Experience and Essence

by Rob Roa

15 November 2012
Discussed Text: Levinas, "Bible and Philosophy," Ethics and Infinity


Experience is a vague word. Sometimes you don’t have experience if all you’ve ever known is “true blue Ateneo”. Others will say you lack experience even if you’ve been around the world contracting business affairs. For some, one game in the UAAP is enough to call experience, where for others, a player needs four years to be called experienced.

Obviously it is true when we call experience “the world of more meanings”. Meaning is essence, and therefore experience is part of the world of more essence. Does this mean the more we experience, the more we discover the essence of the world? Or do we discover the essence of ourselves?

In experience, we cannot separate ourselves from the world, as we are experiencing it, so therefore the essence of the world, is a part of our own essence. What we have experienced of the world, each moment of action that we can be consciously aware of, makes up our own essence. Our own meaning.
At one point in my life, I was a server (a more fancy term for waiter) at an acceptably high class restaurant back home before I came to the Ateneo. In serving food, I was a server. I was being a server. I was experiencing the world of serving and working (almost full time), and because I was immersed in that world, I was discovering my essence, as a person being the server.

Or even more reflective; I came to the Philippines thinking it would be a “good experience for me” and it has turned out to be just that. So as I experienced the Philippines, I was discovering the essence of the Philippines, but at the same time I was discovering the essence of being Filipino.  Now does this mean before I arrived in Manila, I wasn’t a Filipino? Not necessarily, but when you can finally experience the land of your parents birth, there is more essence to be conscious of.

There is just more to experience. Or more to the world of more meanings. More to the world of more essence. Experience is a never-ending chase to know everything, but of course we must pick and choose what we want to be part of our essence. We can’t have it all, nor do we want it all, but there is always an experience that calls us and is ready to become a part of us.

One last question: when we experience more essence, are we simply discovering it in ourselves? Or allowing some essence of the world to become part of what we are being? Or maybe do we just become aware, or conscious of something else in the world, which changes our own essence, or meaning.

Irreversible

by Nats Barretto


Books, texts, movies -- they are not just for entertainment. They are a means, a means of expressing the different possibilities in this world. That's one of the things I've learned so far in this second philosophy course. And today, I've seen that learning "put into action".

Irreversible. One word. Everything that has already happened is irreversible. Every possibility that has passed, every possibility that is happening -- they are irreversible. Time destroys all things.

Having had a three day weekend gave me a lot of opportunity to watch lots of tv shows and movies. And somehow, I happened to stumble upon this rated 21 and above movie from France. Out of curiosity, I watched it.

It was probably the...harshest movie I have seen in my 19 years of living. The movie contains 13 scenes, shown in reverse chronological order.

I won't tell the plot as some of you might want to watch it. But basically, the whole movie tackles a reality often dismissed by many film makers because of its negativity and harshness. Until now, I still can't get the images out of my head, and I doubt I ever will. It's irreversible. I thought, actually, why would someone make a film so...unnerving. Aren't films supposed to be entertaining? This movie is probably the opposite of entertaining!

But no, I guess entertainment's not the whole point of movies. Movies show possibilities, and harshness was simply the possibility shown by "Irreversible". Somewhere in other parts of the world, these things are actually happening. Probably more worse things than this are happening in some other parts of the world. And that's just the way the world goes.

This movie, is a noble movie. It tackles realities other movies are afraid of tackling. And it's noble in a way that it gives these realities exposure, more than what the nightly news shows you. Yes, it makes people horrified, but it also moves people to do something about these realities. Maybe, just maybe, the audience will be able to do something about these realities.

**Spoilers beyond this part.**

After more thinking, I've came to realize the things that made the movie so...horrifying.

1) Two people could have helped Alex in the tunnel scene: the transsexual Guillermo and the man who appeared on the other end during the rape scene. They both could have helped Alex, but they didn't. Sin of omission, yeah. It's scary, how people aren't brave enough sometimes to get out of their way and help people in need; how people are unresponsive to other's demands.

2) It's the same thing in the Rectum club scene, where Tenia was beating the hell out of Marcus' head with a fire extinguisher. All the other guys could have helped Marcus. But they just stood there, watching the man get himself beaten. It was one of the scariest images in the movie I couldn't keep out of my head.

3) The intensity. Several other movies also try to expose these kinds of things, but they don't make you feel the intensity the way "Irreversible" makes you feel it. A part of it is brought by the what the camera chooses to show--the penis of the rapist after the rape scene, the deformation of Alex and Marcus' face during and after the beatings, and several other things.

Watch only if you think you can handle it. It's not a movie for everyone, and I think I've already established that throughout the blog post.

Richard Dawkins On "Useless" Things

When me and my friends were in your age, the times when we were much younger (and full of hope), one of the people that we have read casually was Richard Dawkins, and this is one man from whom I believe we can learn a lot.

The video below is a comment on why humans do these "useless" things (part of which, I think, involves talking about other people talking about uselessness). What do you think?

And for those who are more into any of the writings and ideas of Dawkins, here is another video (this is quite long) which features him in a dialogue with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who, mind you, is one of the greatest minds of this century, a brilliant philosopher and theologian who frequently engages in friendly intellectual discussions with also one of the greatest theologians of our time, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger or Pope Benedict XVI.

When Languages Fail Us

by Rucha Lim

Allow me to divert from my usual ranting on what has been identified to me as orthodox religion and the utter (and with great irony with reference to our lingua franca) banal state of the understanding of what I (perhaps wrongly) believe is an outdated concept of “God.”

As I write, I must acknowledge the source of the imagery, which I am to use.My favorite author, Haruki Murakami, entitled one of his novels, “Dance Dance Dance.” There is a part in the novel wherein the character, amidst all the strange things going on in his life says that he “does his best to just dance along.” Many of the things he encountered, he could not understand. The world continued to turn, just as surely as time flowed, and so all he could do was “dance” the best way he could to what life brought.

I am reluctant to use dancing as a metaphor for living as I have no terpsichorean ability whatsoever. I believe the metaphor however, to be quite effective in communicating what I wish to communicate. Dancing is useless in the sense that it does not necessarily assist in survival. Perhaps our ancient ancestors can attest to this if they could. Why then did it survive? Evolution (that applies not just to biology and genetics but also anthropology) would hold that practices which provide no benefit to survivability dies of their own accord. The laws of nature, in its parsimoniousness, would have what is unnecessary eventually eradicated. Why then, did dancing, from the most primitive times, flourish and even evolve into the wild shaking and gyrating that it is today?I can think of one possibility. 

First, we must look at the original function of the dance. Though I am no anthropologist, I believe we can infer that the ancient dances were mimetic. Ancient dance moves were the same movements done in hunting, harvesting, washing, herding, and so on and so forth.Thisdirects us to their function, that they were instructive. Dances were signifiers that all too often also functioned as narratives. As we know, narratives can tell us about how a certain people viewed the world in their time. What we sometimes forget to ask however is what the narratives told them about themselves. 

Think back to the fables told to most of us when we were children. They were clearly didactic. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” taught us how lying can be bad. “The Tortoise and The Hare” taught us the folly of arrogance and the value of perseverance. What we give importance to is not the signifiers they used but rather the signified, the meanings they wished for us to convey. Such is the function that can be traced back to the fabliau. It’s much simpler to tell children stories and fables rather than having to explain to them the complexities of things. 

So here we have a message, an understanding, which we wish to communicate. We wish to make our understanding intelligible and so we express.These expressions however need to be grounded on something.I could continue writing this essay in the form of dbfkjsnvvdhf andfdskj afhndskvjs aflndvsjafpoa sdnflsdknfslk and just hope that you completely understand what I want to say but that would be highly unlikely.

We need to establish a consensus on what things mean in order to efficiently communicate. When a person says “yes”, we want to be able to trust that “yes” refers to an affirmation and not a negation. These consensuses came to us in the form of languages. To quote Stephen Hawking, “Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible.” We learned to codify our understanding into texts for the purpose of communication.

Texts however have their limits. They communicate ideas in the languages available to authors in their creation. Recall however that components of languages are signifiers and not actually signified, in the same way that the word “cat” is not an actual cat. There is always a gap between signifier and signified, image and understanding. A problem arises however when this gap is no longer recognized, when signifier is equated to signified. This is what Roland Barthes called, the “myth.” In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message” in the sense that the medium has become the message. 

The oldest epic known to humanity is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. In this ancient work, we find themes that we are all too familiar with such as anxiety of death and the desire to be remembered.  In the Bible, we find many didactic passages that hold true in our time despite it long preceding us. It becomes a great loss then, when we practice a fetishistic reverence of these texts, placing them on pedestals without actually tearing into the essence of what they wish to communicate.When their meanings are expressed, all too often, the image itself has become the basis and the process is disregarded.

It is difficult to distinguish then, the natural from the naturalized. Again, we must keep to mind that the naturalized stems from natural phenomena. We humans have naturalized ways of dealing with nature. We crafted weapons and developed techniques and methods in order to help us survive.They are our own creations and we also learned to give them significance.

To borrow from Sartre, to give signification is to deny everything else. To define is to separate. To say that I am me is also to say that I am not you or anybody else. To give significance to something is to give attention and meaning to something amidst everything else.It is therefore, a choice, one that can be conscious of. How easy it is, however, to default and look at things in over-simplified ways. To do so is no grave sin. We look at things simply because we want to acquire a sense of security. We want to make sense of the world in a way that we can easily handle.In the words of Voltaire, “Doubt is an unpleasant condition.”And so we rely on myths in order to easily get by.Myths act as the touchstones of our understanding of things.Voltaire continues however, that “Certainty,... is absurd.”

The ancient Romans believed, as per the writing of Ovid, that spring and summer, the seasons of life are when Persephone is with her mother Ceres and that autumn and winter, the seasons of death are when Persephone is with her husband Pluto. It was what they could default to, as the revolution of the Earth around its orbit was yet unknown to them. We may not view myths and legends as serious etiology these days however we are still captivated by them.  We are not confined to their intended meanings. We hold them in wonder because they are testaments to humanity’s creativity. We have all our wonderful ways of putting a spin to things and we have given them names like love, hate, irony, passion, tragedy, comedy, and so on and so forth.One does not need to believe in order to appreciate. Why, the atheist Richard Dawkins’ favorite piece of music is Bach’s “The St. Matthew Passion.” 

We do not necessarily need to “burn our idols” as one drunken friend once told me. Rather, in the words of Joseph Campbell in “The Hero With A Thousand Faces” what we must seek, in narratives across all cultures is not the differences of images used but rather, their similarities and what they speak of us all as the human race.They touch on the level of things ancient, sublime, the grand inner workings of the human condition.I need not know the technical complexities of music to be moved by Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8. These texts are timeless and classical in that they move us on a level so deep and in a manner so parsimonious that they easily evoke our consciousness into the realm of our abstract essence.

Our languages, myths, and symbols are simply our tools with which we are able to interact. They may be crude and inadequate at times but I am not condemning them. Rather, I believe it would be a challenge of creativity in how we would be able to use (and possibly improve) these tools given to us in spite of their crudeness. I just find that it is necessary to know that we are ultimately free from our own creations however influenced we are by the forces that drove us into making them.This freedom gives us the power to change the way we see and construct our worlds. Again quoting Stephen Hawking, “It [everything] doesn’t have to be like this [I like to think he speaks of what Marcel called “the broken world”]. We just have to make sure we keep talking.” And by talking he does not mean breaking down into verbal nihilism or being reducing all things into talking, what he means is we must just keep striving to communicate as communication is what “unleashed the power of our imagination” and perhaps in doing so, move into a purer level of experience.

And now I return you at last to my metaphor of the dance. Each dance move is an emotion, a feeling, a reaction to the sounds of life expressed within the limits of our human bodies.Each of us hears different aspects of the sounds, naming different things as music. And we dance to this music in different ways, some stiff and rapid, others slow and flexible, and so on and so forth. Sometimes we can choose to not dance at all but we miss out on a very important aspect of living – intimacy. There are not many expressions that express intimacy as much as the dance – when bodies move not only to the rhythm of life, but also to each other.We touch each other, fully appreciating the presence of the Other and offering ours in return. At times we step on each other’s toes, or accidentally hit each other in our wild movements. Our dancing can disturb, or provoke, disgust or arouse, create spite or happiness.We learn to slow down and adjust our pace for others. Sometimes we just get tired of dancing and stop. But we have to keep dancing. To dance is to find and interact with the Other. I like to believe that in our differences and inadequacies, we can strive for harmony with each other.

We are homo sapiens sapiens. What has allowed us to thrive is our ability to communicate and build societies. It should not be then that what has allowed us to survive will be what will cause our downfall. As they said in one of the lectures in RSA, “We need to rethink the human narrative.” We have all the material we need to revise it. Zeno’s paradox states that in between any two defined points is infinity. Between 0 and 1 is 0.5, and in between 0 and 0.5 is 0.25 and in between 0 and 0.25 is 0.125 ad infinitum. Reality, in its finiteness, holds infinity.And human knowledge of this finiteness continues to approach infinity. How many permutations of meaning can we potentially get as we arrange the finite holders of infinity in life?Why,∞!

Think about it, and let the music of Pink Floyd carry you.

A Reflection On A Reflection

by Rucha Lim


One slightly tipsy evening, I was struck with a thought. “I can never fully see myself.”  What I see in the mirror is not me but rather, the light I am reflecting off into the mirror that bounces into my eyes. Optical nerves convert the light into electrical signals that travel into my brain, which encodes it into information, an image. Elementary science. Seeing my own physical appearance is simple enough. Science doesn’t really say anything more though. The guy I see in the mirror isn’t that bad looking, far from being an Adonis but decent enough. What I judge though is not myself but rather, a reflection of my self that I see. Any judgment is made on the basis of things outside my self.

The mirror speaks of my appearance- an objective reality. As we know, we are more than our objective realities. But how can I know what lies beneath my surface?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I will not talk to you because I haven’t lost my mind (yet?). I will not hope that through some hocus-pocus, the mirror will reveal to me whether I am good or bad. No, to find my inner self, I must go outside of myself. I must look at the Other. As I look around me, what can I say of the people around me? Are they happy? Do they despair? Have I a hand in their happiness or in their despair?It is perhaps through this type of questioning that I can find my self.

I know now that I exist. Here I am in the world, interacting with it, and being aware that I am in it. What luck!But now I must ask, how do I exist? Have I done good for the world or did I make the world good for me? I have an ideal identity of myself in mind but it is only through seeing how I interact with the world can I approximate how much I resonate to my ideal.

I think of one of the prayers Doctor Garcia recites before class.John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

I am in the world. Everything I do has an effect. Everything that I do not do also has an effect. Many suffer unjustly. Many abuse power. Many die in vain. I am partly at fault because of my actions or lack thereof. Every second that I allow to pass where the Other suffers is an opportunity lost. I am part of the problem but I believe that awareness of my responsibility and accountability to humanity is the first step to my taking part in a solution. And in taking part in a solution, I believe that I move closer to my ideal identity. An identity that is good.

Being Your Way Into Being

by Dondee Alampay

13 November 2012
Discussed Text: Levinas, "Bible and Philosophy, Ethics and Infinity


Three lecture classes have gone by and so far, Emmanuel Levinas' take on the topics of experience, modalities of living, and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit has been molding in class a sense of practicality in realizing one's orientation towards consciousness, whether it be in the form of an ego check, self help/motivation, or something as normal as “ah!, that's nice to know”. College comes with many instances where an ambitious student could lose his or herself in a cascade of self-inflicted expectations and peer obligations, but the manner in which the lecture topics fall into place seem appropriate to prepare the student for exactly that, especially when dealing with the infamous third year burden.

Take for instance, last Thursday's lecture which tackled the dynamism of consciousness, and Being contrasted with being. Many a semester (well, back when I was still an engineering student) have I heard friends and peers relate their then current predicament with what they assumed their current position to be. For instance, the struggles of dealing with circuit analysis coupled with calculus every week, with no respite or safe haven with which to take a breather, and the sighs of disappointment and discouragement that ensued every time a long test would be returned imprinted on some (and to a certain extent myself) a very distorted transmutation of what they first considered a pursuit of knowledge, into a struggle to adhere to a certain standard, at a certain pace.  It is at these times that the question “is this really for me?” is asked, and back then, I would be inclined to say that it made sense going along that particular direction of thought. Looking back however, and with last week's lecture topic in mind, the more appropriate questions would have been “what am I doing”, “what do I want” and “how am I to get there”. It is this delicate balance of self identification tied to one's actions and decisions that is most often confused with identification tied to one's accomplishments, although sadly this is what history seems to favor.

To realize who you are in this world is to realize that the hurdles and obstacles that bear down on you is to acknowledge that your existence is what gives those challenges the significance that they have. What you make yourself out to be entails that you have to “be” to be. Let each and every succeeding  instant, opportunity, moment, and waking hour, remind of you of who you are. The famous question posed in Hamlet to be or not to be is only half the decision. Most of it is getting there once you decide to.

Texts and Phenomenology

by Kris Kokseng

13 November 2012
Discussed Text: Levinas, "Bible and Philosophy" in Ethics and Infinity


Today Doc Garcia talked about two main topics, text and phenomenology. What exactly did I learn about these topics? Doc Garcia explained that philosophy should not begin with ideas in one's head; it should begin from lived experiences. Texts are important because one person can't experience everything. Texts are the experiences of other people written down, and when we think of philosophy we must not only use our own experiences but texts as well.

"La vraie vie est ailleurs(the true life is elsewhere)," said Rimbaud. Levinas states that this true life is no longer utopian because we find a place for it in our thoughts. We "de-center" ourselves and enter the world of what we are reading. As Flaubert said "Live in order to live!" This is why Levinas considers the Bible as one of the great books that he has encountered because not only does it give a possibility but it gives many possibilities of that true life.

Moving on to phenomenology, as we experience things we are living life however this is only the pre-reflective level of phenomenology. A reflection as defined in class is a gaze that goes outside and comes back.  As we reflect on our experiences we enter into the reflective level which is living life outside of life.
I had an experience when I was driving a car. I was in the pre-reflective level when I was just driving on "auto-pilot" until a point where I almost hit somebody. That's when I became conscious of being conscious, and being conscious that what I do could really affect others. From reflecting I learned that I had to be more careful when driving. In a sense I was also conscious of others. And as we tackled being a person for others, I always wondered why did I even think or care about others during this experience. Maybe it is just hard-wired into us.