The other levels of meaning: Philosophy as articulated in Literature

I was at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) campus in Sta. Mesa the other week. I was invited by Virgilio Rivas of the University’s Institute of Cultural Studies to explicate my personal beliefs (i.e. philosophy) in my writing.

The idea was first proposed by Fr. Leonardo Mercado for his graduate philosophy class at the University of Santo Tomas but the lecture was cancelled and Rivas, his student, picked it up.

The PUP, I was informed, is one of our largest institutions of higher education with an enrollment of more than 65,000. It is reported to be very radicalized, far more than the University of the Philippines in Diliman. This radicalization is in keeping with its beginnings when, as the former Philippine College of Commerce headed by the activist educator Nemesio Prudente, it was the vanguard of the student demos prior to the declaration of martial law in 1972. May there be more institutions like the Polytechnic University of the Philippines!

This is what I told my young audience:

Most of my contemporaries are gone; some grew powerful and rich, others — the writers particularly — were penurious and in distress for this is the fate of most writers in our country. We are not appreciated, we are not listened to.

Some two decades ago at a conference in Hamburg, Germany, Stefan Heym, one of East Germany’s most famous writers told me about the harsh regime in his country, that under such bruising conditions, a writer’s primary purpose is to keep alive, to bear witness to the travails of his people. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn did this in the Stalin years, So did many writers in Eastern Europe — they survived to tell all about it.

In those years that Marcos brutalized this nation, imprisoned, tortured and killed so many, I had one wish — to see the dictatorship end. I did, but with Filipinos deprived of memory, I now ask myself if it is worth it.

First, what is a writer? Or, what is literature? Its use? Language as a communication tool is the primary element from which literature is created. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as songs, riddles, or epics that are chanted. As incantations, it is often believed to have magic, powers to cure the sick. As epic, it unfurls a particular tribe’s or people’s narrative and how, with their hopes, they have prevailed.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little. Living is a learning process, but more than this, work is the law of life — we must strive for as long as we can; there really is no retiring from life if we consider living a challenge as well — even the very act of walking when infirmity sets in, even the act of seeing when the eyes are dimmed, and most of all, the very act of thinking and imagining — when the mind is already dulled.

Rizal the writer taught us compassion, how to be contextual, and by his life, how to relate to this nation and its oppressed. Rizal inspired me to tell the Filipino story from the bottom up.

I began this work very young, first by reading aside from Rizal in grade school, the Greek myths, Medusa, the Gorgon, Ulysses — and in high school, at the National Library in the basement of what is now the National Museum, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Homer, the Greek philosophers, Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Almost every afternoon, I was there, or at the Far Eastern University library where I attended high school. I read for entertainment, but most of all, to learn. During the Liberation, I saved the pocket books and paperback editions discarded by American soldiers, books that also confirmed my maturing ideas.

These are what I have gleaned:

From Socrates (he did not write anything but is copiously quoted by Plato), the twin goals of man: “Virtue and excellence.”

From Nietzsche: “Convictions are prisons.”

From Sartre: “Man is doomed to be free.”

From Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Kierkegaard: a tenuous belief in God — for there are times when I doubt Him. And the essential loneliness of man, his insignificance in the vastness of time and space, our melancholy existence — the very same melancholy which is the matrix of art.

In the early Sixties. I entered my ascetic Hindu-Buddhist phase and was about to join a Buddhist monastery in Chiangmai, through the intercession of the Siamese activist, Sulak Sivaraksa. But the sybaritic life beckoned and off I went to Bellagio in Italy instead.

I did some writing and thinking there, of Rizal as propagandist, as champion of the Filipino cause. He could have simply written manifestos, articles, treatises. But he chose fiction and poetry — he knew that they would live long to move future readers like myself, survive long after the event — a living historical testimony.

What is a writer’s purpose? Tell a story, and history becomes alive, is lived, especially if the writer is truthful.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories — these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance. The authors are irrelevant, except for purposes of scholarship where research could probe into their contextuality, craftsmanship and even their creative motive. I seldom do this; it is self-serving, but for this lecture’s purpose, I will now give a background on my work.

First, I try to answer the ponderous (and pompous) questions relevant to all of us, questions like the meaning of life. Each individual may have his own answer according to his understanding of the beginning. Sometime back, the American playwright, Thornton Wilder wrote that brief novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is about a bridge in Peru which collapsed; several people on that bridge died. Was it an act of God or sheer fate?

My reply is in my novel, Gagamba; the omniscient observer is a cripple who watches cars and sells sweepstakes tickets before a plush restaurant destroyed by a massive earthquake. Three survived — Gagamba himself, a baby and the manager of the restaurant who is paralyzed from the waist down. Karma? Destiny? Has life any meaning at all?

Think of a future wherein a giant asteroid may smash the earth ending this planet and everyone in it — the cathedrals of our civilization, the great art created in so many thousand years. Why then — if we are so puny and doomed should we strive at all?

The story “The God Stealer” is a deliberate comment on the power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. My novel, Ermita, is about a very expensive prostitute. Through her story, virtue and ethics and the moral contradictions in society are raked over.

The purpose of art? Sherds explores this issue in its most elemental form. What does art mean to the poor? Are there limits to the creative imagination?

With these stories, I asked parallel questions: why we are poor, why there is so much injustice in our country. Why we are inert, incapable of mounting social change, a revolution even. What is our history? What is wrong with us? Our leaders?

I examine these assumptions in the Rosales Saga, which encompasses a hundred years of our history from the martyrdom of the three priests in the Cavite Mutiny in 1872 to the declaration of martial law by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

Extensions of the saga appear in my novel Viajero, where the major character, Pepe Samson, appears. In this saga the espousal of revolution is epitomized by him in the concluding novel, Mass. He kills an oligarch thereby liberating himself from the ancient bondage that holds us in thrall.

The conclusion of the saga is a two-act play, Balikbayan, set 20 years or more after Pepe Samson, in Mass, joins the revolution. A reunion of the former activists shows how some went their separate ways. They became politicians, businessmen, academics. One returns from the United States and it is in his honor that this reunion is held. Pepe Samson arrives from the field, now middle aged and very tired. Only he had tenaciously kept the faith, but he is killed.

In the second act, Colonel Sidewall, who tortured Pepe in Mass, reveals the betrayal in Pepe’s wake by a trusted colleague turned opportunist. Tia Nena in My Brother, My Executioner and in Mass, who speaks at the wake, tells Colonel Sidewall that Pepe Samson was betrayed, yes, but he did not betray her, and his country.

Listen — the Rosales saga is our story, how we also betrayed ourselves. Who will carry on the struggle for social justice? Are we doomed to decay, to perdition? The telling is necessary but painful for I see no reprieve from our moral malaise and poverty — not till the youth act like Pepe Samson.

Does literature really matter, then? Or philosophy?

Let us look into the future and focus on education and science.

We have seen in our lifetime the quantum leap in the physical sciences that brought the atomic bomb, the miracle of digital and nanotechnology as exemplified by the new computers, cellphones, etc.  utilized in our daily lives. We have also seen how easily such instruments evolved and changed within a few years — not decades.

Those of us who are conditioned by archaic concepts of reality and empiricism are now able to witness evidence not confirmed by such traditional thinking. The physicists tell us now that two plus two is not necessarily four. There is so much phenomena now that defy the old scientific conventions. Those of us immersed in the humanities — have we come to the end of philosophy itself and must now get out of the box? There is no limit to knowledge as there is no limit to the imagination. If there is no limit to the imagination, then there is no limit to progress.

And this is where philosophy (and ethics) may yet regain its supreme status as we contemplate man’s fate, how our contemporary world is diminished by consumerism and greed — the driving impulse of capitalism which ravages our earth, its finite resources, its climate. This is where we ponder the global issues of poverty and eventually of justice for poverty is not an economic or political problem. It is moral.

Long ago the philosophers found the answers and as writers, we articulated these in enduring prose and poetry. It’s the scientists who must now provide this hope, this reality, and for the writers to record the promise and fruition of that reality.

But let us go back to the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, whose radicalization I appreciate. The University has come out with an excellent journal, the Mabini Review. Its first issue contains excellent essays by Virgilio Rivas and Kristoffer Bolanos. Its literary section deserves to be enlarged to include fiction and poetry like the excellent contribution of Dennis Aguinaldo. The review should contain more critical studies on our vernaculars and particularly our English literature to locate it in the context of world literature.

More on the humanities, too, and eventually venture into original thought so that Philippine philosophy will progress beyond the pioneering baseline studies on values by F. Landa Jocano and Leonardo Mercado. Creative thinking will then develop in the manner that German, French, even American philosophies have emerged as distinct additions to classic Western thought.