New York Times
January 9, 1999
THINK TANK
Very Espresso Philosophy
By PAUL
APPLEBOME
Is there a future in America
for the café-philo, the philosophical discussion
sessions in public cafes that have become the rage in
France? Judging from the oneBernard Roy moderates at
the cozy Le Poème bistro at Prince and Elizabeth
Streets in Little Italy, the answer has to be a Kierkegaardian
"Maybe."
Roy, a philosophy professor
at Baruch College, has clearly reached critical mass
for his sessions, which began in September and drew
more than 20 participants on Thursday for the topic
"Is There a Value in Excess?" But the colloquy,
which turned on the two touchstones of Nietzsche and
football, at times raised another question: Is America
now so divided that any discussion immediately devolves
to something akin to the House of Representatives with
everyone launching arguments like cruise missles?
The current wave of cafés-philo
began in France in 1992 when Marc Sautet, a Nietzsche
scholar, inaugurated sessions on philosophical issues
at the Café des Phares on the Place de la Bastille.
Cafés-philo began cropping up across France and
in other European cities.
There are now some 200 cafés-philo
in France.
Roy, a 54-year-old native
of Paris who has lived in New York since 1969, decided
to start one here.
It regularly draws a diverse
group, including students, a bioethicist, a retired
accountant and others who sit around a long wood table
over couscous, split pea soup and French bread.
Lou Marinoff, a philosphy
professor at City College, runs another one at a nearby
Barnes & Noble, but Roy feels a gathering over food
and drink in a cafe is more receptive to the populist
instincts of the café-philo than one in a bookstore.
Outside of New York and San Francisco, he said, the
café-philo in the United States might prosper
best in shopping malls ("the American agora").
To get his thinkers thinking
about excess, Roy distributed a sheet with quotes from
the Bhagavad Gita, Plato, Aristotle and Mo-Tzu, the
Chinese philosopher, along with Hammacher Schlemmer
catalogues and a recipe for Omelette Louis XV for 12
(24 ortolans, 18 pheasant eggs, 6 whole black truffles
. . .)
No one quite agreed on what
excess is, but the discussion careered along nonetheless.
Are the virtues of the mind inherently loftier than
the virtues of the body? Is a consensual communal orgy
valuable excess, or is it inherently laden with dark
gender issues? Is Elvis Presley serious art? Can Dvorak
compare to Mozart?
Most of the thought played
out on the comfortable axis of acceptable New York liberalism,
with a fur-clad veteran of a Tibetan monastery setting
much of the tone for the discussion with denunciations
of capitalism, consumerism and particularly the herd
instincts that drive people to sports events -- "circuses,"
she shuddered, "where people think they're having
a good time, but are they really having a good time
or are they just salivating when they're told to salivate?"
Her foil turned out to be
Jason L. Smilovic, a 24-year-old networking consultant
who was favorably disposed toward football, Bruce Willis's
life style and other heresies so extreme that one woman
began looking at him as if he were a yak with two heads.
"Where did you
go to school?" she asked at one point. "These
arguments are so -- I can't even think of the word.
You are such an apologist for the status quo, it's unbelievable."
After a few minutes of further
squabbling, others objected to the ad hominem turn of
the discussion, and it drifted back toward broader questions
about excess, consumer culture, elevator music and Nietzsche,
who led Herbert Marcuse, John Stuart Mill and Aristotle
by far as the most frequently cited philosopher.
Things ended with relative
comity, though Smilovic, a first-time philosophe, still
felt a bit beleaguered.
"I thought some
people had fair and just opinions and other people were
just immersed in elitist snobbery," he said.
Still, most of the participants
found the session a good one overall and the excesses
par for the course. "It's just one of the hazards
of the business," said Will Fisk, the bioethicist.
Even Smilovic seemed
to think so. He figures he'll be back again, perhaps
on Jan. 21 for the next session, on "The Selfishness
or Unselfishness of Sympathy."
