Socrates Hits the Streets

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At 40, Chris Phillips is underemployed, deeply in debt . . . and absolutely thrilled about how his life has turned out. Since 1996, this former journalist and schoolteacher has dedicated his life to teaching small groups of people how to use the Socratic method to revolutionize their everyday lives. Wandering about the republic, Phillips reaches out to anyone willing to engage with him in a common quest to lead the examined life, facilitating hundreds of “Socrates Cafés,” in which ordinary men and women gather to ask the Big Questions, and to ask questions about the questions. He’s also launched scores of after-school “Philosophers’ Clubs” for kids. “I didn’t have any master plan when I started doing this,” he admits. “I just had this little idea: Let’s give philosophy back to the people.”

Like a Johnny Appleseed with a master’s degree, Phillips has gallivanted back and forth across America, to cafés and coffee shops, senior centers, assisted-living complexes, prisons, libraries, day-care centers, elementary and high schools, and churches, forming lasting communities of inquiry, composed of people, he says, who have nothing in common beyond “an immense respect for one another’s point of view, an immense desire to have their convictions scrutinized by others, and an immense curiosity that cannot be satisfied by the facile responses of know-it-all gurus.”

Phillips won’t charge for his work. (“It would be sacrilege to charge people when you learn much more from them than they could ever learn from you.”) This, he admits, has required some sacrifices. “I want to have a family, but I can’t afford to,” he laments. “My wife and I are crashing with friends. I drive a 1985 Chevy Nova with only three gears out of five working. It’s humiliating!”

But Phillips claims he’s profited in other ways. “If you look at the development of a more empathetic and pluralistic democracy as an end to shoot for, then giving everything I’ve got to attain this end is far more rewarding than anything I’ve sacrificed,” he insists. Besides, he recounts, at one of his very first Socrates Cafés, in Montclair, New Jersey, when only one person showed up, “I was so depressed! But we had this beautiful discussion on the question ‘What is love?’ and I ended up marrying her.”

Phillips has just completed a book about his mission, Socrates Café: Tales of the Examined Life, which will be published by Norton in February. Why the obsession with Socrates? “More than anyone else who’s ever lived,” Phillips believes, “Socrates models for us philosophy in practice—philosophy as deed, as a way of living, as something that any of us can do.”

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