The Independent
June 12, 1997
Coffee, Croissant,
Brioche and a Dash of Sartre
Eye on Monday
by Chris Darke
"Continental breakfast, monsieur?"
"Yes, make it coffee,
croissants and a vigorous bout of dialectical reasoning."
"Perhaps you’d like
to choose from today’s menu of topics. For starters,
you might consider ‘is thought an addiction and
love a cure?’ or ‘How can we go beyond animal
instinct?’" "I had a heavy night. Bot
anything a little…lighter?"
"Perhaps monsieur
would care to grapple delicately with ‘What is Normality?’"
"Oh, go on then. Black,
no sugar."
The hundred-plus souls gathered
in the Institut Francais’ spacious café for
the second British Café Philosophique hunkered
down to get grips with a spot of weekend philosophy. Well-heeled
SW7 sophisticates mingled with polyglot students and competed
with a hissing espresso machine to exchange terms. The
professional philosophers could be picked out by the frowns
of puckered disgust as words like "value", "self-refutation"
and "objectivity" were recklessly bandied about.
Given that the British skepticism
toward most things Gallic goes into overdrive when faced
with the very idea of the French philosopher, the Café
Philosophique is a brave venture. I attended with a certain
degree of that same skepticism myself, but aware that
it’s often a defense mechanism against feeling intimidated
by the spectacle of full-on intellectual badinage, especially
so early on a Saturday morning. What do Café philosophers
read on the tube, I wondered? Karl Popper’s Quantum
Theory and the Schism in Physics was one volume I
spotted, which made me feel a little awkward about the
James Sallis spy thriller protruding from my pocket.
So what is Normality this morning?
"There are four coffee cups on this table,"
interjected one participant languidly. "Three are
on saucers, one is not. So this cup is clearly abnormal."
Ah, the voice of sardonic empiricism. More, please. After
about half an hour, the slightly self-conscious sense
of occasion gave way to some real exchanges, leavened
by some passion and no little humor. Thankfully, there
was no sense of this being a nostalgic wave for the spirits
of Café-swelling Parisian intellectuals. The convenor,
Paris-based American philosopher Gale Prawda, conducts
a similar event every month at the Café de Flore,
Sartre and de Beauvoir’s former cogitating ground,
and the Café Philosophique has more than a hundred
branches throughout France and has even moved as far afield
as Japan. When I learned that the originator of the Café
Philos, the French intellectual Marc Sautet, had been
charged with the mission to extend the idea to Latin America
by Jacques Chirac I had a vision of their global strategy
session at the Elysee Palace. "What have the Americans
given us - Euro Disney and the Hard Rock Café?
WE must hit back on all fronts. I see brioche and Barthes
partout. As for "What is Normality?"
search me garcon.
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