INNOCENCE LOST AND FOUND
The Annual Alexander Phillips Arête Award
Presented by Democracy Cafe and Dr. Christopher Phillips
Welcome to the Democracy Cafe’s second annual Alexander Phillips Arête Award. This yearly event, launched on the first day of spring, the birthday of Alexander Phillips, who would have been 85 today, gives participants the opportunity to explore philosophical themes through essays, poetry, original artwork, and creative videos. Each year we ask participants to submit a piece based on a specific theme.
This year’s overarching theme is innocence, and the question to be explored is:
“How we do we cultivate our innocence?”
Submissions are currently open until June 21st 2019, the first day of summer.
Please note the following guidelines: Essays should be as carefully crafted as possible and no more than 1500 words. Up to three pages of poetry may be submitted — poetry should attempt to show understanding of form and substance as well as content. Videos should not exceed five minutes in length. Paintings or graphic art should either be scanned at high quality or else captured via high quality photography.
Though all who submit entries are winners in our book, three submissions will be picked by independent judges from all participants’ submissions this year and will garner first, second and third place. First place will get three signed copies of one Dr. Christopher Phillips’s books (their choice), second place will receive two, and third place will receive one – and they will have their pieces published on the Democracy Cafe website, and will appear on the popular podcast The Openist (SocratesCafe.Podomatic.com or on Spotify and elsewhere). All submissions are voted on by several volunteer judges to ensure fair decisions are made.
Read on for frequently asked questions and contest details.
- What is arete?
Arête is the Greek word for all-around excellence, in all dimensions of life, and of a sort in which duty to self and duty to others go hand in glove. To further realize arête, one must have a certain amount of innocence, of faith, in yourself and your fellow humans that there is a shared aspiration, imbued with social conscience, to excel to new heights, together and alone, autonomous and connected all at once.
- What is the topic this year?
“How do we cultivate our innocence?
Innocence has many synonyms and connotations. Though you can lose this quality to some degree at any time in life, it is most often associated with our youngest ages and stages. We may stop believing in Santa, though we may keep believing in the spirit of giving. We stop thinking our parents are perfect. We become away that there are many hurts in the world (one of my earliest memories in this vein is when Robert F. Kenny and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated). Our hearts are broken for the first time; yet most learn to love and try, try again, still believing in love’s transformative capacity (even if and when our hearts are broken again, and again). We are betrayed by someone we trusted.
Do we ever lose our innocence entirely? If we do, is it possible to regain it? If so, how? What kind of innocence, come what may, should we cultivate? How do we go about cultivating it?
- Are there any other requirements for submission?
Essays should be carefully edited and no more than 1500 words. Up to three pages of poetry may be submitted — poetry should show understanding of form and substance as well as content. Videos should not exceed five minutes in length. Paintings or graphic art should either be scanned at high quality or else captured via high quality photography.
- Who can submit work?
Anyone. Any person, anywhere on the planet, is welcome to submit to this award contest. The goal is to help realize and foster the connections all humans share. If you feel that you have something especially powerful, moving, insightful to share, something with the sort of quality that really shines with the spirit of arête, then that’s the work we want to see and we hope you’ll submit it to us.
- What languages do you accept?
We accept pieces in any language as long as they are accompanied by an English translation. For videos, this could take the form of subtitles — of course, this only applies if speech or the written word is necessary to understand the concepts explored in the piece. Some more inventive method of providing a translation can also be used as long as it allows the central themes and concepts to be shared.
- Who retains rights?
You do. Participants do not give up ownership of any material submitted. Democracy Cafe only retains publication rights of submitted work for the purposes of posting winning pieces on the Democracy Cafe website and in related promotional materials for the Arete Award.
— With enormous thanks to Odin Halverson for his deft editing, revisions, and additions, and to Kate Small for helping me come up with just the right question for this year’s award competition.
More about the Alexander Phillips Arete Award
Dr. Christopher Phillips, founder of Democracy Café, author of numerous books on philosophy and social matters, founded the Arete Award in 2018 as a memorial to his father, Alexander Phillips. Though Alexander’s life tragically ended in 2011, his legacy lives on in his son and in the moving and insightful work of those who participate in the yearly Alexander Phillips Arete Award.
Here is Dr. Phillips’ own statement of how this year’s award theme arose:
Arête is the Greek word for all-around excellence, in all dimensions of life, and of a sort in which duty to self and duty to others go hand in glove. To further realize arete, one must have a certain amount of innocence, of faith, in yourself and your fellow humans that there is a shared aspiration, imbued with social conscience, to excel to new heights, together and alone, autonomous and connected all at once.
The philosopher Socrates devoted his adult life — at a time, no less, when the West’s first great democracy had entered a period of irreversible decline — investigating in public places and spaces, or agoras, in the Athenian polis all that this richest of concepts might amount to (such investigation was itself a manifestation of ‘arete in action’), and how individuals and society as a whole (a kind of self that is an amalgam of individual selves) might further sculpt it.
When Socrates was convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth at his rigged trial, he was of course innocent — and he left this world with the same wide-eyed wonder, curious about what, if anything, followed this one, as he entered it.
I have devoted much of the last 23 years of my life to further discovery and practice of arête. My beloved late father, Alexander Phillips, whose life was tragically truncated in 2011, was president of a chapter of AHEPA — American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association — for years.
Arête was in many ways Alexander Phillips’ own pursuit, though he wouldn’t have put it in those words. He also was a longtime member of the Nisyrian Society, comprised of members who can trace their ancestry to the beautiful volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece. My dad’s father, mother, my Yaya — who became one of the first teachers of Greek language and culture in the Tampa Bay region — and older brother, a poet and war hero (served in both WW II and the Korean Conflict and was injured by grenade shrapnel) immigrated from there through Ellis Island.
My dad had to put away his childhood things at age 7, when his father Philip, after whom I’m named (Philip Christopher Phillips), crumpled to the floor of their home when playing with my dad and his younger sister Maria. He died almost immediately of a massive heart attack. My dad had to become a man of the family. He sold newspapers each and every day on a street corner, delivered groceries, played piano (boogie-woogie music was his forte) at taverns and dance halls after teaching himself to play by ear — anything and everything, always with unbridled commitment, and spirit, to support his family.
After high school, my dad was drafted into the Army, where he proudly served in radio operations. He then, with the steadfast support of my amazing mom, eventually graduated from the Apprentice School in Newport News Shipbuilding as a designer, and then went on to become an electrical engineer. Dad eventually became an executive at the highest echelons of the Department of the Navy, and also was a finalist for one of the most prestigious engineering awards. He also was the first person ever to graduate from Christopher Newport College (now Christopher Newport University), when it was part of the College of William & Mary, from which I graduated before I went on to become a writer for national magazines, then to earn three masters degrees and a PhD,, to author numerous acclaimed books, and also to found Socrates Cafe and Democracy Cafe.
When Dad retired in 1999 after decades of indefatigable work that he mostly loved, he returned to live in Tampa, and was able to do many of the things he didn’t have time for when he had to assume the mantle of adult at a tender age, without ever feeling sorry for himself in the least. With childlike abandon imbued with a keen sense of wonder, as I note at some length in my newest book, A Child at Heart, he read, danced, did crosswords, and much like Socrates, pondered continually life’s deep questions. He was filled in many ways with childlike joy, exuberance. But he rarely was able to fully enjoy those years, because of someone who followed him down there.
In spite of the sundry accomplishments of this savvy and astute man, and all the obstacles he had assiduously to surmount as he made his way in the world(including anti-Greek sentiments, and a severe lisp), Dad was at this late stage of life still as innocent as a lamb— and I believe it was taken horrific advantage of in the end, the most sacred trusts betrayed. Dad desperately wanted to believe the best in someone, despite all evidence to the contrary, and as a consequence the worst imaginable befell him.
In the tragic aftermath, which continues to unfold, I’ve asked myself, even with all the awful consequences surrounding my dad’s death, whether it is better to believe the best in people; whether it is best to be innocent in certain ways than it is to be forever jaded; whether, all things considered, it is better to have faith that good and goodness will somehow prevail over the longer haul.
I’ve asked myself whether one should still strive to recapture and cultivate, especially in the face of harsh experience, innocence, or at least innocence of certain sorts that hinge on high ideals and a sense of wonder and a never-say-die spirit. My accomplishments since my Dad’s death – from becoming a dad for a second time, to becoming an ethics fellow at Harvard, a senior research and writing fellow at Penn, authoring a philosophical book and accompanying workbook on this theme, a senior education fellow (the first ever at that glorious place) at the National Constitution Center — are in many ways my own ‘answer,’ or at least response.
And so this is a bit about how the theme of innocence for this year’s award contest emerged. You should take the question in any way you like. You do not at all have to view ‘innocence,’ much less what are or aren’t good or bad forms of innocence, in the same way I do or that anyone else does.
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Here below is a small newspaper article about my dad Alexander Phillips from his days selling newspapers as a child, and a photo of my oldest daughter Cali, now 12 1/2, and her grandpa falling in love with one another. We still mourn not having the opportunity to say our good-byes to him, still mourn that his home with all the family memorabilia was completely looted, along with virtually anything else of value. Most of his nearest and dearest fear that at the end his home became his prison rather than his castle by those who robbed him and many of the rest of us who loved him dearly, of innocence itself. But most of all, and more than ever, we celebrate his example and inspiration, and his enduring faith, born of innocence, in most of us to do the right thing.
