Everyman’s Socrates
How long can you talk about nothing?

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor
April 28-29, 2001

Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy by Christopher Phillips (Norton, 232 pp, $23.95)

year or so ago I found myself in a new-agey coffee shop somewhere in Montclair, New Jersey. It was a cold, dark, winter's weeknight — "Café for Socrates" night at this place called Collage II. For a few hours, my experience was an almost-flashback to those Saturday-evening conversations with fellow undergraduates.

You couldn't have scripted it better. Within minutes of my sitting down, a David Duchovny look-a-like walked in proudly with his guitar. The stringing, however, wouldn't come for another two hours, an encore to the main event. At first, there was just private chatter around the shop, and the chatterers fell into almost every age group. Individual conversations included "Do you like Rousseau?" and "I'm finding Sarte hard to get through." Not before too long, Facilitator Mulder asked the question of the night: "What is evil?"

I've never hated a question so much.

There was instantly something that set the night apart from any I had spent in college voluntarily dissecting big questions. After all, it's hard to determine what evil is if there is no one present willing to admit to the existence of any truths. (My Knights of Columbus philosophy-major friends didn't have that problem.)

Hitler was evil, offered one retired gentleman. No, argued the young schoolteacher with the guitar — if something is that recognizable as evil, the claim is automatically suspicious. It's just too easy. Finally, someone came up with an indisputable example of evil — "The Army of God goes around bombing abortion clinics. They are evil." Another young man, a recovering addict (alcoholic) seemed disturbed by the whole discussion. After all, he whined, "Evil is not a healthy concept. It is used as a stereotype." Besides, "can you give me an example of any evil person who did not have a hurtful, traumatic history — like, abusive parents?"

As the night wore on, it became more difficult to determine what evil might be — and if there is even such a thing. "What is the difference between that girl who put her newborn in the trash at her high-school prom and a lion who eats her cub?" No one felt qualified to differentiate the two.

The turning point of the evening had to be when one young woman remembered that in grade school she learned that "evil" is "live" spelled backward. Thanks for the insight. As I started to think about the prospect of going home and sleeping before having to go back to work, someone asked if a conscience exists and if it has anything to do with guilt. "Well," an older Irish women chimed in, "if you come from the religion I used to belong to, it does." Everyone laughed.

Finally — thankfully — time ran out. I have no idea what evil is.

Christopher Phillips, author of Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy, started the Montclair meeting group in the early nineties, working out of the local mall. Phillips had been a philosophy major, but graduated with "an empty feeling." Then, he discovered a French philosopher named Marc Sautet and, after reading a few pieces on him, decided to head to Paris to get a look at the philosophical café movement Sautet had spearheaded. They hit it off, and the rest is history.

Phillips is in vogue. All over the world, people of different ages, classes, and educational backgrounds meet in coffee shops, bookstores, and restaurants to discuss "the meaning of life" and other questions that the majority of Americans are usually too busy living life to ask.

But the Phillips book doesn't give you the full picture. Pop philosophy has multiple manifestations, and they don't necessarily get along. Other professional philosophers would have the neurotic drop their shrinks, and pay them to take a walk with Socrates and all his descendents (however lacking their worthiness). Louis Marinoff, a professor at the City University of New York and a philosophical counselor for hire, provides insight into the more professional site of pop philosophy in his Plato Not Prozac.

And don't think the philosophical counselor a novelty service, like a pet tanning salon. These are full-time academics, capitalists, and politicians. A New York assemblyman who sponsored legislation to establish a government license to practice philosophical counseling called for no one to be left behind — "poorer segments of the population should benefit" from the talents of philosophers, too. A right to Socrates?

Phillips's book is a first-hand account of an interesting fad. It is also a bird's eye view into the world of the New Class, the folks who are above religion — probably because they never were exposed to it as a legitimate option for a cultured person — but who know they are missing something. Off to the café they go. Of course, once there, odds are, no one has the answer. Post-modern angst anyone?