PHILOSOPHY IN PUBS NATIONAL CONFERENCE: DAY 1

In Liverpool this evening, for the start of the first national conference of Philosophy in Pubs (PIPs). We're based in the Britannia Adelphi Hotel for the weekend, a great venue which is a stunning monument to Liverpool's grand architectural heritage. This conference has the following aims:

1.     To allow space and time for reflection on what we see as the PIPs vision, reconsider its purpose and, perhaps, the need for renewal and reinvigoration.

2.     To provide an opportunity for members to express their philosophical ideas/theories in a more detailed/extensive way, and provide the opportunity for peer review and enquiry of and into those ideas.

3.     The conference will also provide us with an opportunity to hear and respond to professional philosophers speak on chosen subjects.

4.     This is a new development of PIPs and will allow for sustained philosophical and social engagement, relaxation and reflection with our fellow PIP members that goes beyond the usual meetings.

Being a Friday night in Liverpool, there's a lot of partying going on in the hotel. There's a wedding reception or birthday bash going on till the wee small hours. The women in the Adelphi this evening look like they've just walked off the set of a lost episode of Blake's 7 - one entitled "Planet of the Space Vixens" or the like. I've never seen shoes so teeteringly high, skirts so short, hair so precariously piled and material so shimmery and gravity-defying! I'm in a second floor room and there's a disco underneath it, the door just below the window. I finally fall asleep somewhere around 0130.

The opening talks by Rob Lewis and Paul Doran (on respectively, the origin, aims and vision of PIPs and its present and future national position) really strike a chord with me. I felt transported back to my teen years, on Saturday afternoons in the Gemini and the Third Eye Centre in Sauchiehall Street, when I first began learning about philosophy and philosophers among the filter coffee, lemon and sultana cheesecake and the smoke from roll-ups. Now, like then, I really got off on the union of thinking better and living better - changing oneself on the inside and consequently changing things around us, on the outside.

Rob says that once he realised how "doing philosophy with other people was a way of overcoming the sense of alienation that many of us feel at time, which comes from being in a society that wants to measure you in very limited ways and then judge you to see what shaped hole you might fit into and what life chances you might be worthy of".

He describes how he "saw the thinking skills and especially thew thinking attitudes that are developed through doing philosophy as essential to the task for overcoming this process of over rationalisation  that leads to social structures that are designed to perpetuate the exploitation and alienation of people, generation after generation after generation."

I think it worthwhile to reproduce a little more of Rob's talk here.

"Further analysis of these social structures by Marcuse and Chomsky talks of how they serve to desublimate the beauty in human relations, desublimate human production and desublimate human existence itself. So the sublime or beautiful, creative and uplifting is replaced with desublimated commodities and our desire for them is manufactured in the form of false needs or false consciousness. "The upshot is that public thought, the intellectual public agenda and all importantly the public scrutiny of that agenda is controlled and serves the interests of exploitation, alienation, disempowerment and desublimation. As such, genuine democracy is lost - the possibility to seek out or influence a sublime, achievable and sustainable social agenda and its outcomes is severely to tokenistic gestures by politics, media and the dominant cultural forces such as Fox, Disney and Hollywood; and those how control the most vital and defining structures in this social reality are able to function most effectively beyond the penetrating stare of public scrutiny.

"So the purpose of PIPs, from my perspective, was to form communities of philosophical enquiry for those people who have suffered greatly or marginally from the effects of these exploitative, alienating, disempowering, desublimating and dehumanising social structures. I believe as Bertrand Russell did in the power of philosophy, in the power of being able to think well, as humans can.

"Russell in his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916) tells us that men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, even more than death. Thought is subversive, revolutionary, merciless and destructive towards privilege, established institutions and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic, lawless and indifferent to authority. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is swift and free, the light of the world and the chief glory of man.

"This is what Russel said of thought but what of thinking well? Perhaps we can say that thinking well means making the light shine brighter and our chief glory shine all the more gloriously. Thinking well will surely make us bolder when we stare into hell and all the more effective when we turn our thought towards the task of scrutinising and restructuring our social reality."

I hadn't realised quite how popular Philosophy in Pubs had become in Liverpool; nor how many groups there are in and around the city (15). And its founders and supporters here are only too conscious of its place in the tradition. As Rob put it in his opening presentation,

"I'd also like PIPs and PIPs members to become more aware that we have something of a place in the history of grass-roots community learning and empowerment, similar to that of the mutual improvers, the Reformers and the Chartists of the 18th and 19th centuries. PIPs connects, to some degree inadvertently, to a history of social movement that it can be proud of and no reason to shy away from and this history has a role to play [...] in terms of shaping and forging some aspects of its identity."