Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy, by Christopher Phillips.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
$23.95 - 224 pages.

What is silence? What is justice? What is wisdom? What indeed is what?

Christopher Phillips, author of Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy has traveled around the country raising such questions in an effort to revive a forum of inquiry once inspired and loved by Socrates. Dubbed by some the “Johnny Appleseed of philosophy,” Phillips takes his knowledge of Socrates and philosophic inquiry into many different settings cafes, universities, elementary schools, even a prison to raise debate over fundamental questions.

A brief examination of Socrates Café might lead the reader to conclude that Phillips is simply promulgating sophomoric bull sessions, that he and his Socrates cafe are simply providing Americans the opportunity to build their own talk show. Sometimes the sessions which Phillips offers do descend into the sort of personal, self-absorbed dithering that would have caused Socrates to laugh aloud. Here is a discussion of “home” among residents of a housing complex for senior citizens:

“A real home is where you were born and raised,” says a woman who throughout the discussion has been standing in the doorway, leaning heavily on a cane. For some reason she hasn’t or won’t come all the way in to join us.

“My childhood home, which is nearby, and which is where my parents still live, doesn’t feel much like a home to me anymore,” I say to her. “My bedroom slowly but surely became an extra room for my mom. In fact, I don’t even have a key anymore.”

“You can’t go home,” a resident says. While fingering her pearl necklace, she eventually says, “Well, maybe you can. But it’s not the same and you’re not the same. You can go back but is it still home? Or is it a new home? Is it a stranger’s home?”

Pages of such dialogue might drive desperate readers to the more violent philosophical musings found on the Jerry Springer show. Fortunately, however, Phillips and the participants in his Socrates Café give us more than these white-bread ponderings. Many of the discussions reproduced in his book inspire the reader to consider the benefits of the socratic method the constant questioning, the slow movement toward some sort of truth. Some of the discussions, such as the ones that take place in the elementary schools, may even open readers to the sense of beauty, truth, and wonder that lie at the heart of philosophy. Here Phillips brings a glass half filled with water to a meeting of one of his philosophy clubs for kids:

“... The last time I did this with a group of kids singled out as “gifted, “ they argued among themselves that the glass has to be one way or the other, either empty or full. They never considered other possibilities.

Not so the members of the Philosophers Club. “It’s half empty and half full, Carmen said when I posed the question to them. “It’s half full of water and half empty of water.”

Then Estefania said, “It’s half empty and half empty! It’s half empty of air and half empty of water...”
This prompted fair-haired, fair-skinned Arturo, who is from Mexico, to say, “It’s completely full. It’s full of water and air molecules...”

Then Rafi, who as usual waited a long time before saying a word, said, “What’s that thing in the middle?”.. He took the glass and jiggled it so the surface of the water moved “There, “ he said. “Where the water and the air meet. That doesn’t have anything to do with empty or full, does it?”

Rafi’s observation leads Phillips to a discussion of Zeno’s famous paradox, in which the ancient Greek philosopher poses the impossibility of going from point A to point B by traveling half the distance each time you move.

At one point Phillips tells us that for Socrates “nothing was ever resolved once and for all.” Perhaps, but Socrates was searching for Truth with a capital T in his questions. This quest is the thing that set Socrates apart from the sophists of his time, sophists being the men who for a fee taught students to argue any side of any question; teachers mirrored in our own time by university professors, the media, and indeed the entire philosophic mind-set of our culture. Socrates actually looked for justice, for wisdom, for truth. Phillips hints at that quest, but does so in such a roundabout way that readers may fail to grasp what he is saying.

Despite that point, Phillips and his bands of amateur philosophers I was highly amused to read that some “philosophers” of the academic variety actually want “all public philosphers” to be certified by a sort of licensing system with fees offer inspiration in their passion for reason. Reason has taken a large number of hits in the last thirty years; we are often asked to feel rather than to think, we have seen presidents and their wives consulting astrologers, we glean information from sound bites and from impassioned but ill-informed talk show hosts. By stressing the benefits of reason and of philosophic wonder, Phillips helps the reader begin to engage in “the great ongoing dialogue without beginning or end.”

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville).

 

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