Just Being

by Bits Penaranda

There are often times when I find myself spacing out because my mind decides on its own to go on auto-pilot and wander off by itself. It gets lost between the dimensions of what to do vs. what do I want to be in life. What I want to do concerns itself with my daily activities and decisions, or what I would be doing for the next couple of months. On the other hand, what I want to be is on a bigger scale that actually determines what will become of me in the future. What becomes of me will be the stories I share with my kids and it will dictate whether or not I find myself feeling fulfilled and content or regretting most parts of my life.

Most of our minds become preoccupied with the future that we act carefully as early as now to make sure we play it safe and achieve that desired goal in the end. I'm not saying that it is wrong to think this way, but aside from stopping to reflect on what we should do for our future, why not stop to appreciate our mere existence? Just like the first lessons we had in class about the silly philosopher who fell in the well because he was so busy with exploring the beyond that he failed to see what was right in front of him. It's like how we deal with life. It would be nice to think that we have plenty more years to live, but there is no certifying that. We need to appreciate  the fact that we are here now. We are breathing, we are thinking, but most especially, we can experience. Also just like the lesson we learned this past week about being beings. We all exist together as beings and what we become of ourselves is what truly sets us apart and is what highlights our special differences.

We should celebrate this collective existence. Not just be selfishly grateful for our own existence, but as well as for the existence of other beings. It is beautiful that we are alive and each day should be a celebration for living.

I would also like to share this excerpt I found in my planner that inspired me to write this in the first place. It is entitled the "Just Because Philosophy".


We often forget that thinking is a tool used to make us better, and not to burden us with justification for every little thing. We are here for a reason, but we do not understand completely and we accept that. Sometimes, our inner spirit knows that being is just as important and as complete as all the other more active pursuits in the world. Right here and now, we should celebrate our perfection, even though it may not be apparent even to ourselves. We just know it to be true, in our hearts, we are here, and that is great - it is enough. 

A View On My Side of the Coin

By Ina Pizzaro

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

I give great importance to the things that dictate who I am as a person. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. My parents know who I date. I only party when I have my parents’ permission. I have never crossed the line. For most these things don’t matter, as they believe these are the stuff that comprise a teenage life well-lived. YOLO, right? Well, I disagree.

"Dude, drinking is part of growing up!"

What is there to growing up really? Isn't it ironic how most people claim drinking as part of something that’s actually a process of molding us into becoming better, into actually “growing up"?

My high school teacher assured me that I was going to learn to drink the moment I’d be in college, especially that he knew I was going to study in Manila, away from my parents. I told him not to generalize, because I was different. But he doubted it, shrugged his shoulders and said, “That’s what everyone said." I just smiled. I didn't want to argue about something I still couldn't fully defend myself from, as it is still something that is going to happen. I was certain in my heart that he was wrong but I kept my mouth shut. I knew only time could tell.

Isn't YOLO supposed to remind us that this is a one-way life? That there are no U-turn slots? That the world doesn't care if you took the wrong turn? YOLO. YOLO! YOLO? It is, I think, something that’s very much misunderstood. As I have learned in class, and as a Christian, “Freedom is not doing whatever you please, but doing whatever you ought." With that being said, I guess I don't have to sound so omniscient by dwelling on this matter. I just really know it means different from what most people think it is.

I was raised by a Dad who doesn’t smoke, who doesn’t drink for “fun" and whose only real contentment is a good conversation with the family at home. My Dad is very God-fearing and family-oriented. Whenever I open up to him, his final advice would always be to “talk to God about it" because he said He always listens. I guess it is why I have learned to always communicate with God, and to always believe that everything happens for His reason. I was raised by a Mum who told me not to believe that drinking is part of growing up, because she turned out more than okay without ever having to gulp a spoonful of champagne in her whole life even when everyone else was enjoying their mojitos and screwdrivers and flaming ferraris. From her I learned that it is indeed my choice whether to just freely go with the flow or to choose to brave the current.

I don’t want to be a person I’d end up regretting, because this is indeed a one way life. My idea of living the life is having a family whom I can totally be myself and have real conversations with. It is surrounding myself with things which, and people who, truly matter to me. FUN doesn’t have to involve alcohol or nicotine intake. When people tell me I don't have something to laugh at when I grow old for I haven't really done something crazy in my teenage life, I laugh at them. I guess I have come to a point in my life that, even when I'm only eighteen, I have already sincerely realized the things I can always choose to live without. What is there to a last-friday-night-was AWESOME moment that makes it worth remembering anyway? What’s so cool about allowing other teenagers dictate how life should be lived?

I am no saint. I make mistakes, and, like you, I constantly sin. But I’m most willing to put my life on the line every time people try to judge me about my principles. NOT EVERYONE is the same, even our fingerprints can prove that. I’m not saying that what everyone else is doing is wrong, because who am I to say really?

My point is this: in this generation, even when most just laugh at people who choose to live like I do (some might even already be judging me now at the back of their heads), we can still always choose to stand firm by our principles and be strong enough to go against the status quo. Because really, in the end, what matters are the things I can bring with me to heaven, and who I have grown to become the moment I face my God. I was blessed with the freedom and the will to choose my own path and to make my own life. This way, I don’t just exist—I actually live. And this is who I choose to be. This is the life I want.

The Ateneo vs. La Salle

by Pax Aranas

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

With just a few more days until the ultimate rivalry in collegiate basketball, it is not surprising that there would be uproar of news and tweets from both perspectives from the day they start selling tickets to a few days after the match day itself, and I would not veer away from this as well. What makes this on court rivalry so interesting is that it deals with people coming from different backgrounds per se.

Comparing the teaching styles of both schools might prove the point regarding the different backgrounds. Looking at the "Green and white" side of things we see a school structured in a way that it encompasses all their subjects within the 3 year, trimester schedule of it all. In the "Blue and white" side of the coin we then see the Ateneo education structured in such a way that it is made to be finished within 4 years, in which some may feel like a trimester due to required summer classes, but more often than not a semestral curriculum.
What then is the difference? Some people would argue that a La Sallian education brings about what is more necessary for the course. It puts emphasis on teaching the majors early on and while doing so incorporating the ideas and structures of the real world at an earlier stage. While on the fields of Ateneo, we are told that we should learn more in a “holistic” way. We take up multiple classes in the different social sciences classes that for some may be too much. Putting it into the context of Philosophy, we are like the open fan, we cover up a lot of things that deal with the social sciences and other sciences as well, we "spread our wings" into different aspects and perspectives. I am not saying that a LaSallian education would not do so, but it will give a brief overview of these subjects given the number of units given per subject. Both schools have open Fans; the width of the fan though might have some differences.

Let me clear things out, I am not in any way saying that the curriculum of one is better than the other, or that one school is better than the other. Both schools are of good stature in terms of ranking, consistently making the top 3 rank of best schools in the country alongside UP is not a small task. Both schools are good at what they do. Both excel in the fields they take on. Both schools have graduates of grand standings. The question though is, do these graduates take on the concept of being after college? Do La Salle Graduates end up becoming true La Sallians in the future, or do Ateneo Grads end up being Ateneans in the future? The question of being must be asked because it is in this way that we see whether or not a school has impacted a person enough. An Ateneo graduate may move on with his/her life forgetting the values of the school, forgetting what it is to be an Atenean. A LaSalle graduate might also just move on after college bringing about a new perspective and loosing the LaSallian in him/her. It all boils down to this, as we see ourselves in the bleachers and stands of whatever coliseum or gym it might be, wearing the blue or the green, do we see ourselves as the Ateneans or the LaSallians, or do we just wear a colour and stand and cheer for a school we once were in? It’s a question of being, and a question of faith in our traditions of both Ateneo and LaSalle.

On The Level of Everyday Life

by Fuze Andrey

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

Primum vivere deinde philosophari. We must first live and experience life before we can philosophize. It requires us to be knowledgeable of the things around us before we can actually explore and question them further. Just like the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” we should not judge that person/thing by what our eyes can perceive for we don’t know them/it fully. Also, when we argue about a certain topic, we don’t just say things that are irrelevant to the topic because we should be able to know something about it in order for us to defend our side.

Moreover, the connection between philosophical reflection and our everyday experience is somewhat the same. It’s impossible for us to reflect on something without experiencing it first. For example, we can’t learn from our mistakes without committing the mistake first. It’s just as simple as that. I think this is the reason why philosophers tend to live and experience life everyday as if it’s their last because it will give them more chance to reflect if they have more experiences.

Going to the topic about a person’s true happiness, in order for us to achieve that, we should narrow the gap between ourselves and the person we truly desire to be. But first, we should know who we really are. I don’t actually know how to know one’s self because according to my theo131 professor, knowing one’s self is the hardest thing to do. So an alternative way for acquiring our true happiness is to do our best to be the person we truly desire to be. We can do this by changing our outlook in life. We should learn how to care for others even if they don’t feel the same way. In addition, we should learn by heart to think about others as well and not just our own for we are sent in this world to serve and not to be served. Following the example of Jesus Christ, we should completely dedicate our life in helping and influencing others to do good to one another. By doing this, we are able to achieve our goal to be the person we truly desire to be by being men and women for others.

The goal that philosophy can offer to the present society, to will that all persons form one humanity and to will that each person realizes his/her unique humanity is very interesting and rather hard to do. Firstly, the idea that all persons should form one humanity is very difficult to do because we speak different languages, we have different customs and traditions, we have a different lifestyle and we all have our own way of living life. So in my opinion, this first goal of philosophy is almost impossible to achieve. The second goal of philosophy on the other hand, is more realistic and more feasible than the first one. Many of us now already realized his/her unique humanity. It is just like what I have said earlier, knowing one’s self. By knowing one’s self, you have already realized that you are unique and unlike any other.

To wrap things up, we should always make the most of our day because everything that we experienced in that day can help us to become the person we truly desire to be. By being that person that we desired to be, we can already attain true happiness.

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.

Concerning Pickpockets and Thieves

by June Bulaon

This happened on my way home after Philo class.

I was on the southbound LRT 1 train home. I live a bit far from Ateneo (six stations from D. Jose, add nine for the trip from Katipunan to Recto), so I felt relieved that the train wasn’t full and I was able to sit. After I sat, two suspicious guys “from” FEU and UST got in.

I thought that the two guys were particularly suspicious because their IDs didn’t matchtheir uniforms. One guy was wearing the UST Engineering uniform but wore the ID for the College of Accountancy. This was really sketchy since UST has strict rules regarding uniform. Also, the other guy was wearing the FEU uniform but his ID claims that he’s taking BS Information Technology, which only FEU-East Asia College offers and had a totally different uniform.

I’ve had several encounters with pickpockets so I’m really alert when I’m commuting but this pair wasn’t targeting me, they were targeting the girl beside me who, after listening to their conversations a little later, owned an iPhone 5. Fortunately, the girl may have been aware of their plans and she was able to get down without losing her phone, I think/hope.

Even though I felt so sure that they were pickpockets (they even chatted about the day’s catch!), I didn’t report them to anyone because I really wasn’t and I had no proof. I went down Vito Cruz feeling frustrated that I wasn’t able to anything and that these people actually exist.

I’m pretty sure that no one actually wants or prefers to be a thief. No normal child would tell people that when they grow they want to be a pickpocket, or a hold-upper, or worse, an ex-convict plunderer-then-Mayor. No, I honestly doubt that. I think that all this stems from the need to survive, to make ends meet and the desperation that poverty brings, and in worse cases, just plain greed.

But all this happened at 1 in the afternoon. I understand how difficult it is to get a job these days, especially for the less fortunate who weren’t able to get a decent education, but anything’s better than stealing, right? To make matters worse, these people even bragged about “their day’s catch”, openly talking because they knew that no one would report them. They were proud of what they do.

It’s scary that something like this happens in broad daylight; that something as sick as this is a reality and is almost acceptable in most parts of society. It inspires a culture where taking what isn’t yours, what someone else had to work hard for, is not out of the norm. I understand that these are only material possessions but these “material things” are also fruits of the hard work of some people, things that they too had to strive for. And these don’t only happen in the streets, thievery is everywhere: even at work, in school, and sadly, in the government.

I think that this is a reality that should concern everyone. As much as we need help to control these people’s crimes, they themselves need help. These people are, in their own ways, victims. Again, I go back to my first point that nobody ever wanted to be a thief. I think that it is society’s nurture (or failure to nurture) that made them be this way and given any opportunity, they would choose to be otherwise.
Dr. Garcia says that the purpose of reflection is to be able to act better, and that one of the goals of philosophy, or “philosophical people” per se, as revealed by Paul Ricœur, is to help attain a “utopia for humanity”. How do we help these people find their beatitudo even in our small ways? And if something likethis ever happens again, what should I/we do?

The Experience of Humanity

by Hazel Alino

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

I’m sure every living person in this world has already heard of at least one story about the battle between the good and evil. Well if you haven’t heard of any, there’s this famous story about a wicked witch who tried to get rid of her beautiful step daughter but failed to do so. The fair and pure princess was saved from death by a kiss from her prince charming. And as usual, as all stories go, they live happily ever after and the good triumphs over the evil.

We were told that good will always prevail, that the wicked witch of a step mom was evil and jealous and selfish and nothing more. But not once did we ever try to consider stepping in the shoes of the evil witch.
In this world it is very easy for us to judge people based only on their actions without really digging deeper into the reality of their lives. People have different ways of viewing things. We have different ways of “seeing with our minds” which are called insights. But insight is not just seeing rather insight is an experience. Insight is way more than being an observer but having an insight means being an active participant in life. But what if our experiences in life were not that good and we turn out to be the bad guy, what does that say about us? If our experiences are good and we end up as the hero, are we better than the rest? In other words, what is the role of insight in our humanity?

The nature of insight tells us that we need to learn to see things which are essential. But it also tells us that we have to go somewhere from that point. Philosophy explains that to have an insight means to know something, then analyze it, dissect, realize then go back to reality. From what I learned in class, I can say that our insight guides our actions. Insight tells us what needs to be done and that there’s more to be done.

Our insight guides us. And I guess that is its role in our humanity. It helps us to make a choice on what to do with what life has given us whether it is a bad or good experience. And I guess when the evil step mom decided to get rid of her step daughter, she just chose to stay blind to all the other possibilities. But that does not mean she’s not human. Experience makes us human. An insight leads us to an experience. And we just have to remember that our wrong choices and mistakes are part of that experience.

Calm (After and) Before The Storm

Perhaps nothing new can be said about what happened during the past few days, as well as our response to this event. For us who have gone through typhoon Ondoy and are experiencing torrential rains and monsoons almost every year, albeit not as grave as this, we as a nation, to a certain extent, are prepared with automatic responses to such occurrences: when the Marikina River rises, evacuate, when people are affected, we plan and execute relief operations, and when all of this is done, then we give ourselves a collective pat on our collective backs and hope that it will never happen again.

But, as we have said, experiences are never duplicates of each other, and there is always something new even though it seems like it has been the same, and every experiences bring new insights, realizations, and lessons to teach us. With that, allow me to at least let these recent events speak to us and gain insight not just on the reality of our own selves, but also of others that most of us do not encounter on a daily basis.

The strong monsoon rains which not only suspended our regular classes and routines for the day but also puts the city in a suspended state, in a sense that many places have submerged and lives have been endangered, constitutes a break that hopefully allowed us to rethink, to see our own worlds and ways of living with new perspectives. Whether our homes have been affected by the floods or not, we are invited by this event to reflect on how we think of life and live it, day in and day out, especially in times when our studies have become a burden and we wished nature would intervene in order for us to get that free day we hope for. We are invited to think of those who go beyond the boundaries of our homes and schools, seeing that those who live in places that we barely call home, exposed at the risk of forcefully evicted because of natural disasters like these. We are invited think how we ourselves are related to those unfortunate others, who have the same right to a good life like us, but clearly are deprived of it. Finally, we are invited to think  what this event means for us as a nation, what can be done in such situations, and what needs to be changed not just to improve our ways of living in the city, but also to uplift those who have repeatedly subject to suffering and dehumanization

Photo courtesy of the Guidon's Facebook page.

Thankfully, as men and women for others, most of us whose lives and homes were not endangered by the floods helped out in the relief operations in more ways than one. I am quite amazed with the fact that we have immediately responded to the need of our brothers and sisters whose lives were devastated by the monsoon rains. It is a comforting fact that we have been distressed by what happened in our country and decided to set aside our present concerns (our students and immediate plans) in order to use our time and resources to actually help in more ways than one. I hope that such actions are not brought about by the desire to just be seen in action or peer pressure, but a genuine desire that springs forth from within, telling us that our lives are lived not just for ourselves, but for others, and this is what is demanded of us in this present moment.

But this is nowhere near the real storm that we all have to face, the floods that we need to endure, the operations that we need to execute. This calls us to look forward, think of ways and procedures that will lead us to actually assure everyone that whatever happened today and in 2009 will never happen again. Our generation will be the one to inherit the problems brought forth by our predecessors, and we cannot just be satisfied with relief operations.

The challenge now, for us, as future leaders, game changers, and movers of the country, is to go beyond than what is demanded of us and actually think of the future of our city, the Filipino people, and our nation. We are called, as Paul Ricoeur said, towards responsibility and hope

Maybe we could start with this simple one, right?