The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
The monarchist cleared his throat. ‘The world began with monarchy, and monarchy will be here as long as the world is.’
The donkey began braying in the middle of his sentence. The sound filled the bus so thoroughly that the man had to stop speaking.
I turned towards the donkey. ‘Bad manners! You don’t interrupt people while they’re speaking, you barefoot scoundrel.’
The newcomer laughed. ‘Allow me to speak for the donkey: it depends on what they’re saying. Our comrade Lena has been talking for an hour and he’s still asking whether Layli was a woman or a man!’
The woman in red joined in. As usual, when she wanted to say something serious, she closed her book, narrowed her eyes, gave a mischievous smile and rested a hand on her chin. A fine scar marked the skin there; in this pose she looked a little like Scarface.
‘Perhaps Lena should give us a brief but useful history of philosophy,’ she said. ‘Then we might see how thought developed and how people became more enlightened.’
Coco began wagging her tail.
‘That counts as another vote in favour,’ I said.
The monarchist looked at the woman in red but said nothing. Lena picked up her water bottle and took a few sips.
‘Brief and useful, you said?’
‘Yes, please,’ said the newcomer. ‘If we start the history of philosophy with the dawn of humanity, as we did migration, we might still be in a cave when the story ends.’
‘Don’t worry. This bus is licensed to travel through every historical period. We’re just not sure about its insurance.’
‘The donkey handles the insurance,’ said the woman in red.
‘Then we’ll be bankrupt at the first accident.’
The donkey gave a short bray.
‘You’re right. I shouldn’t judge your finances before reviewing the case.’
Lena smiled. ‘Very well. First, philosophy did not begin with a single named philosopher or in one particular country. Wherever a person asked, “What is the world?”, “Who am I?”, “What is death?”, “What is justice?”, “Who ought to govern?” or “Why do some command and others obey?”, philosophical thought began.’
‘But everyone says philosophy began in Greece,’ said the monarchist.
‘Much of what we call classical Western philosophy developed in ancient Greece. But people thought about existence, ethics, justice and government before that, and at the same time, in other civilisations. In India, China, Iran, Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere, people questioned life, death, social order and humanity’s place in the world.’
‘So the first philosopher could have been someone sitting by a fire one evening asking where all the meat from the hunt had gone?’ I said.
‘And the chief answered, “Don’t ask questions about matters of security,”’ the woman in red said.
‘And that night the first political philosopher was born.’
The laughter rose around us.
‘It may be a joke,’ Lena said, ‘but questions about how food, power and justice are shared are among humanity’s oldest. Philosophy isn’t only about the heavens and the stars. It’s about bread, property, obedience and freedom too.’
‘Back to bread and class,’ said the monarchist.
‘You can philosophise on an empty stomach,’ I said, ‘but a hungry philosopher tends to ask about justice rather sooner.’
Lena continued. ‘In Indian philosophical traditions, suffering, consciousness, human desires and the path to liberation were important concerns. In China, thinkers such as Confucius spoke about ethics, duty, social order and the conduct of rulers. Other traditions emphasised harmony with nature, simplicity and restraint from domination.’
‘So philosophy dealt with government from the start?’ asked the newcomer.
‘Yes. Whenever people ask what makes a good life, sooner or later they ask how a good society ought to be run.’
‘Which is usually when government officials turn up,’ I said.
‘Ancient Iran also had ethical thought and questions about good, evil, choice and human responsibility,’ Lena said. ‘In many ancient civilisations, philosophy, myth and religion were not separate things. People explained the world with stories, experience and reasoning together.’
‘Did religion help thought to grow, then?’ asked the monarchist.
‘It helped at times, and at other times obstructed inquiry. It isn’t a one-sided story. Religious beliefs have sometimes encouraged ethics, solidarity and resistance. Religious institutions have also stood beside political power and treated questions as crimes.’
‘So again we must distinguish people’s beliefs from an institution that builds power on them,’ said the woman in red.
‘Exactly.’
The bus passed a dark park. Small lights along the pavement flickered among the wet branches.
‘In ancient Greece,’ Lena said, ‘some thinkers sought explanations for natural events without immediately appealing to myths. They asked what the world was made of, how change occurred, and whether an order lay behind its variety.’
‘Instead of saying lightning meant the gods were angry, they looked for another cause?’ I asked.
‘Yes. The importance lay not only in the answers they gave, but in how they asked. They proposed that the world could be examined, arguments offered and other people’s views challenged.’
‘A lot of their answers were wrong, though,’ said the monarchist.
‘True. Philosophy isn’t a collection of answers that remain correct for ever. It is the history of people trying to ask better questions. Sometimes one good question is worth ten ready-made answers.’
The donkey brayed.
‘He understood that. He’s been asking questions all his life and never waits for an answer.’
‘Perhaps he knows the answers are usually longer than the questions,’ the newcomer said.
‘Then we come to Socrates,’ Lena said. ‘He talked to people in streets and squares, using one question after another to expose contradictions in their thinking.’
‘Something like what Lena does on this bus?’ I asked.
‘Except Socrates didn’t have a donkey,’ said the woman in red.
‘If he had, perhaps his fate would have been different.’
‘They executed him in the end,’ said the monarchist.
‘Yes. Power isn’t always most afraid of someone who supplies answers. Sometimes it fears the person who asks the right question more. Socrates was accused of corrupting the young.’
I looked at the monarchist. ‘Hear that? The charge of “leading young people astray” is older than your complaint.’
The woman in red laughed.
‘Perhaps Socrates was a leftist too,’ the man said.
‘We haven’t found his membership card yet.’
‘Plato, Socrates’ pupil, wrote about justice, truth, knowledge and government,’ Lena continued. ‘He imagined an ideal society and argued that philosophers should rule.’
The monarchist sat a little straighter. ‘There! A philosopher finally says something sensible. A philosopher-king — that’s monarchy.’
‘Don’t celebrate yet. Plato’s philosopher-king was different from a hereditary monarch. Being born into a royal family wasn’t meant to qualify someone to govern.’
‘His father’s birth certificate wasn’t enough?’ asked the newcomer.
‘No. Apparently philosophy classes for crown princes hadn’t been invented,’ I said.
The monarchist turned back to the window.
‘After Plato, Aristotle tried to examine the world, politics, ethics, logic and nature more systematically. He took observation and classification seriously and discussed different forms of government.’
‘Did he speak about equality too?’ asked the woman in red.
‘Here we must understand philosophers in their own time without letting reverence for their names hold us captive. Aristotle achieved a great deal, yet regarded certain inequalities, including slavery, as natural. The history of thought isn’t only the history of progress; it is one of contradictions and limitations too.’
‘Someone can write books on logic,’ I said, ‘and still find that their logic limps when it meets the injustice of their own age.’
‘Exactly. A famous name exempts nobody from criticism.’
The donkey made a noise.
‘Rest easy. No philosopher has yet declared braying illogical.’
‘After the classical world’s decline, much philosophy in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere became entwined with religion and theology,’ Lena said. ‘Philosophical questions did not vanish, but were often asked within frameworks of faith, interpretation of religious texts and the relationship between reason and revelation.’
‘So philosophy went into religion’s service?’ the newcomer asked.
‘Sometimes. But the relationship wasn’t always simply one of service. Some thinkers sought a place for independent reason. In the Islamic world, Greek works were translated and studied, and thinkers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes debated reason, politics, being and knowledge.’
‘Philosophy crossed borders,’ I said, ‘even when human beings had trouble crossing them.’
‘Ideas have always been great migrants. They move between languages, cities and generations. No single civilisation owns all human knowledge.’
‘So philosophy didn’t need a Nansen passport either,’ said the woman in red.
‘Ideas had excellent smugglers: translators.’
Lena laughed. ‘Translators have sometimes carried something across a border that armies could not destroy.’
‘Many of those thinkers were at the courts of kings, though,’ said the monarchist.
‘Some had royal patronage; others faced pressure from those in power. That is another contradiction in history. Thinkers needed safety in order to live and write, yet their protectors might be the very people who forbade them to cross certain lines.’
‘A philosopher had to tell the truth,’ I said, ‘but in a way that didn’t cost them their supper.’
‘Difficult work,’ said the newcomer.
‘It still is.’
‘The Renaissance, growing cities, expanding trade, printing and advances in science brought new conditions,’ Lena continued. ‘More works became available, and older institutions gradually lost their monopoly on knowledge.’
‘Did printing do what the internet does now?’ asked the woman in red.
‘In some respects. It helped ideas spread faster and escape the control of a single court or institution. Of course, just as the internet has not brought only freedom, printing served education, propaganda, struggle and lies all at once.’
‘So from the beginning they printed advertising leaflets alongside philosophy books,’ I said.
‘Quite possibly.’
She went on. ‘The scientific revolution also changed people’s view of the world. Observation, experiment and mathematics became more important. The earth could no longer be treated as the unquestioned centre of the universe, and nature could be explained by its own laws.’
‘What did that have to do with politics?’ the monarchist asked.
‘Once you learn to question ready-made answers about nature, sooner or later you question society and government too. If you can reconsider how planets move, why not reconsider a king’s hereditary right?’
‘The telescope changed more than the sky,’ said the woman in red. ‘It made the throne look smaller too.’
‘Especially once people realised the sun doesn’t orbit the king.’
The donkey brayed.
‘Some people still aren’t convinced by that discovery.’
‘In modern philosophy, thinkers such as Descartes emphasised doubt and reason,’ Lena said. ‘Descartes wanted to begin with something that could withstand doubt.’
‘He’d doubt everything after a few minutes on this bus,’ I said, ‘even whether he’d really boarded it.’
‘Perhaps he’d ask whether this donkey actually exists or is only something we imagine,’ the newcomer said.
‘One look at the bill for the damaged seat would convince him.’
‘Political thinkers of the time also asked where government’s authority came from and what rights people had,’ Lena said. ‘Does power descend from heaven? Does a king have a divine right? Or is government an agreement among people, requiring their consent?’
‘A king can have the people’s consent,’ the monarchist said.
‘An individual can be popular. But the philosophical question is whether the right to govern should pass by inheritance. If the people are the source of legitimacy, why should a child in one family be deemed more fit to rule from birth than millions of other people?’
‘Because they’ve been trained.’
‘Plenty of people learn to drive buses,’ I said, ‘but that doesn’t mean they leave the bus keys to their children for ever.’
‘It isn’t even clear who has the keys to this bus,’ said the woman in red.
‘In appearance, I do. In practice, history does.’
‘Thinkers such as Hobbes argued that a strong authority was needed to prevent chaos,’ Lena continued. ‘Locke stressed natural rights, property and the consent of the governed. Rousseau asked how a person born free could find themselves in chains within society.’
‘Chains again!’ said the monarchist.
‘If history hadn’t been so full of chains, philosophers wouldn’t have had to write so much about freedom.’
‘Enlightenment thought helped shape revolutions and new ideas of human rights,’ Lena said. ‘Reason, liberty, equality and criticism of authority gained force. But that period was full of contradictions too.’
‘What contradictions?’ asked the newcomer.
‘People spoke of human liberty while slavery, colonialism and the exclusion of women continued. The “human” in many texts effectively meant a white man with property. Others had to fight to establish that when we talk about human rights, they too are human.’
‘Even the definition of a human being was political and bound up with class,’ said the woman in red.
‘Yes. Women, enslaved people, workers, colonised peoples and minorities had to come forward and say that a philosophy which could not see them was incomplete.’
‘And the powerful said, “We have no capacity for completion at present.”’
The newcomer laughed.
‘The French Revolution and what followed challenged the old order,’ Lena continued. ‘Even the terms “left” and “right” became famous through where different groups sat in the assembly of that era. Those seeking more fundamental change sat to the left; defenders of monarchy and the old order tended to sit to the right.’
I glanced at the monarchist. ‘Now do you see why we’re called the left? It didn’t begin with my driving.’
‘I thought it was because you always overtake on the left,’ he said.
‘At last, a scholarly joke from you.’
The woman in red laughed, and even Lena smiled.
‘In the nineteenth century, philosophy faced enormous economic and social changes. Industry grew, cities expanded, and a new working class emerged. Legal freedom had been proclaimed, but many people worked long hours in harsh conditions and owned nothing but their labour.’
‘Free on paper,’ I said, ‘but they would starve if they didn’t work.’
‘Yes. A new question followed: is freedom simply the law removing a chain from your wrist, or must you also have a real possibility of living freely?’
‘Is this where Marx comes in?’ asked the monarchist.
‘Don’t worry. He hasn’t got off at the stop.’
‘Before Marx, philosophers such as Kant discussed reason, ethics and human autonomy,’ Lena said. ‘Hegel saw history as a living process full of contradictions, in which ideas and society change through conflict.’
‘That’s dialectics?’ asked the newcomer.
‘One of its important sources, yes. But Marx brought this way of thinking down from the realm of ideas to the ground of society. He argued that to understand history we should not only listen to what people say about themselves. We should examine how they produce things, who owns what, what classes exist, and how their interests clash.’
‘So everything is economics?’ asked the monarchist.
‘No. That’s a common simplification. A person is more than a stomach. But you cannot properly understand ideas, politics and culture without considering how people live materially. Economics is not the sole cause, though it underpins many social relationships.’
‘If someone works for bread all day, you can’t give them an evening lecture explaining that hunger is all in their mind,’ I said.
‘Unless the lecturer has an enormous supper waiting afterwards,’ said the woman in red.
‘Marx believed philosophy should not merely interpret the world; it should play a part in changing it,’ Lena continued. ‘The gap narrowed between a philosopher writing about justice in a room and a worker striking for it.’
The donkey let out a loud bray.
‘He too wants theory united with practice, apparently.’
‘What practice?’ asked the newcomer.
‘The revolutionary seizure of the hay store, most likely.’
Lena laughed. ‘But philosophy did not stop with Marx. Other currents followed. Some asked about individual freedom, anxiety, loneliness, death and the meaning of life. Others examined language, consciousness, science and the limits of knowledge. Women showed how much of philosophy’s history had overlooked their experience. Anti-colonial thinkers asked how colonialism occupies not only land but people’s minds and their image of themselves.’
‘It takes more than mines and oil,’ said the woman in red. ‘It tells people they are nothing without their colonisers.’
‘Exactly. Colonialism tries to make domination seem natural. Hereditary monarchy, class inequality and patriarchy were also presented as natural for centuries.’
‘Back to monarchy,’ the man said.
‘We haven’t come back to it. It’s been standing in the middle of the road since this discussion began.’
‘And the donkey has objected to it all along,’ said the newcomer.
‘He has a long record of struggle on this point. Donkeys have carried kings’ burdens for centuries and never received a medal.’
The donkey twitched his ears.
‘He agrees with that one,’ said the woman in red.
‘If I had to sum up the history of philosophy in one sentence,’ Lena said, ‘I would call it the history of human beings questioning the world, themselves and power. Every generation offered answers; the next questioned those answers again.’
‘So there is no fixed truth?’ asked the monarchist.
‘I did not say that. The growth of knowledge does not mean every claim is as sound as every other. There is a difference between an argument and a slogan, evidence and assertion, knowledge and prejudice.’
She looked at him. ‘If someone claims monarchy has existed since the world began, they ought to explain where their king ruled before states and classes formed, and who his subjects were.’
‘Perhaps he was king of the cave,’ the newcomer suggested.
‘And the donkey was his transport minister.’
Laughter spread through the bus.
‘What I meant was that people have always needed a leader,’ the monarchist said.
‘A leader, an administrator, a representative and a hereditary monarch are not the same thing. A society can share responsibilities, elect representatives and organise its affairs without declaring that one family owns the country for ever.’
‘Philosophy starts right there,’ said the woman in red, ‘by distinguishing things people deliberately muddle together.’
‘Like a donkey and a transport minister.’
The donkey objected.
‘You’re right. An insulting comparison — for the donkey.’
Even the monarchist could not suppress a smile.
Lena screwed the cap onto her water bottle. ‘Ideas, like people, have crossed borders. Philosophers have been exiled, books burned, writers imprisoned, and governments have tried to silence questions. But ideas have often found another route.’
‘Why is power afraid of philosophy?’ asked the newcomer.
‘Power is not afraid of every philosophy. It fears the philosophy that shows how something presented as natural, eternal and unchangeable was made by history and can be changed.’
‘When a king says monarchy will last as long as the world,’ I said, ‘philosophy quietly raises a hand and asks, “What is your evidence?”’
‘One question can be more dangerous than an army,’ said the woman in red.
There was a brief silence. Rain had started again. Drops gathered on the bus windows and broke up the city lights.
‘Questions can also plunge a society into disorder,’ the monarchist said, more quietly this time.
‘A question may disturb an apparent peace,’ Lena replied. ‘But a society whose calm depends on enforced silence was already ill before anybody asked.’
‘You put a thermometer under a patient’s arm to measure a fever. The thermometer didn’t give them the illness,’ I said.
‘Though the patient might dislike the thermometer,’ said the newcomer.
‘Especially if it’s a left-wing thermometer.’
The donkey brayed again.
‘All right: an independent, hard-working thermometer.’
The woman in red opened her book again, but before reading she said, ‘Now I see better why you cannot separate the history of political asylum from the history of philosophy. Many political refugees have had to flee because their questions, beliefs, writing or struggles challenged the existing order.’
‘Yes,’ Lena said. ‘Sometimes a person’s ideas cross the border before they do. A government tries to imprison their body because it can no longer put their thoughts back in prison.’
The bus turned into another street. I glanced at the passengers in the mirror. The monarchist was quiet. The newcomer had a hand on Coco’s head. The donkey sat by the window, his ears turned towards Lena.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘We’ve understood the history of migration, the political refugee and a little of the history of philosophy.’
‘That was a little?’ asked the newcomer.
‘On this bus, anything that ends before we reach the destination counts as brief.’
The woman in red laughed. Yet another question still hung in the air:
If the history of philosophy is the history of human beings questioning power, why does each new power, after a while, imagine it holds history’s final answer?
To be continued…
Naser Kamali
Translator’s notes
- Layli: The newcomer uses a Persian expression for missing the point after a long explanation: someone is still asking whether Layli, the famous female figure of the Layli and Majnun love story, was a man or a woman.
- Scarface: The original compares the woman’s expression and small scar with Scarface. The film reference is retained.
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