Living Without Philosophy

The first essay shows Anday's style at once. He retells a Romanian one-act play he read years earlier: Santa Claus comes to a child's bedside at night and, before handing over the presents, scolds him for a failing grade in maths and for skipping school. As soon as the boy has his presents, he pulls off Santa's beard — it is his father. The boy then puts the beard on himself, sends his father to bed and reminds him of the padded report he wrote at work and the day he called in 'sick' when he was actually hungover. The essay closes with Jesus's words: let the one without sin cast the first stone. In two pages Anday builds a complete argument about upbringing, hypocrisy and the moral privilege adults grant themselves.

The second essay, 'Contrary Thoughts', is another favourite form of his: dialogue. At a New Year's lunch his old friend Gani Girgin bombards the guests with questions: should parties be shut down? Trade unions? Associations? Should the state supervise them? 'It was as if Socrates were sitting across from me,' the author writes. By the end, the notion of civil society is unpacked from Cicero's 'societas civilis' and presented as a counterweight to state despotism. This essay explains the book's title better than almost any other: here philosophy lives not at the lectern but at a table with rakı.

'The Mostar Bridge' is more personal and melancholic. Anday recalls Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis, but answers it not with theory but with the memory of a trip to Sarajevo twenty years earlier: failing to find a hotel room, feeling at home in the old Ottoman quarter, the waiter shouting 'Buyurun!' who turned out not to speak Turkish at all. The author also corrects the widespread Turkish belief that Bosniaks are Turks. Through the eyes of a poet who likens cities to people and experiences their destruction like the wounding of someone close, the Balkan war stops being a statistic and becomes a loss.

The short title piece is devoted to an international colloquium held in Istanbul in 1994 by the Philosophical Society of Turkey. Anday accepts that philosophy drifted away from ordinary people as it specialized, and that it now faces a crisis summed up by the question 'is it needed at all?' — but he refuses to join those who proclaim its end: 'Living without philosophy is synonymous with living without awareness... Philosophy is the art of asking questions.' If we stop asking 'What is true? What is good?' in each new situation, he argues, everyone will simply call their own actions true and good. The essay 'Our Relationship with Philosophy' completes the thought with the history of Ottoman learned societies being shut down one after another.

'On Reading' is a special gift for book lovers. Starting from Borges's remark that the Middle Ages were a fine era because there were so few books, Anday asks who the first critic was: the Greek title 'kritikos' was first given to three Alexandrian scholars whose job was to weed out lines later added to Homer's epics. His conclusion is simple: the way to escape junk books is to prefer the classics. The book's weakness comes precisely from its newspaper format — many pieces refer to council decisions, elections and names from the 1990s that feel incomplete without context. It is better read selectively, a few essays at a time, than cover to cover.

• Most essays run 2–3 pages, each built around a single idea
• Easy movement between dialogue, memoir, translated excerpts and polemic
• A poet's plain language — even heavy subjects are handled lightly and with humour