WHY I STARTED SOCRATES CAFE

A bit of the story behind the story of the 'Fresh Taste of Philosophy' I introduced to the U.S. and then the world starting 29 years ago

By Christopher Phillips

One day in August 1996, I took a deep breath and walked into a Borders Bookstore in a nondescript shopping mall in Wayne, New Jersey, twenty miles southeast of New York City, and introduced myself to the store’s ‘community events coordinator.’ I told her of this idea I had of starting a weekly dialogue group featuring a version of the Socratic method in which me and my fellow inquirers and I would thoughtfully explore those philosophical questions that most weighed on our minds and hearts. I certainly had my fair share of pressing existential concerns and conundrums, and I much desired the considered perspectives of others in gaining some enlightenment on them. What is more, it seemed to me that American society itself was in a state of crisis that much of its citizenry chose not to recognize, yet that demanded a response.

Some years later, in Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (2001) I relate that I decided to hold my first Socrates Café dialogue group as one modest effort to combat in the United States “what I perceived as an extreme and pervasive self-absorption and intolerance among people, coupled with a lack of any sense that they were their brothers’ and sisters’ keeper” (p. 130). But my ends were in fact more positive, namely to create a type of dialogical inquiry group, in a public setting, that created bonds of empathy and understanding among participants. Ideally, this in turn would prompt contributors to become more committed to one another; to do their utmost to help one another discover, cultivate and contribute those talents that would lead to a singular type of excellence. To my mind, the pursuit of the noble, the good, of all-around excellence – what the Greeks of antiquity called arête - can best be accomplished within a society with a type of openness that seeks ever to widen the circle of inclusiveness.

To make even modest inroads in achieving such a lofty goal, however, it seemed incumbent to have our dialogues driven by a method that would not so much force but inspire participants to challenge their own, and one another’s, dogma; so that any desultory habits that allowed for complacency in thought would be supplanted by ones that inspired both our critical acumen and imaginative vision. It further seemed to me that what political theorist Dana Villa said of the Greeks of the Athenian polis in which the historical Socrates resided in the 5^th century B.C. could also be said of many Americans of my era. Namely, the citizenry in both societies posed a considerable challenge to the formation of such communities of inquiry, “not because they were more dogmatic than other peoples […], but because they were the most active of peoples, the most restless and driven” (2001, p. 4).

The qualities of being restless and driven are neither inherently positive nor negative, but whether they are channeled in positive or negative ways seemed to me to hinge at least in part on whether we take the time to examine ourselves and consider how best to harness our energies. Further, it is wise to contemplate the type or types of moral code(s) we might strive to cultivate to advance humanistic ends. To this end, much as Villa’s imagines her version of the historical Socrates to do, I planned to disseminate a type of Socratic inquiry via Socrates Café which was aimed at engaging “fellow citizens on the question of how one should live” (2001, p. 5).

But the aim was by no means primarily or solely to transform others; rather, it was to serve as a means better to understand, articulate, explore, and indeed further discover my own moral code, to gain a keener sense of whether the values I professed were aligned with the way I actually lived; and to determine whether my code and my world view were in need of alteration or even of considerable overhaul. To realize this, I needed others. Margaret Betz Hull, in The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (2002), notes that Arendt, a political theorist renowned for her studies on the problematic nature of power, identifies in her version of the historical Socrates what “she believes to be a unique respect for doxa, to each individual’s own opening to the world” (Hull, 2002, p. 107).

She [Arendt] explains that ‘the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it’ but that there is a ‘sameness of the world, its commonness’ which ‘resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and despite all differences between men and their positions in the world – and consequently their doxai (opinions) – ‘both you and I are human.’ […]

Arendt argues that Socrates’ voluntary involvement with the doxai of others reveals an interdependence to the formation of opinions: ‘…just as nobody can know beforehand the other’s doxa, so nobody can know by himself and without further effort the inherent truth of his own opinion’ […] Present here is also a taste of Arendt’s notion that the formation of the self is not possible in isolation; others are needed, as in this case, for the expression and development of my unique doxa. (2002, p. 108)

I also subscribe to the belief that I can only further, and prospectively better, sculpt myself with the dedicated help of others. This requires that I continually seek forms of encounter with others in which I can come to a more acute understanding of what my words and deeds and ideals, and the value system on which they are based, amount to.

I deemed it essential regularly to hold philosophically-grounded inquiries featuring a modernized version of the Socratic method. These took place in public spaces with diverse others, in order best to realize this.

In my estimation, the ultimate end of Socratic inquiry is to engage in a type of discursive, methodically-based deliberative dialogue that contributes to democratic renewal and even upheaval. This view is based on a notion of self in which the individual and society are not at opposite ends of a continuum, but are interlaced, requiring a dual nurturing of both if greater individual autonomy is to be coupled with a developing social conscience for the realization of democratic ends. Additionally, in my view, if one divorces Socratic ideals and their integral political dimension from the ideal Socratic setting – namely, the public marketplace, what the Greeks called the agora – one diminishes the capacity of Socratic inquiry to advance deliberative democracy. I hence felt that a democratic citizenry needed continually to cultivate what political science scholar Dana Villa describes in Socratic Citizenship (2001) as a critical-sceptical bent, in order to practice constructive dissidence, with the end of cultivating forms of individual, communal and societal excellence in which citizens develop a successively greater commitment to achieving arête. Villa characterizes the ideal form of democratic citizenship as necessarily Socratic in its essence; to him, this is tantamount to placing value on the form of “conscientious, moderately alienated citizenship” that he argues is modelled by the historical Socrates. This kind of citizenship is one that is “critical in orientation and dissident in practice,” and is “cause-based, group-related, and service-oriented” (p. 2). I am not sure that such conscientious citizenship is always one in which we are moderately alienated – depending on the time and clime, one might not feel alienated at all, while at others, one might feel extremely so.