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Nietzsche With a Chaser

by Libby Copeland

This is why New York will always look down on us -- staid, serious Washington, with our sensible low-heeled shoes and our no-fire-in-the-belly sports teams. Imagine a Tuesday night, in "lively" Dupont Circle. In a dim bar, surrounded by kegs, a table full of lawyers is shaking off the workday, drinking beer, laughing and . . . listening to a lecture on Kant.

That's right. Kant. This is what happy hour in this town has come to. And it's only downhill from here. In two weeks, the same folks will be studying that serious downer Nietzsche. Here's what's wild: Philosophy is hot nowadays, hot as, say, Ricky Martin in leather. When a couple of folks decided to hold a lecture series called "Philosophy on Tap" in the bar Brickskeller, they thought they'd get 40 or 50 people willing to pay $195. They got 150.

The phenomenon is not limited to Washington. In France, they've known for nearly a decade that philosophers go well with coffee, which is why they started philosophy cafes, a phenomenon that has more recently spread to the United States. Applied philosophy courses are big on college campuses now. There has even been interest in philosophy as therapy, a point of view championed in the 1999 bestseller "Plato Not Prozac!"

It's enough to set your head spinning. Philosophy . . . relevant? Since when does philosophy have any place in our modern lives? Why, many of us haven't thought about philosophy since we scrawled " 'God is dead.' -- Nietzsche" in our high school yearbooks. Still, if you climbed to the top floor of the Brickskeller on Tuesday night and peeked through a crack in the door, you'd see an awful lot of people captivated by a clean-cut guy in a pink dress shirt standing in front of a huge Bass Ale sign. This is V. Bradley Lewis, an assistant professor of philosophy at Catholic University and one of two lecturers hosting this course. He is speaking into a microphone and gesticulating with his right arm. It goes up. And down. And up. And down. And the people are sipping their beers and occasionally laughing! As if this is cabaret! And if you listened between the laughter, you'd hear: "Kant . . . Hume . . . Hobbes . . . noumena . . . Me in myself . . . When we think about ourselves we can't know ourselves as the thing that is us . . . "

Confounded, you might sneak in and take a seat with three youngish women. Lawyers, it turns out. Their table is completed by another friend, a guy who says he's a lobbyist and doesn't say much else. Every once in a while, a waitress comes by with a different pitcher of beer, and offers each table a sample. There are three different beers available to try.

That brings us to the question: How does beer affect one's understanding of Kant? Let's try empiricism: At the beginning of the night, Kant sounds like this really smart guy from the 18th century. In other words, unintelligible. At the lectern, Lewis is explaining Kant's definition of a good life. For Kant, that seems to mean following a strict moral code, remaining pure both in deed and in intention. Lewis's inflections are dramatic, his manner accessible, but as he reads Kant's Critique of Practical Reason he might as well be reading a shopping list.

Strangely, though, Kant begins to make more sense as the night goes on. After half a Hefeweizen and a sampling of Hoegaarden Witbier, why, Kant starts to rock. The women at the table concur: Beer makes Kant go down easier.

"Hey, whaddya think of this Kant fellow?"

"This is her night," says one of the women, gesturing across the table at her friend. "She's more of a Kantian." The Kantian, Tara Hurley, smiles. After the lecture, she explains that she likes Kant's stress on moral duties coming before personal happiness.

Across the table, Hillary DeNigro wants to know how, exactly, does Kant know what our duties are? She is more of a moral relativist: "Absolute rights and absolute wrongs -- I cannot, I cannot, I cannot get on board with that."

Absolutes -- "that's the only way that you can hone a philosophy," Hurley says.

And at some point in this interchange, someone says, "I wonder what Greg thinks."

Upon which the lone guy, who has said almost nothing, says: "Good beer. I thought the second one was wonderful." For the record, that would be the Hefeweizen.

Then the lecturer takes questions: from an erudite-sounding guy with a British accent, who wants to know why Kant values morality so highly. From a lady with a garbled question that somehow has to do with, uh, gout. Oh, and from some smart young whippersnapper in the back who throws in phrases like "if you will" and "popular cosmology," which just confuses everybody.

Still, Lewis deftly handles all the questions. With seven philosophers being featured in six 1 1/2-hour Tuesday sessions, the lecturers' challenge is to condense a lifetime of meditations into a brief, comprehensible framework. The premise of the program is to answer the question "What is the good life?" from the perspective of each philosopher.

Philosophy on Tap is a program being offered for the first time by the Smithsonian Associates, the continuing-education wing of the Smithsonian Institution. It was thought up after the success of Theology on Tap, created by the Archdiocese of Chicago to bring Catholic discussion into a bar setting, which has been modeled in many cities, including Washington. Philosophy on Tap draws on the renaissance that philosophy has been enjoying in recent years in all sorts of settings.

Take the philosophy cafes, also known as cafés philo. The trend is usually attributed to the late Marc Sautet, a French Nietzsche scholar who arguably established the first one at Cafe des Phares in Paris around 1992. The format gained popularity in France: an informal gathering of people from all walks of life getting together for a few hours every few weeks to discuss a chosen topic. The phenomenon spread to the States, and nowadays, there are a number of well-established cafés philo that have met regular as clockwork for years. They are peopled by students and auto mechanics and writers and housewives, who consider questions like, What is art? What is happiness? What is freedom? What does it mean to be human? Why is what? (Yes, that last is a real question posed in San Francisco. As for what it means, you're on your own.)

American cafe philosophers are an intense bunch. The people who are really into this tell of flying from California to the East Coast, or taking a train from D.C. to New York monthly, to attend cafes in other cities. Then there's Christopher Phillips, who has spent five years traveling the country, helping hold what he says are more than 1,000 philosophy cafes across America. He has held them in bookstores, senior centers, hospices, even a homeless shelter. The events -- he call them Socrates Cafes -- are concepts rather than physical places. He started the first Socrates Cafe in Montclair, N.J., in 1996, inspired by the French phenomenon and a philosophy course he was taking. At the time, his marriage was dissolving and a good friend had committed suicide. Phillips was looking for meaning.

The venture was going well, attracting a little local attention, until one day he held a session and nobody showed up. Well, almost nobody. Just one person, a woman from Mexico who was getting her graduate degree in the United States. She'd come with one important question on her mind. She and Phillips sat down at a little table, and the woman said, "What is love?"

"It was probably the last thing I wanted to talk about," Phillips says. Only the more they talked, the more he realized he had the answer. It was her.

They were married two years later.

Today, when they're not traveling, the couple live in Alexandria. Earlier this year Phillips came out with a book called "Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy." His next mission: educating children in the art of philosophical inquiry. He sees his mission as counterbalancing the "cancerous" shallowness of a Jerry Springer nation.

Also in Washington is the café philo that meets twice a month at Les Halles downtown. It's run by a former college philosophy major named Ken Feldman, an Alexandria resident.

Then there is Bernard Roy, who hosts one of the better-known cafés philo in New York. Born and raised in France, Roy now teaches philosophy as a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College.

"Sometimes it's totally wild," says Roy of the event he holds twice monthly at an Afghan restaurant. (He's on the phone from the South of France, where he's studying the café philo phenomenon.) The disagreements never come to blows, he says, but once a participant got "offended because we seemed to be on the side of Foucault a little too much. We seemed to be a little too postmodern, and he didn't want any part of that. So he got up and left."

These are the divisions that would try any man's soul.

But Roy says one thing that's even more troubling: Very few of his fellow cafe philosophers actually change their minds because of the debates. "They really stick to what they believed originally and they try to maintain their point," he says.

That is why you ask Lewis the last big question of the night: What's the point of philosophy if -- after all the broadening of horizons and all the questioning of assumptions -- we wind up right back where we started, believing the same things we've always believed?

And Bradley Lewis responds: You can't blame philosophy for that. That's the province of human psychology.