More Than The "I"

by Mara Cepeda

Last semester, we sought to answer the question, “Who am I?” We learned that we are embodied spirits, who exist not just because he is a cogito or a thinking “I,” but also because he has a body which physically manifests his existence in the world. We learned that our bodies are uniquely and intimately part of ourselves and that we cannot separate ourselves from it. At the same time, we learned that while we identify our bodily existence, we are more than our material body. This is because we have the capability to dream, to aspire, even to fight our own desires. We later on learned about being as in Being; our intentional awareness of our existence ultimately implies already that we exist and that we are trying to find our niche in the world.

I do not deny the importance of being aware of one’s existence. After all, it is but natural only for the human person to ask where he came from and what is the point of his life. Those kinds of questions make us human. However, like Levinas, I believe we cannot just stop there. Our quest to understand the reality of existence does and cannot end within ourselves. We cannot put ourselves in a corner by believing that the one I wrote above constitutes the whole of existence already. We have already gone past that kind of thinking.

I therefore think that Levinas wanted to change philosophy’s gears not because it was completely wrong, but because, as we have learned in class, it was leading us to another road block. It was leading us to think that existence is a journey taken alone. What’s worse is that it is leading us to believe that the world operates and is defined by the same terms as we see it to be. “This is how I see things. We can’t you do the same?” We were at risk of building a shell around ourselves and calling that the world, when in fact, what we should have been doing is continually breaking that shell and letting the world in, not blocking it out of ourselves.

“No man is an island,” says John Donne. And indeed, once you are aware that you are capable of asking “Who am I?” you will become aware that you are also capable of answering an even more fundamental question of “Who am I, and what does the Other demand from me?”

What I’m saying is, once you have started to understand one’s existence, you also become aware of the other beings doing the same thing around you – they are also existing like you, they are also finding their places in the world, they are also trying to find the point of their individual existence. But while you have that similarity with other beings, there is also the difference – they have different personal histories from you, they have perspectives separate from what you have. In the similarity, there is the difference; there is the difference in the similarity. With that awareness, therefore, we realize that it’s not enough to ask the point of our individual existence; we must also ask what we can and should do with that existence. When we do that, we allow ourselves to be driven out of the corner and towards the openness that is existence.

For example, it is not enough that we know as Ateneans the Ateneo’s philosophy of being men and women of others. It is not enough that we know we are made to serve others; rather, we literally must seek to serve others. We literally must become men and women for others. In my case, my being an Atenean is not just characterized by my ID number nor just by my utterances of “St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.” My being an Atenean is also manifested whenever I become a neighbor, say for example to my sister, when I help her in her math homework even when I have to study for a theology quiz as well.

Levinas perhaps found the need to shift philosophy’s gears so that our individual existence will not be in vain, so that our individual existence will be more, so that our individual existence will be for the Other.