“That is a madman: he does not understand life! The curate calls me philosopher for nickname… Perhaps I may really be the fool and they, the sane, who can tell?” – Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (1887)
Readers of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere will remember old pilosopong Tasio. He was described as such in the book but the adjective purported two meanings: “The well-bred persons called him Don Anastacio or Tasio the pilosopo, while the ill-bred who constituted the majority called him Tasio the loco-loco for his rare ideas and his strange way of treating people.” For Filipinos nowadays, a pilosopo is a term of endearment for someone who can wiggle himself out of a tough spot with wit or smart language.
I did well on my first year of undergraduate study back in the Philippines. So on the first semester on my second year, I decided to take a course on Speculative Thought. The professor of this philosophy course intrigued me a lot. While lounging on the third-floor lobby, he had this deep-thinking poise while smoking his Marlboro cigarette. Being naïve and unsophisticated, I thought it was worth finding out how to become a pilosopo. His lectures were on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and they were just incomprehensible to my plebeian mind. I failed as a result and had to do a retest and barely passed it. That’s my first and last bold attempt in trying to be a deep thinker.
The difficulty of understanding philosophical arguments, however, did not deter me from buying books about philosophy. The first author I sought as soon as I settled down with my married life was Will Durant, an American writer and a philosopher. But his massive work The Story of Civilization (11 volumes all in all) was expensive. So I went to the library instead and borrowed volume 3, Caesar and Christ, as a dry run to buying the whole set. I couldn’t sustain reading the whole book. Still I managed to purchase three of Durant’s books: The Story of Philosophy (1926), The Mansions of Philosophy (1929) and Heroes of History (2001).
When I was a student attending university in Manila and travelled by bus to my hometown, I always took the window seat so I could watch the fading daylight illuminating the passing towns and the welcoming sight of street lights. I cherished the moment to think things through with my life. Here in Canada, however, during my workday commute by GO train, I used the travelling time instead to read. I discovered the writings of A. C. Grayling, a British philosopher and author. His philosophical essays were brief and easy to read. They were appropriate to induce me to think somehow. In The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy (2001), his range of topics involved about moral matters, public culture, community and society, anger and war, grief and remembrance, nature and naturalness, reading and thinking. In 2004, he published The Mystery of Things that dealt with arts, history and science. And in The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century (2005), he delved on personal themes like happiness, good life, quality of life, reading, solitude, to name a few; on public concerns like democracy, rhetoric, debate, tyrants, and other subjects; on people like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, etc.; on ideas such as simplicity, the crisis of thought, white-collar boxing and more; and on his concluding thoughts about the uses of philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s book History of Western Philosophy. His most recent work The History of Philosophy (2019) covered a wide span of western philosophy from ancient to medieval and renaissance then modern to twentieth century, including the history of Indian, Chinese, Arabic-Persian, and African Philosophy. It calls for heavy reading. Though I have all the time in the world as a retiree, I don’t think I have the stamina or the scholarly persona to study such a book. Grayling recognizes my deficiency when he wrote in his concluding remarks: “Even though most people shy away from accepting the challenge to think (Russell said, ‘Most people would rather die than think, and most people do’), they still find themselves often enough confronted by a philosophical question: about right and wrong, about what choice to make in some fundamental respect, about what it really means. Thus everyone is a philosopher at times; everyone takes part. And that makes us all players in the history of philosophy.”
I came across a paperback by Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy (1991). Right away I assumed this could be an easier reading than Grayling’s tome. One day, after school, Sophie received a mysterious letter that asked: “Is there nothing that interests us all? Is there nothing that concerns everyone – no matter who they are or where they live in the world? Yes, dear Sophie, there are questions that certainly should interest everyone. They are precisely the questions this course is about.” From then on, Sophie got free lectures on the history of philosophy, from presocratics to Jean-Paul Sartre, plus a brief coverage about the universe and the Big Bang. It was a brushstroke of the many arguments from the leading intellectuals of years passed. Questions were asked, possible answers were made but no absolute solutions. It was no accident that Gaarder chose a 14-year old girl as his main character because children and philosophers shared something special – a curious mind. “It seems as if in the process of growing up,” Gaarder wrote, “we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central – something philosophers try to restore. For somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought.”
There are several Canadian authors I wish to rely on “to think the thought”. Wish in the sense that I have their books but have not spent as much time reading them. There’s Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992) by John Ralston Saul. Then there’s the weightier book by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007) that cost me a fortune but is still unread. Mark Kingwell, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, attracted my attention. He could make a mundane activity like fishing into a profound discussion of life and family relationship (Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life, 2003). Surprisingly, I was able to read this book fully but not the other three books: In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac (1998), The World We Want: Virtue, Vice, and the Good Citizen (2000), and Opening Gambits: Essays on Art and Philosophy (2008). Last but not the least is Michael Ignatieff who ran unsuccessfully to become the prime minister of Canada in the 2011 federal election. My collection includes: Scar Tissue (1993), Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Generation (1993), Virtual War: Kosovo and beyond (2000), The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the Age of Terror (2004), The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998), The Needs of Strangers: An Essay on Privacy, Solidarity, and the Politics of Being Human (1984), Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998). This Isaiah Berlin, who was a British philosopher, intrigued me as well. So I went looking for his books and found three: Four Essays on Liberty (1969), The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1959) and The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (1998).
I have more books (not mentioned here) on philosophy that I can handle in a lifetime which is getting shorter and shorter. It seems like I overbought as compensation for my failed experiment to be an intellectual, knowing full well that I don’t need to pass an exam. But as I go through my collection, I feel overwhelmed with the task of reading them all. Always the question is: do I have full understanding of what the arguments all about? It’s so obvious by now that I don’t, yet I keep deluding myself that perhaps I can meet the challenge, to be inspired in the same foolhardiness as pilosopong Tasio. Though he has more discipline, desire and commitment, all I have is the curiosity. The odds are stacked against me. But why does philosophy matter especially now when its lustre is gone? Why do I have to spend hours and hours inside the house reading when I can enjoy life more with outdoor activities? Do I have anything to gain really?
Listening once again to A. C. Grayling, he wrote: “Reflections on the kinds of enquiries, and kinds of questions those enquiries prompt, shows that philosophy is the attempt to make sense of things, to achieve understanding and perspective, in relation to those many areas of life and thought where doubt, difficulty, obscurity and ignorance prevail – which is to say: on the frontiers of all endeavours.”
“Perhaps the greatest thrill brought by doing philosophy,” said Astra Taylor, the editor of the book, Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (2009), “is the moment when a concept that initially appeared impenetrable all of a sudden becomes clear, perfectly illuminating some problem, situation, or sensation that had previously eluded comprehension.”
Filipinos are fun-loving people who enjoy their silly and corny jokes, while belting away their favourite love songs to show off their musical prowess at karaoke. They can’t endure serious reading and deep thinking.
But once in a while there’s this odd person who will traverse the lonely path like old pilosopong Tasio in the best way he can with no pretensions – just an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible.
3 February 2022
