*Please address communication to: acohen@cityu.edu
This paper introduces the idea of, and narrates an experiment in, the form of a Philosopher’s Café and the practices of Deep Democracy as radical pedagogical methodology. Philosopher’s Café’s are public forums where the practice of open dialogue is practiced, and enacts Deep Democracy. Deep democracy challenges the classical understanding of democracy as majority rule based on one vote to each citizen, which is based in the ontology of individualism and its privileging of expressions of self-interest. Interbeingness describes the interconnectedness of individuals and thereby contests the classical categorical separation of self and other. Our paper describes the process of Deep Democracy development in a Philosopher’s Café that was part of a major international conference about Existential Psychotherapies. The theses tested in this small experiment were the value and possibility of intermingling process and content, the importance of personal inner work, and the effect of process facilitation using the format of a Philosopher’s Café and the practices of Deep Democracy . This experiment supports the classroom potential for personal growth, community development, and subject matter assimilation. The inherent implications for classroom practice are outlined.
The starting point of our paper is the axiomatic statement of fact that democracy is the social, moral, and political ideal of our North America societies, and that the educational institutions such as K-12 schools are mandated to teach what democracy is, how it works, and, most importantly, cultivate democratic citizenry. However, teaching what democracy is and how it works is not the same as, nor does necessarily translate into, the cultivation of democratic citizenry. We can always learn about something (e.g. how a violin is made) without becoming good at doing this something (e.g. making a violin). The main focus of this paper is an enquiry into and an experiment in the cultivation of democratic citizenry.
Following the lead of philosophers such as John Dewey and Rockefeller (1992) who consider democracy our moral and spiritual ideal, Bai (2001) theorizes that the key to democracy is intersubjectivity, that is the capacity to create mutual understanding, feelings of empathy, compassion, respect, and care—in short, solidarity—through mutually sharing “thoughts, perceptions, hopes, fears, desires, as well as . . . communal labour. . .” (p. 310), and through “mutual inquiry, consultation, and deliberation” (p. 310). Moreover, Bai suggests open-forum dialogue as the quintessential practice of intersubjectivity. Bai states (ibid.)
Dialogue wherein we share our minds and hearts, therefore, is the most foundational activity of democracy. Understanding that emerges from dialogue is the foundation of sympathy and solidarity. Understanding bridges differences and draws people together. Such understanding is the source of the power that fuels democracy. (p. 310)
Is the practice of dialogue prevalent in our schools? Is dialogue the main pedagogic practice in our schools? We invite the readers to reflect on their own schooling as well as their children’s, friends’ children, grand children, and so on. If our readers’ experience is anything like ours, chances are that they, too, did not experience a prevalence of substantial and meaningful dialogue in their schools. Schools of today, like those of various yesterdays, revolve primarily around transmission of bodies of information, knowledge, and skills, whereby it is the teachers’ job to ensure that these materials are delivered to the students. This mode of schooling is what Freire (1970) calls the banking model. Dialogues that conduce sharing of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions certainly are not the main pedagogic practices in our schools. To the extent that dialogue is not the main fare of schooling, to that extent the cultivation of democratic citizenry is compromised. In the next section, we explore the Philosopher’s Café environment in conjunction with Deep Democracy (Cohen, 2006; Mindell, 1992, 1995, 2002) practices as a form with great potential for enhanced and substantial dialogue in the classroom.
Philosopher’s Café’s are growing in popularity in Europe and North America. They are based loosely on the idea of Socratic Dialogue, a form of questioning that assumes the answers to questions lie within a person and that the task is to inquire in ways that will draw out what is hidden within. They are public forums where individuals can bring their views, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, and be involved in a lively dialogue about a particular subject. No previous training is required. Everyone is welcome. The range of backgrounds of participants can be as diverse as the culture within which it takes place. These are opportunities for members of the public, who could be characterized as members of a community of strangers in contemporary cities of multicultural, cross-cultural, and cosmopolitan population, can meet and engage with each other in intellectual and personal ways. Café’s start with some opening comments by the facilitator(s) and then the discussion is opened up to everyone in attendance. Discussion is focused on personal knowledge (Polyani, 1962), and formal erudition is neither required nor necessarily useful. Philosopher’s Café’s “ began in France, which is a definitive cafe-culture. The French have a tradition of great poets, writers and philosophers meeting in cafes, and scribbling their works on napkins” (FAQ, 1999-2006) . This quote captures the essence of the Café ethos, which encourages participants to think, feel, express, share, and join together in meaningful and lively discourse. We, the three authors of this paper, became interested in conducting a Café, and testing out our theory that this open forum may be an excellent way to cultivate democratic citizenry at school, and we saw a great opportunity in the open forum venue of a Café, which would also have classroom-like characteristics. In this paper, we describe our experiment with these ideas of Philosopher’ Café and Deep Democracy at a conference site. In the narratives that follow, we discuss how we worked with the entrenched challenge that faces any classroom, namely the phenomena of domination and marginalization, the role of the teacher(s)/leader(s)/facilitator(s), the dynamics of the group, culture, process, content, meaning, and community development possibilities as pedagogical opportunity.
Philosopher’s Café’s have many similarities to Open Forums and Town Hall Meetings. Essentially, anyone can come and within specified limits participate equally with each other person. Such gatherings are usually to do with issues of public interest. There is a main speaker, a facilitator, a location, a time frame, and some implicit and explicit rules of conduct. All of this applies to a Philosopher’s Café with the exception that the purpose of the meeting is to share and discuss ideas, beliefs, and values related to a particular theme. Like many classrooms and other organized and group environments, Philosopher’s Café’s, which have great potential in educational environments, are also subject to the same problems as we listed above as any group gathering, including classrooms. If the essence of the practice of democracy is intersubjectivity (Bai, 2001), as we discussed at the beginning, then the classroom as a primary site of cultivating democratic citizenship has to squarely deal with all these issues and the associated problems of marginalization and domination. In our own delivery of Philosopher’s Café, we approached the problems with the group dynamics facilitation tool known as “Deep Democracy” developed and articulated by Mindell (2002). As we shall show, Deep Democracy gets at the roots (from Latin, radix, meaning ‘root’) of domination and marginalization. Hence, Deep Democracy is the heart of radical pedagogy.
Before we talk about Deep Democracy, it is necessary to mention our discontent with conventional democracy. Deep Democracy was conceived to address the shortcomings of the conventional democracy. Many thoughtful persons, institutional employees, organizational members, and ordinary folks have expressed dissatisfaction with prevailing democracy practices that prevail in Canada, the United States, and other Western democracies. A defining characteristic of such democracy is one vote to each citizen. Under this arrangement as Thomas Jefferson noted, “fifty-one percent of the people can take away the rights of the other forty-nine” (Rhiannon, 2006). Winston Churchill stated that “democracy was a terrible system, except when compared to all the other systems that have been tried” (Levy, 1996). Mindell (1992, 2002) developed an evolved paradigm of democracy, Deep Democracy that challenges the classical conception of democracy and its limitations. Since then, many thinkers, social policy makers, and spiritual practitioners have worked with this paradigm (Mencken, 2001; Diamond, n.d.). The ideas and practices of deep democracy are central to any practice of radical pedagogy in our view. We believe that the Philosopher’s Café format offers an optimal opportunity to practice Deep Democracy, learn about community development, and within which the atmosphere will be most conducive to learning about self and curriculum in an integrated way.
Deep democracy challenges the fundamental philosophical assumptions of classical democracy, namely individualism and its expressions of privileging self-interest (Chinnery & Bai, 2008), and posits an alternative vision of human relationship. Within a deep democracy experience, individuals do not see themselves as essentially disconnected from others or the environment, and consequently do not function as, separate social atoms (Ogilvy, 1992). Individuals are not separate: they are “in-divisible,” the etymological meaning of “individual” from the Latin ‘individuus’! When individuals choose to see themselves as other than separate social atoms, then the warring and negotiation of self-interest does not make sense and does not happen. Individuals are not pitted against each other as in the classical Hobbesian model of society that pictures humanity as “of every man, against every man” (1964: 84). Moreover, when cooperation is called for and accomplished amongst individuals, it is not for the reasons of instrumental rationalism whereby they see that cooperation is the way to increase the chances of fulfilling self-interest. In deep democracy, “my” interest and “your” interest are co-emergent, hence, continuous and interconnected. To a deeply democratic person, the idea of fulfilling one’s self-interest by hurting others is absurd and illogical: it does not make sense.
It is instructive to note that there is a parallel development to Deep Democracy in ecology: Deep Ecology. The earlier notion of ecology as the management science of the Earth and its operations has been critiqued and challenged by the philosopher, Arne Naess (1973), who saw that the scientistic management mind-set and approach to the Earth was precisely the problem that led us to domination, exploitation and degradation of the planet in the first place. (We invite the reader to reflect on how the classroom management is so central to contemporary pedagogy, and draw a parallel between this and Naess’s critique of the management paradigm in ecology.) Deep ecology advocates a radical shift in the way we relate ourselves to, and interact with, the planet. This way is the understanding and experience of our interbeingness1 with the planet. We and the Earth are not two separate entities. We are the Earth and the Earth is also us. From this logic of interbeingness, what hurts the planet hurts us, and vice versa.
What we discussed above is no matter how attractive and compelling is just a theory. The real question is how do we practice deep democracy? Or, better yet, how do we become deeply democratic and how do we go from conventional democracy to deep democracy? What practices can we undertake here and now, in the setting of conventional democracy, to effect the shift? How do those of us committed to the perception, understanding, and practice of interbeingness or intersubjectivity, engage and work with individuals committed to social atomism and its intrinsic self-interest? And, to put it more pointedly, can those who are committed to a deeply democratic way of living and being, see and feel the individualist and his or her philosophy as an integral part of the field of interbeingness in which all are embedded? To the extent this is not done, to that extent, the practice of deep democracy is not deep enough. Let’s look now at the practice of deep democracy. As we shall see, becoming deeply democratic involves changing the substratum of one’s psyche. That which obstructs a deeply democratic way of being must be brought in to conscious awareness and transformed through inner work practices (Cohen, 2004), and the surging energy of the life force has to be cultivated to flow and blend with the so-called outer world2.
Mindell (1995) advocates a community building process that is designed to deconstruct the conventional sense of separate individuals by acknowledging and integrating the walls that exist between and within individuals. The walls that separate individuals, the constructed visible and invisible barriers, that separate, invalidate, fragment, and marginalize the other and similarly, unconscious and/or unacceptable parts of self, are indicators of the practices that marginalize aspects of self from self, and self from other. For example, I am walking down the street. I see a street person. I have a flickering thought, “Disgusting!” In a flash I have drawn a line in my own consciousness and that line divides me from this person, and on my side of the line is what is “good” and on the other side is that which is “bad.” I am cut off from my own humanity at that moment and I am not in touch with any human compassion for my fellow human being. Following Mindell, we suggest practices that facilitate the widest and deepest ways of inclusion in the community. All marginalized voices, roles, positions, experiences, consciousnesses, including the conflictual, contradictory, hostile, alien, and unspeakable are to be invited in and their voices included. This radical inclusivity is not just to be “good,” it is done because of the recognition that the marginalized voice always carries a message that the collective needs to hear and use for the overall good.
Deep Democracy suggests that all voices and positions must not only be allowed into the conversation, but must be unconditionally invited in. The way to head off conflict and other trouble is to create a situation where each “other” has the opportunity to be known by the individuals in a group or community and by the whole. The view taken is that minority and unpopular voices carry a message that is crucial for the collective and it is in everyone’s interests to hear the other. As you might well imagine, the practice of deep democracy can be very difficult, the reason for this difficulty lies in the “truth” of whatever we do is a reflection of who we are, as captured by Parker Palmer’s famous statement, “we teach who we are” (1998). In other words, the reason why we find it very difficult to practice deep democracy in places like the classroom is because we are not deeply democratic within ourselves. We are within our psyche full of domination and marginalization.
The key to the cultivation of deep democracy leadership is the culture of inner work (Cohen, 2004), wherein leaders regularly engage in working on themselves, psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually, so as to overcome their own inner marginalization and invalidation. Leaders who are in a process of becoming whole persons model and catalyze this possibility for the community. How should we as teachers do this inner work to address the inner domination and marginalization? Space does not permit us to explore the practice of inner work fully, but the principle can be succinctly stated here: the “guesthouse” attitude. The latter phrasing comes from the celebrated Persian poet Rumi (1995):
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. (p.109)
Inner work is a process that guides a group leader, a teacher, or any person to look into their inner world and identify aspects of their experience that may have been previously outside their awareness and that are affecting their way of being in the moment and, in particular for those in positions of leadership will also have an effect on those whom they are seeking to lead or guide. Here is a personal example from Cohen (written in the present tense to convey a sense of immediacy) for purposes of illustration:
I am teaching a class. I have a practice of ending each class with an opportunity for closure on a personal note. Students can say how the class has been for them, something that they learned that was important to them, give feedback, and so on. The instruction given is to not engage in dialogue and to refrain from asking about any practical issues. The idea is to achieve a sense of ending and being okay with even that which is unfinished. A student asks a question about an assignment at this ending point. The question is preceded by some introductory remarks. I interject quickly and ask the student to refrain from this type of comment. My reaction is swift, too swift, and has a pained tone. The change in the classroom is palpable and suddenly the atmosphere is very heavy. I realize immediately that I have created a problem with my reactivity I can feel a tension in my gut. My mind is racing. I do not have a good option available and at least I have the presence of mind to not do anything to worsen an already tense situation. Later I am sitting in meditation and re-calling the experience. I feel my anxiety and wonder what it is about. I spontaneously have a series of memories of situations where I could not control what was happening and which had not gone very well. Some childhood memories of a similar nature emerge. I feel fearful and helpless. I recognize that my reaction was driven by all this personal history and had only a very little bit to do with what was occurring in the classroom. It was not that there wasn’t some issue with the student, but the manner of my response colored everything. Coming to terms with my own sense of helplessness is, of course, not a one time process, but being less reactive to it is helpful to me and my students. I returned to the next class and shared the contents of my inner work. This had a number of benefits, including, initiating a process to lift the heaviness, modeling inner work as a benefit, demonstrating the vulnerability of the person, me, in a leadership position, exemplifying the identification and Deep Democracy practice towards my own marginalized aspects of consciousness, and demonstrating that the inner world of anyone, and particularly a person in a position of power and authority has a deep and abiding effect on a classroom and any group.
We note, as the above example illustrates, that the innerwork, vis-à-vis the guesthouse, attitude is not a separate activity from the activity of classroom for deep democracy. It is not as though one has to do the inner work alone, and then bring the fruit of it to the class. A classroom that is ‘open forum like’ is a place of inner work. Mindell says, “Deep Democracy is awareness of the diversity of people, roles, and feelings, and a guesthouse attitude toward whatever comes to the door of one’s attention” (2002, p. viii). He further explicates:
Open Forums in my definition are structured, person-to-person or cyberspace, democratic meetings, in which everyone feels represented. Furthermore, they are facilitated in a deeply democratic manner, which means the deepest feelings and dream can also be expressed. In other words, the Open Forum is to a corporation or city as innerwork is to an individual. The analogy between the inner of an individual and organization’s Open Forum goes even further. Just as your personal learning depends on how open you are to your various parts, feelings, and dream figures, an organization’s self-discovery process depends on openness to the diversity of its individual members, and the diversity of their inner and outer worlds. (2002, p. 3)
We believed that in the Café’ environment everything would come to the door personally, intellectually, culturally, politically, and religiously, much as it does in any classroom. We wanted to not only demonstrate a “guesthouse” attitude, but to put into practice facilitation that would be deeply inclusive so as to enact the underlying philosophy of the Café’ to invite all ideas and all participants in with their ideas and their ontological beingness. For the rest of our paper, we shall present a small case study of that translates deep democracy from theory into practice. We document our deep democracy involving a number of INPM 2004 conference participants.
The Conference where the Philosopher’s Café3 took place attracted many of the world’s experts and luminaries in the field of existential analysis and logotherapy. The Café was offered and facilitated by the Cohen and Green. Bai was a participant. The intent behind offering the Café was to go beyond talk about the ideas that emerged from the conference presentations and to engage participants in a process of connection with each other, the Café group as a whole, mutual meaning-making around the ideas generated by the conference proceedings through the exchanges of personal impressions, struggles, and questions about the ideas. In other words, the organizers of the Café wanted to bring ideas that had emerged from the various conference presentations to life within the intersubjective and subjective spaces of the participants. The emphasis was to be on the personal responses of the participants to ideas rather than more theorizing about ideas. Our declared intent was to offer a living experience of deep democracy.
The Café was scheduled for two hours. The two facilitators (Cohen and Green) each have over thirty years of experience in group work, individual counseling, and education. Cohen has many years of experience leading groups and using the ideas and practices of deep democracy. Green has five years experience leading Philosopher’s Café’s along with many years of group facilitation experience. Bai is an educator and was a participant in the Café.
The idea of a Philosopher’s Cafe, which we believe is very much akin to how a classroom ought to be constituted, is to replicate spontaneous and open-ended inquiry through dialogue that emulates the model of Socrates in Athens where he was well-known for engaging citizens in what came to be known as Socratic dialogue. This is a dialogue in which no interlocutor knows the endpoint of the inquiry, since there is no pre-given or pre-established conclusion to the arguments in which they were engaging. The importance of open-ended inquiry to deep democracy is that, freed from the compulsion to reach a conclusion, interlocutors are able to attend to the process (in contrast to primarily the content) of inquiry itself. To this open-endedness of the inquiry, another element was added, which was facilitation of the process to engage participants in a personal way in the enactment of the content in-the-moment in the group in order to create optimal opportunity for the raising of consciousness of the group and the individuals in the group, and to facilitate I-Thou (Buber, 1970) intersubjective encounter. Our perspective and intent was to identify individuals in the café who were marginalized, to characterize this marginalization in a way that spoke to these kinds of processes both within and beyond the boundaries of the café environment, to identify this is as not just a problem of these individuals but as a problem, and an opportunity, for the group as a whole.
The café started rather uniquely. Due to difficulty with the graphics of the schedule, many thought the café was to start at a time that was thirty minutes later than what a close reading showed, including one of the facilitators! With this inauspicious start as a humorous background we began. This happening supported a tone of informality and an ease for the café that the facilitators wished to convey. The facilitators began the Café by offering the fifteen participants opportunity to identify themselves by name and give some personal information of their choosing. Suggestions given were: usual information such as occupation, what brought them to the café, what they hoped to gain and contribute, and also participants were invited to introduce themselves in any non-usual ways that they wished. One participant took this last suggestion and introduced herself without any reference to professional background or personal history. The facilitators expressed the idea that this would be an opportunity to have a living experience of some of the core ideas of care and intersubjectivity that were themes of many of the Conference presentations and for which there was not room in the actual presentations. Participants were invited to share their personal responses to what they were experiencing at the conference and in the Café.
The introductions identified a range of backgrounds. There were counselling students, professors, psychotherapists, an organizational consultant, conference presenters, conference participants, and a friend of one of the facilitator’s, a psychotherapist, with a lifelong interest in these ideas. The age range seemed to be from mid-twenties to mid-sixties. The gender mix was fairly balanced. The religious affiliations or lack thereof also showed up and seemed to cover fundamentalist Christian, Buddhist, Christian, agnostic, and atheist identifications. In short, as expected, it was a group characterized by all manners of diversity and plurality increasingly typical of today’s public gatherings and classrooms.
Once the introductions were made the group immediately launched into a discussion of some ideas that emerged from the central themes of the Conference; death, loss, and grieving. In a relatively short time it became apparent that the conversation was being dominated by certain people and that others were completely silent. One of the themes that emerged from the conversation was the importance of I-Thou encounter and the intersubjective space. Ironically, the very marginalization that was also part of the discussion was happening in the moment. The café community was doing the very thing that was being spoken against, namely, talking about the experience rather than noticing that we were living it. The intersubjective space that is the co-emergent space of communication and communion that dialogue participants can enter was not in this particular case one conducive to the experience of I-Thou connection, which is so central to the experience of deep democracy. The usual public discussional space where a few people dominate by strongly asserting their views while others remain silent and withdrawn certainly is not conducive to the development of deeply democratic intersubjective experience. Democratic intersubjective space happens when people enter into an I-Thou mode of relating. I-Thou relating denotes a multi-dimensional encounter (Cohen, 2004) between individuals that can involve the intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of a persons and the inter-subjective encounter of persons in all of these dimensions. In a group context such as this, such encounters are possible and the witnessing energy of all members of the café potentially serves to enhance and validate the living experience that is deeply democratic.
One of the participants, in this instance Bai, spoke up and said that there were people in our small, time-limited community who had not had a chance to speak as yet. She suggested that it would be good to make space for them to overtly enter the conversation if they would like it. The group readily acknowledged and enthusiastically welcomed this proposal, but then, quickly and unconsciously the group shifted back to its mode of domination by the most vocal members. At this point, Cohen, one of the facilitators, suggested that if we wanted to live what we were talking about as a major theme of the conference, namely creating intersubjective space of relationship in which we voice our thoughts and feelings and be heard by others, then it would be important to make space for those who had not yet spoken. Everyone agreed and again attempts were made to take up this call seriously. One of the silent members spoke about her “cynicism” about peoples’ motives. This immediately brought aggressive responses from the more talkative members, one of whom worked at drawing out this person about her cynicism. Others joined in. After a while it was pointed out that again the dialogue space was being dominated by the same people as before even while attempts were made to draw the marginalized people into the conversation. In fact, what seemed to be happening was that these attempts at inclusion existed along with an aggressive energy from the dominating people that seemed to include getting at the quiet people even if the overt intent was to invite them in. When the first quiet person elaborated a bit on her cynicism, there was an outpouring of advice from the concerned vocal others on how not to be cynical, which was quite imposing and overwhelming, and had the effect of again silencing the quiet members. At this point, Cohen asked the group to consider whether we were living the ideals that we were professing and if so, to what extent; if not, to what extent; and if we wanted to make changes, what needed to happen. Again the group returned to listening to the person who spoke about her cynicism. Once again another voice from the group began to give advice. This time it was a solution to the quiet person’s problem of cynicism. The solution was informed by what might be described as a strict Christian viewpoint and seemed to suggest that the main thing that was required to solve the dilemma was a belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior and the son of God. This brought a quick response from a participant who said, “I am a Buddhist. I don’t believe in God. Where does that leave me?” At this point the Café could best be described as hot. A few minutes later, Cohen said, “I am stepping temporarily out of my role as facilitator and becoming a participant. I am having a lot of personal feelings about what is happening here. I really question whether we are able to live out the beliefs we are professing so passionately or whether we will just stay with talking about them while doing what seems contrary. Also, I feel that I am becoming the voice for those of you who are quiet. My request is that you also stand up for yourselves.” This statement and the particular way it was enacted had several effects. The role of facilitator and participant was identified as moveable and transferable. The group was confronted with its entrenched behavior. The quiet members were confronted about their responsibility in the context of the group in its current moment of existence.
Eventually, the three quiet people who were sitting together en bloc spoke up and were heard. At one point when one of the previously dominating voices turned to another participant who was starting to speak again, said: “You are breaking the rule. Let’s listen to these people who have not had an opportunity to speak.” (Note, though, that there was no actual rule set up about this.) What is important about this statement is that the speaker was becoming critically aware of the group dynamics and taking responsibility for expressing care in an articulate way for the group, and for all intents and purposes became in the moment a leader in the group. This seemed to be a good sign that the group was developing a group-awareness and taking responsibility and that the café was moving into living experientially what was being talked about conceptually. The two of us who were facilitating also could see that individuals were actually beginning to take more careful notice of each other and appreciating the otherness of fellow café members. At this point there was a palpable and poignant sense of a community that was in a process of awakening to itself. The sense of care for each other was tangible. There were profound acts of sensitivity for each other, which further supported the changing and softening atmosphere. Strangers were no longer strangers. Each saw and felt the humanity of the other and this seeing was witnessed by each participant.
Philosopher’s Café’s and Deep Democracy exist at the dreaming level in every classroom; that is within the collective and individual unconscious’ there is an unrealized vision of possibility of real connection between community members and within each person between the different parts of themselves. The innate capacity to facilitate the emergence of this potential exists in every educator. The potential for learning about self, other, relationship, relating, community development, and dialogical process is a largely untapped and dynamic process. The potential to create human and humane communities is waiting to emerge. Imagine classrooms where experiences such as took place in our Café are the daily experience. Students would become deeply democratic citizens. The “ripple effect” as described by Yalom (2007) is also implicit. Participants will take away the impressions and ideas from their classroom-like experience in the Café. The effects will be transmitted by each person to those with who they are in close proximity. Similarly, and more powerfully, this radical pedagogy will have a similar ripple effect for those who are in classrooms that meet over a protracted time period. The fabric of the culture would eventually change.
These ideas place the educator squarely at the center of radical social change. The approach to the education of pre-service teachers would have to be changed to a focus on inner work and facilitation of classroom communities. Only families have the potential and the contact time with learners that exceeds the time that schools have and the opportunity to make a difference in how a students sees him or herself and the world. No greater mission can be offered to anyone. We wonder if policy-makers and educators will pick up this great possibility and challenge and work towards a democracy that is truly inclusive, vital, and responsive to the real needs and dreams of the human beings who live within them.
We believe that the Philosopher’s Café environment is a living example of the work that is required to establish an open form of Deep Democracy (Mindell, 1995; 2002), and the kind of ethic of care (Noddings, 2002) that fosters intersubjectivity of relationships—that is, the interbeingness—necessary for the enactment of Deep Democracy. Our group’s work in the Café exemplifies that care involves dialogue and relational experience and certainly showed that it is not easy and that ideas alone are not sufficient. We witnessed the enactment of Deep Democracy in the instances of conflict, attention to marginalized members and marginalized aspects of experience, and the use of facilitation skills by the leaders. The feedback from participants was very positive, and if further evidence that the experience was a positive one was needed, the continuance of conversations in smaller groups that went on for a substantial period of time in a warm and engaging fashion after the official end of the Café seemed to provide this evidence. Our experience showed that even in this small time frame with participants who were strangers to each other prior to the Café, we could develop and experience a sense of community, however transient, based on the intimacy of intersubjectivity that can be initiated with attention to diversity, the use of facilitation skills, and an ethos of care that is initially modelled in the leadership. The possibilities in classrooms for classes that go on for a semester or even longer are exponentially greater (Cohen, 2006).
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1. This term is translated from the Vietnamese, tiep hien, which means being in touch with “reality, the reality of the world and the reality of the mind” (Hahn, 1998, p. 3). Hahn’s words are conveying a message, that message is about the inter-connectedness of all beings and all things.
2. We use the term “outer world” for convenience and not as contradiction to our previous defining of interbeing. Inner and outer world are terms relative to consciousness contained with a singular human being, or alternatively relative to a focus point within the realm of all beings and things.
3. Philosopher’s Cafes started in France and their popularity has spread to North America. The usual format is someone will give some introductory remarks to an audience of the general public on a topic of interest and importance locally, and then will engage the audience in a wide-ranging discussion of the topic.