Identifying With the User-Friendly

by Andrew Panopio

2 July 2013
Discussed Text: Garcia, "The Promotion of Responsibility and Hope"

One of the characteristics of a philosophical person is his or her ability to assess what they want in life. To illustrate, they say that a philosopher is stuck staring at the stars too much only to fall into a well. People may ostracize these thinkers for their absurdity in a rational modern context, but it’s refreshing to learn that the philosopher is exactly where he or she wants to be. Philosophical people, if they had gone through this assessment critically, could find themselves in the most socially different and unacceptable places or standpoints and be pleased with that understanding.

It is to live more intensely and to break up certain immediacies, as Dr. Garcia had put it, that Philosophy is experienced. These immediacies come in the form of the material things that most of us deem as important. In reality though, they are purely desires of power and maybe even desires fed by our own selfishness.
Ricoeur identifies that people around us are constantly prospective.

That speaks for itself because I think we can all identify with that. We try to control what we want in life by assessing mostly everything if they are of value to us. In a more unethical level, we assess our benefits within other people and we sometimes manipulate them. There’s a colloquial term that we Filipinos call such manipulative people; User-friendly.

For example, given a group of friends, another person happens to start hanging out with them more. Given enough time, they soon find out that this person is unusually wealthy. When this newbie friend leaves, they start pointing that out and they get excited whenever they get to go to the newbie friend’s house. In doing so, they see the person beyond who he is but what his worth is to them. This is just one of the many scenarios that happen in our society and it hinders us to develop as more critical people.

The philosophical wanderer has a lesson to teach us. Philosophy has taught us not to just be aware of our outside surroundings, which we can separate from, but it has also taught us about being aware of ourselves. Assessing ourselves is important to make sure that we keep to our morals and we are the proper person who we want to be and not the kind of person which selfishness and our hunger for power dictates us to become. We can find this ideal self when we are aware of our placement in a world that needs ethics and selfless individuals. We have to be aware that there are things happening graver than our smaller problems in life. Once we respond to that, I believe that philosophy would serve a meaningful purpose in our lives.