Clubs carry on Socrates' musings
The thrill of intellectual exploration is what attracted Ivana Hill to her first Socrates Cafe meeting in Kirkland last week.
"It reminds me of when I was younger, when I used to hang out in coffee shops and have philosophical discussions," the 31-year-old Bellevue escrow assistant said during a break from the Friday meeting.
"You lose that. You become accustomed to life, you don't discover as much anymore. You become more comfortable in what you feel and believe. I don't want to lose that feeling of discovery."
The Socrates Cafe is not a coffee shop, although many people arrive cradling a cup of java. The cafe is a forum for anyone who turns up to discuss some of life's Big Questions.
In Kirkland, between 10 and 50 participants meet for two hours once a month at Parkplace Book Co.
Last week, about 40 crammed into a semicircle of fold-out chairs in front of the health, philosophy and personal-spirituality sections. Ranging in age from their early 20s to a Kirkland man who is 82, they included a former Boeing engineer, a native of India and a woman seated at the back who spent the entire time knitting a sailor's skullcap.
Comments zinged back and forth, from the scientific to the metaphysical to the wacky. Some took notes; others alternated between sighs and nods. Behind the huddled group, customers shopped for books, whispering questions to sales staffers.
Spinoff group formed
The gathering has proved so popular that a spinoff group, which wanted to meet more often with fewer people, now gets together twice a month in a Houghton-neighborhood Starbucks.
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Phillips, who is touring the West Coast, made a guest appearance in Kirkland last week to moderate the discussion. With nine groups in the state, including two in Seattle, the idea has proved more popular in Washington than anywhere else in the country, he said.
"Americans love to talk," Phillips said. "But our way of talking, I think, has been cancerous."
Phillips thinks people too often use discussions to prove how much they know or to win points over others and that conversation rarely rises above the banal. But lowering the level of discourse can have a negative effect on society, he says.
"The idea was to create new habits of talking to one another," he said.
Phillips, 42, a former free-lance journalist, studied philosophy on his way to getting three master's degrees. The suicide of a close friend and Phillips' divorce prompted him to act on his long-held dream of starting a philosophical discussion group.
He held his first gathering six years ago in suburban New Jersey community of Montclair. Since then he has moderated groups in nursing homes, maximum-security prisons and, most recently, in South Korea and Japan.
The Parkplace group was started by Dan Borgen, a technology planning consultant and former New York jazz musician who now lives in Kirkland. Borgen moderates most months, making sure everyone gets a chance to speak and that the discussion remains lively.
The group suggests topics then takes a vote. Last week, suggestions included: Why do people exist? Why should we care? Is it good to be an elitist? How do we distinguish reality from dream reality? And the somewhat facetious: How many questions can we answer?
The question eventually chosen was: What does it mean to understand, and how do we do that?
Over two hours, the discussion switches from the difference between emotional and intellectual understanding to the origin of the word "understand," to Hindi philosophy, to dreams, to the taste of salt.
Ernest Rosenberg said he has attended just about every meeting over the past 12 months, plus the Houghton meetings and meetings at another discussion group in Bellevue. The depth of conversation attracts him, he said.
"People are thinking about ideas that it never occurred to them to think about," he said.
For Brenda Cooper, the city of Kirkland's information-technology director, philosophy has long been an interest.
"It is a rare opportunity to just explore an idea without an expected outcome," she said. "You don't get to do that often in life."
Forum encouraged
Parkplace Book Co., which has more than 55 affiliated book clubs, encourages group involvement, said co-owner Rebecca Willow. An expansion that will be finished by the end of July will give the Socrates Club and other groups more room, she said.
"Philosophically, it is what we believe in," she said. "A bookstore should be accessible to the community that it's part of."
Borgen said he was inspired to start the after attending a talk that Phillips gave in Seattle and reading the author's book.
"Big picture is the concept," Borgen said. "Twenty-four hundred years ago, guys would hang around in sheets and kick ideas around."
But while the picture may be big, small things like a smile that leads to a friendship are what attract many to the meetings. Sometimes, even, a romance is started.
That happened for Phillips himself. At his second meeting in Montclair, only one person showed up. It was his future wife, Cecilia, who was studying philosophy at the time. The topic she chose that night?: What is love?
Nick Perry can be reached at 206- 515-5639 or nperry@seattletimes.com.