Why I Started Socrates Café
An international movement fostering the sort of dialogue which changes lives… Dr. Christopher Phillips discusses its roots and future
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 realisation of democratic ends.
I began Socrates Café in part because of a great sense of alienation not just, or not principally, from the processes of government.
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 characterises 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.
I began Socrates Café in part because of a great sense of alienation not just, or not principally, from the processes of government. Instead, I felt my greatest sense of alienation as being from my fellow ‘ordinary’ citizens in most deliberative spheres in the public realm that were putatively accessible to us, including places such as coffee houses, where rarely if ever did citizens gather with anyone whom they did not know to engage in thoughtful discourse. Socrates Café did seem to me to fit Villa’s ‘Socratic’ criteria of being cause-based, group-related, and service-oriented; even if not directly or overtly political; and even or especially if cultivating greater individual autonomy was a primary result. Like Villa, I tended to agree, when I first started Socrates Café, that such inquiry is not “a directly political exercise”, though it “does have political implications” (2001, p. 4); among other reasons because the insights gained from such inquiry can be one principal determinant of our political positions and dispositions, and hence impact our civic involvement or lack thereof.
However, it may be a more direct political exercise than it ostensibly appears. Charles Taylor, noted Canadian political philosopher, professor and politician — his inquiries into democratic recognition, identity and difference have gained notoriety in both academic and lay circles — maintains in essays such as “The Politics of Recognition” (1994) that contemporary open societies must go to great lengths to enfranchise members of all the cultures of which it is comprised. This is not to say that people’s opinions are equally or intrinsically of the same worth; rather, the distinguishing trait of a democracy is that such worth can only be gauged as its members take part together, on an equal footing, in the deliberative process, subjecting their views to critical scrutiny and empathic immersion by diverse others. My aim was for Socrates Café to be a deliberative dialogue group that interrogated varying views with a method that demanded such scrutiny and immersion. As such, Socrates Café could possibly make a fruitful contribution to this end of fomenting deliberative democracy and to the extent that it does make such a contribution, perhaps it is in fact a direct form of political exercise, albeit a subtle form, because of its predominantly philosophical bent.
Cornell West argues that in order to strengthen and evolve democracy today, we must embrace “Socratic commitment to questioning — questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma, of parochialism, and of fundamentalism”
Princeton University philosopher Cornel West in Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004) stresses the importance of Socratic inquiry for overall democratic vitality. West argues that in order to strengthen and evolve democracy today, we must embrace “Socratic commitment to questioning — questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma, of parochialism, and of fundamentalism” (p. 16). West believes that democracy cannot be had — much less revitalized — without this commitment, since Socratic questioning is what most successfully serves “to tease out those traditions” that might best “enable us to wrestle with difficult realities we often deny” (p. 41). One tradition that we needed ‘to tease out,’ in my view, was the Socratic tradition itself.
To West, bereft of the Socratic, the democratic tradition itself is susceptible to falling victim to those who would distort and pervert it for the pursuit of ends far removed from and counter to their original sublime function.
The Socratic commitment to questioning requires a relentless self-examination and critique of institutions of authority, motivated by an endless quest for intellectual integrity and moral consistency […] that unsettles, unnerves, and unhouses people from their uncritical sleepwalking […] (2004, p.16).
West maintains that Americans today are in dire need of recapturing “the deep democratic energy of this Socratic questioning in these times of rampant sophistry on the part of our political elites and their media pundits” (p. 17). West holds that the end of Socratic questioning is to develop “intellectual integrity, philosophic humility, and personal sincerity — all essential elements of our democratic armor for the fight against corrupt elite power” (2004, p. 208).
We need not just one Socrates among us, but a citizenry of Socrates which takes as its charge the challenge to expose “the specious reasoning that legitimated [the] quest for power and might” for its own sake by “seductive manipulations and lies” from the elite
West additionally maintains that if American citizens are to perpetuate a rich, evolving democratic tradition, we need not just one Socrates among us, but a citizenry of Socrates which takes as its charge the challenge to expose “the specious reasoning that legitimated [the] quest for power and might” for its own sake by “seductive manipulations and lies” from the elite (p. 16). West further praises Socrates for his unprecedented “historic effort to unleash painful wisdom seeking — his midwifery of ideas and visions”. He avers that this Socratic work was “predicated on the capacity of all people […] to engage in a critique of and resistance to the corruptions of mind, soul, and society” (2004, p. 16).
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum — whose scholarly work often ties together ancient Greek philosophy with modern political thinking and ethics — suggests that individual and democratic evolution and revolution on a societal scale go hand in glove. In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Nussbaum asserts that the vibrancy of a democratic society hinges on its pervasive capacity to reason Socratically: “In order to foster a democracy that is reflective and deliberative […] that genuinely takes thought for the common good, we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs” (p. 19).
Nussbaum goes on to maintain that a democracy cannot be in a healthy state “when people vote on the basis of sentiments they have absorbed from talk-radio and have never questioned. This failure to think critically produces a democracy in which people talk at one another but never have a genuine dialogue” (p. 19). To Nussbaum, the concomitant nurturing of individual autonomy and social conscience that is characterized by Socratic inquiry foments a more participatory and democratic society with a citizenry that “can genuinely reason together about a problem, not simply trade claims and counterclaims” (1997, p. 19).
John Dewey (1932) stresses in his Ethics that his variant of concomitant nurturing does not pit society against the individual, as if they are on opposite ends of a continuum, but demonstrates how the two are wholly entwined. As a consequence, it does not entail “a sacrifice of individuality,” much less connote “the submergence of what is distinctive, unique, in different human beings” (1932, p.383). To the contrary, it entails forms of sharing and participating that thrive on “diversification,” in which each citizen contributes “something distinctive from his own store of knowledge, ability, taste, while receiving at the same time elements of value contributed by others”. How does this come about? To Dewey, only through “genuine conversation” in which “the ideas are corrected and changed by what others say; what is confirmed is not his previous notions, which may have been narrow and ill-informed, but his capacity to judge wisely” (p. 384). Such concomitant nurturing leads to “an expansion of experience,” to learning; and this is so even if one leaves an encounter more entrenched than ever in one’s particular view (p. 384). This is so because whenever there is “genuine mutual give and take,” it can be argued, one’s perspectives “are seen in a new light, deepened and extended in meaning, and there is the enjoyment of enlargement of experience, of growth of capacity” (p. 384).
The resulting “community of good” (p. 385) affords each member of society “the same opportunity for developing his capacities and playing his part” (p. 384). Such a perspective implies that all democratic citizens have both the right and the responsibility to sculpt our social practices, given that they are impacted by them. Working towards general social well-being, and greater individual self-actualization, go in tandem, according to Dewey; life takes on richer significance when working integrally towards a shared and desired future (p. 385).
My Socrates Café endeavor represented, or was intended to represent, a modest attempt to revive the Socratic tradition for the types of ends spelled out by Dewey, West and Nussbaum, but also to utilize the types of means to which they allude. It was somewhat daunting that American culture was not inured to such inquiry. When I started my first Socrates Café group in that northern summer of 1996, even sympathizers told me that Americans were no longer capable of engaging one another in thoughtful discourse, certainly not in public settings where they did not know those taking part. If this was so, then it seemed to me that the ‘writing was on the wall,’ and that our democracy already was in the great decline that our more extreme doomsayers claimed. However, I did not think this negative portrayal was necessarily so; at the very least, it seemed worth verifying, or contradicting, this pessimistic outlook.
Originally published in Spring 2010 in a previous iteration of Socrates Cafe.
Edited by Odin Halvorson
