Maverick: Socrates Hits the Street

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While he was traveling across the country in pursuit of stories to report, Phillips recalls, he’d begun to notice a pervasive sense of self-absorption, intolerance, fatalism, and helplessness. In fact, since his professional life had become predictable and uninspiring, and since he and his first wife were splitting up, he felt this way himself. Then, when he learned that one of his former students had committed suicide, his Socratic sensibility kicked in. "I decided to stop wasting my time asking introspective, past-dwelling questions, and to ask forward-looking questions, questions that would help me make a radical transformation in my life," he says. "I began asking questions like ‘What calling will make me feel as if I were getting the most out of my mortal moment?’ and ‘What can I do, here and now, to better the lot of humankind?’"

When the answer came, he says, it was an epiphany: "I wanted to be a philosopher in the mold of Socrates! I wanted to hold Socratic dialogues!" Phillips packed his belongings and started driving to Montclair, to study philosophy with Matthew Lipman, a Montclair State University professor who specialized in creating communities of philosophical inquiry. But on the way, he suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, overcome with terror. "What am I doing?" he wondered. "For the first time, I realized just how much I needed me," he recalls today, "and that if I turned back, I would be abandoning myself in an unforgivable way." Then he started the car up again and drove on.

To find out more about Chris Phillips go to http://www.philosopher.org/

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