I’ll promise. She leans her head on his shoulder and faintly mutters, thanks. Gusts of salty wind blow by. They’re both smiling now, not looking at each other. 

On their way back home they come across an empty playground in the middle of a park. Wei gets all excited in a sudden. ‘The swing!’ she exclaims. ‘And look, the slide! And there, a see-saw too!’ Before Bo says anything she already sets herself running. Bo keeps his stroll, lagging behind, looking at her from afar. She sits on the swing, her legs, way too long for it, dangling awkwardly back and forth. But how joyful she looks, Bo says to himself, how joyfully innocent, like a child, like humans before the fall, playing in the garden of Eden. And yet isn’t she also undeniably amongst the fallen, and one of the most sinned at that – isn’t she an irresistible seducer too? As he walks towards her he recalls their kiss earlier that day, down at the basement of a vintage clothes store, hidden behind the lines and dust of old garments, a kiss long and moist, long enough for her to touch him all over beneath his clothes, and he hers. And then, their sex earlier that evening, when they were so tired that they decided to go try out a Turkish hamam. After it’d been all finished there was no one else, and they went back to the locker room to change, just the two of them. Wei noticed that there was a lock on the door, and locked it right away. She approached him slowly, looking at him, her eyes welling up with desire. They took off their towels. Bo entered her from behind. He knocked the wall lightly and found it thin. She picked up the blow dryer sitting by the lockers and handed it to him. Dry my hair, she said. He started to make love to her while gently blowing her hair dry. Her moaning was inundated by the sound of the dryer. 

Bo refocuses himself on her, now calling to him to come play the see-saw with her. He speeds up and strides to her. His problem with desire is that he finds it corruptive of our idyllic innocence. His problem with the fall is that he finds desire such an indispensably beautiful thing. His problem with her is that she embodies two beautiful things at the same time, in contradiction. His problem with contradiction is that it enchants. 

When they go to Istanbul Modern the next day they lose each other for a while. Bo takes a long look at a Kafkaesque painting with a lot of obscure words on it. Wei is not so interested in words as in forms of expression that are not words, so she walks on. When Bo finishes reading the painting he turns back. Wei is nowhere in sight. Bo goes on to look at the paintings at a slightly quicker pace, hoping to catch up to her. He makes several turns and she’s still nowhere to be found. Baffled, he walks quickly to the end of the exhibition, and then all the way back to its start. The exhibition is fully linear with no branches but still he doesn’t see her. Eventually he gives up and texts her. Hey naughty, he says, where are you hiding. 

Wei texts him back immediately. Then he finds the little dark room, a rather inconspicuous branch, tucked at a corner by the window. There plays a film about a lighthouse keeper, in the film, the sound of people walking steadily upstairs, and that of waves rhythmically washing ashore. She sits alone at the back of the room. She says oh you’re here. He says, I’m here. She says you know as I was sitting here I thought maybe fate should lead you to me, just as it led us to see the dolphin in River Thames. What do you mean he asks, knowing quite well what she means. And if you don’t find me, she goes on to say, I thought, I’d take it as a warning by fate. If you don’t find me, maybe we’re not meant to be together – as in, in whatever form of relationship or situationship we’re in right now – and I should just leave. You see? What I’d do, is that I’d leave this museum sneakily, and grab a taxi back to the hotel. As you have the keys I’d ask the owner to open the door for me. I’d pack up my things and head to the airport and book a flight and leave. I’d go back to London and delete your numbers and never see you again. That’s what I’d do. Maybe I won’t do it but in any case if I were to write a story that’s what my protagonist would do. Bo feels a current of déjà vu flowing underneath when she says all this. Very well, he says, write it down then, and let her do it. You know a famous novelist once said, the characters in my novels are all my unrealised possibilities. Wei says, but I’ve already lost the chance to realise that possibility myself haven’t I. Bo puts his arm around her waist and says, no, totally, you’re not going anywhere now but beside me. Immediately he regrets a little bit for saying this much. Wei says, with a chuckle, maybe I should be more spontaneous after all. Maybe. Bo repeats.

On their way out of the museum she asks him whether he would hate her had she actually done that. He sits on the question for a while, and finally decides, no, he wouldn’t hate her for that. But why? She asks. Because I wouldn’t want to, he answers quickly this time. Now they’re sitting under the shades of a Turkish hazel, the twigs swaying gently to and fro in the summer wind. Maybe, he adds, maybe I’d be sad. Of course I’d be sad. But I wouldn’t hate you. After all, you should do whatever you want, and why would I want to hate you for that.

They talk again of possibilities later that day when they are sitting by the Golden Horn, bathing in the dusk, all exhausted from an afternoon walking in the hilly Cihangir. A boat comes into the harbour. First it anchors its head, then rotates its body until the flank almost touches the shore. It’s so close, Bo says, like we could just take a leap and get on board. He sticks out his arms to measure the distance. What do we do if we get on board? Wei asks. We drift, Bo says. We take a tour around the Golden Horn and the Bosporus and see the sunset and end up wherever we end up. And where would that be? Wei says. Bo shrugs. How would I know, he says. 

Get on then, she says. Get on the boat and take your tour. You see, it’s going around in a circle: from here, up north to Karaköy and Kabataş, and to the east, Harem and Kadiköy, and then back here. Take your tour and go back and see whether I’ll still be here by then. Maybe I will, maybe I’ll wait for you. Or maybe I won’t be here at all, I’ll leave, and in that case you know you’ll never find me again. Either way, I don’t know how it will turn out, but fate will decide. How does that sound? 

Don’t tempt fate, he says. 

I’m merely tempting you, she says. 

People are still swarming ashore. Bo is still looking at the boat intently across that tempting distance. Tempted, yet he doesn’t move, for reasons that are as transparent to him as they are obscure. Eventually the boat pulls out, almost empty, and swims upstream to the setting sun, followed by Bo’s gaze, probably Wei’s too. It is then that Bo finds the explanation for the sense of déjà vu he’s been feeling all this time. He recalls a story he once read, in which a couple was travelling in a foreign city (like them). One morning, when they were sitting together on a bench, the woman stood up and walked towards the sea. She stood next to the sea for a long while and then she decided to circle around to a different area where the man couldn’t see her. After an even longer while, she turned and returned to the place where she left the man sitting – he was gone. Somehow this, she felt, was entirely expected. She began to wander alone in the city, believing that if she didn’t meet him again by chance in this port city by the end of the day, she would never see him again (like her).

As he retraces through the contours of the story, to his surprise he finds himself unable to recount any of the details. Usually it’s the details rather than the plots that strike him the most. Which city is it, and what is it like? What do the couple say to each other? How long have they been there? What is the particular hue of the sea? (Right now it’s turquoise, glittered with gold.) He tries hard but fails to find an answer to any of these. Wei looks at him, deep in his thoughts, as if she can easily penetrate them. 

The next day, they take that boat together across the Bosporus to Kadiköy, the Asian side of Istanbul. Upon their arrival Wei solemnly declares that she wants a flower. That she needs one. Just now on that boat I felt something was missing, she says. It’s a flower and I don’t know what flower it is yet. Plus you’ve never given me a flower anyway. No I didn’t, Bo says, I thought you wouldn’t like it anyway. Maybe, she says, but now I do. Alright, he says, let’s go find it. 

At the nearest flower stall they find themselves talking to an old lady who knows no English. Of course, as they’re dimly aware, it’s Turkey and you shouldn’t really expect anyone to speak English to you anyway, but every time they run into someone that genuinely knows no English at all it still comes as a surprise and a challenge. Wei ponders for a while and decides that a sunflower is what she needs. She points to the pot of sunflowers. The lady says something in Turkish and then takes the whole bunch from the pot and tries to hand it to Wei. She shakes her head and picks out one of them. One, she says, forcing her mouth round and wide, as if that helps to convey the meaning, or at least the finality of her decision. The lady, disappointed, drops the rest of the bunch back to the pot. She then says something else in Turkish that ends with ‘lira’. How many lira? They ask. She takes out a note of 50 lira and shows it in front of them. No, that’s too expensive, Bo says, knowing full well it’s in vain. He takes out two notes of 20 lira and tries to hand it to her. She shakes her head fiercely and once again stretches her 50 lira note, making a flapping sound with it. Alright then, he says, and, a little unwillingly, fetches his own 50 lira note.

There goes your first attempt at bargaining in Istanbul, Wei says, grinning. She plays with the sunflower for a while and then hands it back to Bo. I’m not good at that anyway, Bo says, a sullen sunflower in his hand. And we can’t communicate anyway. And the lady must be poor so maybe it’s better to let her have the money anyway. It’s ok, she says, I’m not blaming you. I know, he says, I’m mostly making the defence to myself. They’re now on the way back to the shore, as Wei decides that she wants to see the Bosporus shining on a sunny afternoon, and Bo says, well, it’d be good for the sunflower to see the sea too, my guess is that it’d never seen it before. How do you know, she says. Just a hunch, he says, it looks local. That might be racist she says. He laughs and pats the flower and says to it, no, you’re beautiful, you’re the best among them all. Now all that tenderness, she says. She doesn’t finish the sentence and doesn’t need to. The Bosporus now comes into view, shining, as it shined centuries and millenniums ago, under the scorching afternoon sun.

By the water Bo continues his conversation, or rather his monologue, with the sunflower. You are beautiful he says, despite that you’re now withering, or maybe precisely because of that? Look at you, you may die any minute – or maybe, for you, dying is a slow process. Maybe for us humans too, we die, bit by bit, a little each time. I don’t know, I’ll never know. You see, maybe some water would be good for you, but most certainly not water from the sea, that wouldn’t go well with you. But now you’re looking at the water from my bottle – maybe you want that? But what would we drink if I give it to you? Alright, alright, I’ll share some with you, you poor thing. Here it is. He pours some water into his used coffee cup and puts the flower in. If you love it so much maybe you should name it, Wei says. No, never, Bo says, naming is too dangerous, haven’t you heard, to name is to bestow a fate. And what am I? I’m not God, why do I get to name things. But look, you’re good now. What do you want to do? Maybe look at the sun? As you should, as you should. He turns the flower to face the sun. But you’ll die anyway. It’s ok, you know, we all die, sooner or later. You must’ve lived a good life. Do you have any unrealised dreams? Maybe you want to see Europe, maybe you’ve never been. You’re a local sunflower. Look, that’s Europe, just that close, just across the water. We’ll take you there, before you die, before you wither and all. Now you’ve got your water you should be good. Hold on to it, you hear? We’ll take you there very soon…

Now, all that tenderness. She says again. He doesn’t hear, it seems. 

As they plan their way back there’s still light. It’s summertime after all. The sunflower is still alive though you can’t exactly call it flourishing. If you die before we reach Europe, at least we’ll bury you there, Bo says. How encouraging, Wei says. Well it’ll need to face this grim reality sooner or later, he says. They made several attempts at finding the metro station before deciding that the Google Maps location is entirely misplaced. It’s not the first time, you see, Bo complains, visibly frustrated. It’s like the relationship between Google Maps and Istanbul is a bit off. Could it be that Google map fabled a metro line for us? Wei grins. See, Google Maps says it’s there but it’s not. Which one’s more real? Google Maps, or reality? He frowns, and says, what do we do when we can’t rely on maps? We drift, she says, with a barely detectable irony. Bo doesn’t detect it, of course. Or, he says, we return to the old-fashioned way. We ask people on the street. 

The sunflower makes it to Europe. It sees the metro, endlessly descending stairs, busy streets on a Sunday evening. It sees crowded trams, hilly roads going down to the Sea of Marmara, a tiny messy hotel room. It’s still alive, Bo says, but that might well be the last scene in its life so we’d better make it pleasant. They resolve to tidy up the bed but halfway through they begin to kiss and touch each other. After that, of course, they make love. Would that be good for the kid to see? Wei says, smiling, out of breath. No it’s not a kid Bo says. It’s just vulnerable. But it must’ve seen things. 

They leave it at the corner of their room and head off for drinks. It’s their last night in Istanbul. Each with a bottle of Turkish beer they propose to recount all the experiences they’ve had in Istanbul. So that we don’t forget, Wei says. So that we’ll keep them in our mind for a little longer, Bo says, until, eventually, we’ll forget. Eventually, Wei says, we all die. That’s true, Bo says. Shall we start, she says, from the dolphin then. Why not, he says, everything starts from there. Alright, she says. It was the golden hour on this autumn day, post-Wong-Kar-Wai, we were on the Waterloo bridge, you were telling me the story of your tattoo, a dolphin and a crown. And then we see a fin, breaking out of the muddy water in River Thames… 

If you’re going to start from there we won’t get any sleep tonight. Bo says, smiling.

Just kidding, Wei says. But you know, it’s not like London, this place will be open till 5am. 

Emmm, it will. He says. 

They restart the story from the dolphins, this time in the Bosporus. She’s already half-drunk. For her a bottle of beer will do. They help each other re-collect everything, big and small, significant and petty. And then, Bo says, finishing the story, and then we’re sitting here, recounting our story of the journey. That’s an interesting way to end the story she says. It’s like a story by this Argentine writer, he says, where one reads in a library which records all the things that have ever happened and will ever happen, and eventually he reaches the paragraph which describes him reading exactly that paragraph. Exactly like that she says. You always give shape to all those vague random whimsical feelings I have. That’s why I love you you see. 

Bo hesitated, taciturn. It’s not the first time he hears words of love from her but the occasions were rare and all of them imbued with alcohol. Inexperienced at that, he still doesn’t know what to do with them until she says, helpfully modifying her own words, what I meant was, that is what I love about you. A little clumsily he says, all your vague random whimsical feelings, those of course are what I love about you. I see, she says, but after you leave London, what should I do with them. Someone else will do it, he says. I’m not that unique, as you might’ve thought. She lets out a bitter laugh. You’re not unique at all, she says, picking up another bottle.

On their way back home Wei is red all over her body and almost unable to walk in a straight line. She clings to him while she walks. Oh the breezy nights of Istanbul, I’ll miss you, he mumbles. Is this over now? She says, is this really already the last night?

The last morning they wake up early. By now they’re too exhausted to make love. Lying on the bed, breathing the morning breeze, Wei tells Bo her dream last night. I had a dream last night where I was beheaded. That’s how she begins. I don’t remember the reason now. But somehow my head was chopped off and I was still alive. I could feel that my being was split into two. It doesn’t just go with the head, as you might think. My hands reached out to search for my head. They wanted the head. Eventually they found it. They grabbed the head and put it on top of the neck and somehow managed to stitch them together. Now, voilà, I’m back in one. But then I could feel the pain, or rather itchiness, where the head rejoined the body.

I wish I could have a dream like that, Bo says. How limited is our imagination when we’re awake.

But listen, Wei goes on. Now I wake up. Now I’m not in a dream anymore. I’m not, right? But guess what, my neck hurts. It itches. The feeling’s real as can be, tangible as can be. It really does feel like I was beheaded and had my head stitched back. It really does. What does that mean? 

I don’t know, Bo says. He turns to kiss her neck gently and wistfully, as if there he finds a wound where her head was really recently stitched to the body. At the time he thinks of a renowned novel where the protagonist kissed the fingers of his lover after she dreamt of him making love with another woman in front of her and, in that dream, jabbed needles under her fingernails to alleviate the pain in her heart. Maybe sometimes a dream is over, he then says, but what really matters remains. 

They fall silent for a while, and then get up to pack their things. The sunflower is, to their surprise, still alive, but they can do nothing but leave it on the table. As Bo insists, on their way to the airport, they’re to make a last stop at the Museum of Innocence, a museum built by a Turkish writer based on his eponymous novel. Or maybe it’s the other way around and I can’t be sure, Bo says, as they’re walking steeply uphill with their full backpack. The first time they walk past it, a small, crimson building, looking no different from the residential buildings that surround it. The second time they find it, and find it closed. It’s a Monday after all. In dismay they peer through the only window left open to see the front hall. On the opposite wall they see a quote, not from the Turkish writer as they expect, but from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bo reads out loud:

If a man could pass thro’ Paradise in a Dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye? And then what?

Wei looks at him, and repeats the line once more. Aye? She says, gently. And then what?

He sits on the terrasse of a cafe, pondering what it would be like for him to become a writer. Henry Miller once thought about the same thing in Paris, but soon he stopped thinking about it because he became one. He was not Henry Miller (and would never be) and not a writer (yet) and not in Paris (yet). To be fair, he wrote about himself and his life and friends when he was younger, but then he stopped when it all became too much for him to put down on paper. At that time he realised that all he had written was fake. Not that the events were unreal, but that the sentiments and emotions he conveyed through them were forced. Exaggerated. Contorted. He realised this because he now understood that if the events he wrote did channel the sentiments as intense as he lavished them on paper he couldn’t have written them down at all. He decided that from then on he should instead write about absolutely sincere sentiments channelled by absolutely concocted events. That’s how it should be done. The realisation dawned upon him in early summer when the blossoms tumbled to the ground and people all became gaily and he became upset because everyone around him was all too gaily. Since then he hasn’t written a word and now it’s already deep into autumn and the air has turned crisp and the leaves are tumbling to the ground. He feels cold but then thinks, clumsily imitating Hemingway, that coldness is good discipline and keeps his mind clear and fresh and crisp just like the autumn air. Is the autumn also called the fall because in autumn everything is falling, first the leaves, then the rain? He thinks he should write the thought down but can’t quite dwell and expand on it. So he gives it up and turns his gaze once more back onto the square in front of him, the square that he has been scrutinising almost every day since early summer, trying to find an object, a person, to which he could safely attach his overflowing sentiments – safely, that is, without leaving himself exposed and vulnerable. Now he knows that there has been at least 2046 leaves fallen from the tree with a huge canopy at the centre of the square, that the vendor of the vegetable stall next to the tree has to get up 4am every morning and drive here and set up the stall and drive back at 4pm with half of the vegetable unsold, that an old lady walks to the stall everyday between 10 and 11am and walks away with a full bag of potatoes, celeries, and onions, that on sunny days her shadow becomes shorter and shorter as it goes deeper and deeper into autumn, and that on the day of autumn equinox the tip of her shadow pointed precisely to the gelateria that children would rush to everyday after school. And yet he still doesn’t know what to write about. His flat white is getting cold and his cigarettes are running out and he still doesn’t know what to write about. He reminds himself about the cooking video he just watched: if only he could take everything on his retina and drop it in a food processor and blend it into a thick, uniform, smooth paste and write about that paste. Only then would everything become unrecognisable and would he be safe. He may even become a great writer because as far as he is concerned nobody has written about that paste before. He dreams on about his prospect of greatness, sublimity, immortality; he dreams that, instead of writing about people around him, he would give birth to characters in a story and then go around the world to seek them, and befriend them, and probably make love to them, before he could start another work and give birth to other characters and repeat the same process over again. Just then he is reminded that the cafe is closing in five minutes. He stands up and packs his empty notebook and immediately gets nostalgic about his as-yet unachieved greatness.