As one of the organizers of the philosophy group being discussed (Being and Becoming for reference) I read this post and comment section with great interest. We’ve been hosting these meetups every two weeks for 2+ years so it’s about time we get a heavyweight critique. First, I feel really terrible that you felt this terrible after an event I had a hand in organizing. Seriously. I sincerely hope you haven’t given up on the idea that ‘common folk’ can reason well, value holding true beliefs, and are deserving of admiration for attempting to understand themselves and the world better, even if they get there by different means than you do.
I don’t think it would be accurate to say that what you witnessed at our events proved your suspicions about the lack of intellectual rigour or interest in truth of the ‘common man’. At least not if you understood the purpose of our events. Let me explain and I hope you will see that all is not lost. In fact, I hope you will see why the fact that these events are still ongoing and sold out every time (sue me) is a good sign of this.
The purpose of our events is to get to a better grasp of the topic we are exploring that week. We usually talk about everyday things like friendship, anger, and grief, but also things like animal consciousness, bioethics, democracy, and AI. We craft handouts with questions that aim to get at these ideas. I’m not sure which session you attended, but I suspect that it would be more frustrating to wander into our session when the topics discussed are the last four topics I mentioned. I’ll admit that they don’t invite the most insightful commentary from people who have little background knowledge, but I’ve been surprised. Plus, when people don’t know a lot about a topic, they come to learn from others who do, in person, on a random Tuesday night. That’s awesome. On the other hand, I’d argue that one of the best ways to understand everyday experiential things like friendship, anger, and grief, is to talk about, well, our experiences of them. And yes, this includes vaguely philosophical sounding takes based on people’s experiences that are poorly phrased because, well, people are trying to process and codify really complex experiences and ideas into language having little training in it. And they often (myself included) fail. But sometimes, sometimes they say something that deeply resonates with someone else and then they go talk about it upstairs over a pint or two. This is what public philosophical discourse often looks like: It’s regular people making an earnest effort and engaging with complicated ideas. Valuing truth can look like different things.
I suspect that what went wrong is that when you thought about our community being a public philosophy group, you didn’t expect to have the kind of experience you had at our event. We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion. We do this intentionally because there are plenty of people who are curious and seek truth, but don’t feel welcome in (and don’t come back to) intellectual spaces where they’re made to feel inferior because they, like you pointed out, didn’t have the same affordances. We created this space to be a starting point for deeper exploration, but we’re also just a community for people who enjoy spending an evening with others talking about our experiences and ideas and hopefully learn a thing or two about how others make sense of the world. Are we allowed to call ourselves a public philosophy group? In so far as we’re trying to collectively understand our experiences and ideas through perspective-sharing and exchange (even if informal), I think so. We may not get to capital T truth in two hours, but people leave with some interesting threads that they can pull and follow. I should also mention that I know of at least one informal group that has formed out of ours that I consider to be more rigorous (members of that group still regularly show up to our events), and I was invited to a gathering this weekend from a similar initiative to talk about death.
I don’t expect our events will be enjoyable for everyone. But the probability of having a good and meaningful conversation at our events are almost certainly higher than at a sports bar. Once you see what’s happening here as a meaningful (but sometimes messy) engagement with ideas, I think you’ll regain some of that hope back. And I sincerely hope you do (and maybe come back, too).
Sofia Panasiuk
Karma: 174
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We’ve found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It’s a bit harder to illustrate how we “don’t make people feel bad for not being cogent.” One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone else to contribute. This comes from a recognition that, for the most part, people’s contributions are works in progress. They may be thinking or expressing an idea out loud for the first time in their life and it won’t always be pretty. Others who do manage to have persuasive arguments get their fair share of recognition (people will come up to them after and say that they really enjoyed their contribution).
Lastly, if person A makes a point and person B responds by disagreeing with everything person A said, we don’t go back to person A to counter. We invite them (in the house rules) to use the disagreement as a starting point for a conversation during the break or after the event. At any given moment, there are usually 3+ people who have indicated that they want to say something (hand up and eye-contact with moderator) and it’s usually not about the disagreement at hand. We have a limited amount of time (30 minutes in small group discussions and 20 minutes in large) and want to use the large-group discussions to surface as many different ideas that came up during the small groups as possible.
I want to make clear that I don’t claim that we scratch past the surface at our events. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming for greater understanding. At every cafe, we distribute a handout with a list of questions that are meant to guide small groups of attendees in their investigation of a given topic. The goal of these questions isn’t to systematically get us to an answer about what is meant by love, morality, or what a fair justice system looks like. The goal is to get people to explore important questions together with others using the tools and knowledge that are currently at their disposal. There are certainly other, more efficient ways to learn about the world, but I’d argue that at least for some topics where lived experience is involved, exploring with others is better than exploring alone.