I have a saying: “pubs, not clubs”. Maybe it’s the proud Brit in me, but I just love pubs (but not clubs). Clubs are expensive, crowded, and worst of all: loud. It makes it impossible to have a conversation! Of course, that’s not what clubs are for: they’re for dancing the night away, or for trying to “dance” the night away with someone else. Of course, this latter purpose attracts a different kind of people, who I’m sure my female readers might be familiar with (and perhaps frustrated by). But I don’t wish to frame my opinion in the negative: I would choose pubs over clubs because I love the conversation, and not because I’m put off by the lines, the creeps, or the bill. After all, the term “pub” is only a shorthand for “public house”. A pub is somewhere for the public—anyone from any and every walk of life—to kick back and relax over a pint, a spirit, or a nice glass of wine. Any pub as such is a kind of microcosm of society as a whole with just enough social lubricant for them to get along. You might say that at a pub, the expectation is that all patrons should be in good spirits. (Haha!)

To me, the pub reminds me of my idealised picture of ancient Athens. In my first year of undergrad, I was captivated by the dialogues of Plato. Like a play, they captured extraordinary moments of ordinary lives as Socrates and his interlocutors were living in Athens. If they had any more humour, they would make for a good sitcom: Plato’s dialogues are the bingeable literature of the philosophical world! These moments, though perhaps they were touched up for publication or never happened at all, speak to the value of encounter for both the devoted philosopher and the curious human being. I sometimes wondered whether Socrates’ life was just this: one of encounter and curiosity. Going about his day, like the gadfly he was, perhaps Socrates had many more of these encounters that went unsaid. What might he have talked about and learned when he spoke with a tradesman rather than the sophists he usually butt heads with, or an actor or even the average nobody on the street! What value might we be missing from these untold stories?

It is gratifying, then, to spend time in a pub because these encounters are not beyond our reach. Yes, Plato had his Academy, and Aristotle had his Lyceum, but before them, Socrates had the school of Athens. This is not a school in the same sense as the other two: there are no class times, exams, or grounds that define it. As cliché as it sounds, this is a school of living. We have institutionalised philosophy, but philosophy doesn’t belong to an institution. Whereas so many arts and humanities studies commit themselves to an -ology of some kind (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology, theology, etc), philosophy is uniquely primal: it is the love of wisdom that one one finds whenever, wherever, and with whomever they endeavour to find it.

What makes pubs so great, then, is this magic of encounter. True, the conversations aren’t often serious, but I would argue that they don’t have to be. Life is far too mad to take it completely seriously. Nevertheless, these conversations are meaningful all the same, and you might be surprised what you can learn and how you can grow in wisdom by simply meeting other people. I spend a lot of time at school: I’m surrounded by people who pursue God, truth, wisdom, knowledge, and all the rest of it on a near-daily basis, but perhaps this is the problem: “there are far more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” including the philosophy of the academy itself. And when one opens themselves to the perspectives and stories of others who may perhaps be quite different to them, one becomes wiser. So, while it is possible to view these scenes as that of people bantering on about nothing and drinking as they do, I prefer to see it as people who have hit the pause button, who have taken a moment to get out, and who are worth meeting. We are social animals, after all. So, go be social, and become a better person because of it; which is, to reiterate, why I say, “Pubs, not clubs.”