Self-Identity and the Filipino Philosophy

By Claro Rafols Ceniza

A man is whatever he identifies with. I do not mean that if a man identifies himself with a rock he forthwith becomes a rock with all its properties — such as hardness and heaviness and maybe a degree of permanence. But he will behave like a rock — and given the limitations of a man, he may in time become hard and heavy (physically and psychologically) and attain some degree of permanence (in his habits). In the comic strip Gasoline Alley, there was a little boy named Rover who thought he was a dog. He insisted on wearing a dog collar, and buried his food like a dog, and otherwise behaved as a dog would. He befriended a man who also thought he was a dog and lived in a dog house. A man will generally find life meaningless — will find himself quite empty and confused and directionless, if he cannot identify with something or other. That he identifies with determines his answer to the question, “Who am I?” That which he identifies with defines his self-identity. It is that in terms of which his behavior can best be understood. He may identify himself with his family, his best friend, his barkada, his fraternity or sorority, his or her own sex, his alma mater, his religion, his country, God — even fictional characters, causes, what have you. Whatever a person identifies with gives meaning to his life and determines his behavior in proportion, in each case, to the degree of identification. A person who finds nothing to identify with lives a desolate life — an aimless existence. He is one of whom it may be said, he has not found himself.

A healthy identification is one which has some basis in fact. Thus, for example, a man is a Filipino. He can identify with Filipinos or with his country to a greater or lesser degree. He is a man. He may identify with humanity — again to a greater or lesser degree. He belongs to an organization or is a student or an alumnus of a college, he may to a greater or lesser degree identify with his college. A man is a being — he may identify himself legitimately with all things or with being itself — as mystics do.

But if a Filipino rejects his own nationality and identifies himself as an American without having even lived in America, then we may suspect that something is wrong. If a man thinks he is an ape and behaves like one, then I think there is also something wrong.

In other words, there must be some truth in his identification. He can identify himself with his class all he likes — even absorb all of his life in it. This I think is legitimate. In fact it is healthy to have something one identifies himself fully with. If the class with which one identifies himself is not yet true of him, he can take steps to make the identification true. A man wants to be a professional. He takes steps to fulfill that goal. A man wants to achieve something. He prepares himself for its attainment and sets about attaining that goal. If one desires to be president of some company or other, then there are necessary steps and procedures for becoming one. This is ambition.

Of course, the question of truth in identification is sometimes a complex affair. For the legitimate ground for the identification may not be obvious, sometimes even to the person involved — such ground being hidden deep in his subconscious. Maybe we can throw light on this question if we first consider the problem of why one identifies oneself with certain classes rather than others. Let us sketch a few possibilities, which however, are by no means exhaustive. When one is born, one, by virtue of his birth, already belongs to several classes and groups. He is born either a man or a woman, to a certain family, a neighborhood, a region, a country; he belongs to a race, to the animal kingdom. He is a living thing. He is a being. And, of course, he is his individual self with his peculiar features, tastes, talents, inclinations, idiosyncrasies, faults, weakness, defects, etc.

Every than is born with feelings of pride and shame, of self-esteem and embarrassment, of love and hate, of comparison and abhorrence.

A man identifies himself with things he can be proud of and dissociates himself from things which tend to give him shame; he tends to identify himself with things he loves and puts psychological distance between himself and things he hates; he tends to identify himself with things which increase his self-esteem and disconnects himself from things that tend to embarrass him. A man tends to think of himself as at one with those who share his principles and to be other than those with whom he disagrees with in regard to principles. A man tends to be sympathetic with those he regards as in the same situation as he is, and he tends to look with aversion upon those whom he feels threaten his being or the class with which he identifies or is identified with. These are tendencies and need not determine in every case how a person identifies himself in particular circumstances. For example, it may be and often is extremely difficult for a person to dissociate himself from the natural classes he is born into — to do so would practically be to wrench himself from himself. For example, since I am a Filipino, I cannot help identifying myself as a Filipino and with Filipinos — and perhaps, if at all, it will take a great deal of doing and happening before I can dissociate myself from being a Filipino as part of my identity. But it is possible to make such dissociation, and it has happened.

For example, we may mention a certain Wayne Williams who recently gained notoriety in the United States. He was convicted of the murder of at least two young persons by a court in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also suspected of complicity in the killing of ten more of twenty-nine other mysterious murders in that city. Time (Feb. 15, 1982) described him as a predatory homosexual who hated his fellow blacks, a man of bristling racial self-hatred, calling black youngsters “street gruncheons” and calling his own race “n — — — .” According to the same news magazine, he cited high black birth rate to denigrate his race and is said to have considered how many n — — — could be eliminated by doing away with one n — — — child. Wayne Williams is perhaps an exceptional case.

Even if I renounce my Filipino citizenship to become, say, an American citizen, I would usually still count myself as a Filipino-American. Similarly, it is difficult for a man to dissociate himself from his family, his region, his humanity — from the fact that he is an animal, a living thing, etc. But it can happen in extreme cases. One can express his rejection of part or all of himself by his acts. Suicide can be considered as an expression of ultimate self-rejection, as well as a re-rejection of all things. It is a rejection of being — itself: one’s own and that of everything else. But otherwise, one’s natural identity is difficult to break. It is fairly stable.

Nevertheless, class identification can be enhanced or diminished. Anything that a member of his class does of which he can be proud will cause him to come out in the open and announce to all and sundry his belonging to that particular class. If a Filipino has done something extremely meritorious, Filipinos can be expected either publicly or privately to declare, “I am a Filipino.” Filipinos’ link to their nationality is thereby enhanced.

But if a Filipino has done something of which Filipinos would be ashamed, such as what happened recently in Saudi Arabia, when two Filipinos were publicly beheaded for allegedly robbing and murdering a Lebanese and molesting his wife to boot, we Filipinos, and especially those in Saudi Arabia, would feel like hiding our faces for a while.

How dolls a person become so identified with his nation, for example, that his personality becomes practically absorbed in it — in other words, so that he practically identifies himself completely with it? Let us imagine a situation. Let your people be continually oppressed, insulted, and otherwise treated in a degrading manner. Either of two things can happen here. Either you feel personally oppressed, insulted, and treated in a degrading manner and react more or less violently. Then you became a rebel — either in spirit or in act. The other thing that can happen is that you escape this feeling of personal oppression, insult and degradation by identifying with the oppressors. You adopt the values of the oppressors, affect his manners, learn and master his language — in other words, become culturally and spiritually one with the oppressor. If this happens — as it does usually among the privileged classes in the colonies, then you side with the oppressors and oppress your own people. This, brought to the highest extremity, is what I think happened to Wayne Williams. Perhaps to a lesser degree, this is what has happened to most of our educated and privileged classes during the Spanish and American regimes. (The Japanese regime did not last long enough to allow the process of cultural conditioning to take root). Didn’t we prefer Spanish and American literature to Philippine literature, respectively? Didn’t we prefer Spanish and American goods to Philippine goods? Didn’t we prefer Spanish and American physiognomy to native, our own? Don’t we consciously or unconsciously look down on things Philippine?

But let us go back to the process of national identification the process of building up national pride. We began by recognizing a situation where a people suffers oppression at the hands of foreigners, and how one may react to such oppression by becoming an actual or spiritual rebel. If the agent possesses enough effective leadership among his people, he will probably rouse his people to anger and fight back. He would regard the liberation of his people from oppression as his personal crusade. But he is fighting in defense of his people, too. Their fight is his fight. Their liberation is his liberation. We will be unable to distinguish his cause from that of his people. He and they are one in this fight. He feels compassion for his people and hatred for his oppressors.

Because a person is a Filipino, an insult against Filipinos is an insult against him. Acts committed against Filipinos are acts committed against him — unless, as we have said, the person has effectively dissociated himself from his countrymen and has learned to identify himself with their oppressors. Conversely, respect, praise and favors done to Filipinos as Filipinos are acts of respect, praise, and favors done, if in an indirect manner, to Filipinos in general. This is why a man normally cannot dissociate himself from the classes to which he belongs, more especially so if these classes are what we have called natural classes. Such dissociation is always a mark of some abnormality.

Not all group belonging, and hence not all group identification, is natural. Some are voluntary and conventional. Among those are memberships in clubs, fraternities, a church, etc. It is easier to dissociate oneself from conventional groups. One may join a group or withdraw his membership from it. But group identification can become quite strong, especially if the group is very cohesive and the individual member involved finds that his membership therein enhances his self-image and if he is otherwise proud of the group and membership in the group gives him a sense of security. The group usually serves as a sounding board for his feeling of personal self-esteem. But he can always dissociate himself from any group to which he momentarily belongs, if he should find himself at any time in fundamental disagreement with its policies, goals, or actuations — if he should, in other words, find the group’s actuations threatening to his personal self-image.

Filipinos are small-group oriented. We tend to be loyal to small groups, such as our barkadas, our families, our school, our clubs, our region. It is, I think, the consensus among us Filipinos that we have not fully developed the spirit of nationalism. Why is this so? I think part of the reason is in our colonial history. Although there are exceptions, it is common among people who have been colonized that they look up to and admire the culture of their colonizers and look down on their own. Part of the reason for this is the tendency of some colonizers to impose their own culture on the colonies and to discourage the development of local cultures. These colonizers tend to impose their religion, their language, their legal and value systems, their mores, and in general their way of life on the conquered people, with the result that the latter tend to look upon the culture of the conqueror as the standard by which to judge their own culture. Thus, a cultural inferiority complex is in time established. The conquered people thus learned to look down on their own ways of life — to denigrate their own values. Hence the conquered people’s culture fails to develop. These people begin to feel that they are strangers in their own country. They become like Wayne Williams in being over-critical of their own kind. This is what the Spaniards and Americans did in our country. Another reason why we have not developed our sense of nationalism fully — and this is probably a function of the first reason — is that we have little to be proud of as a people — as yet. Oh yes, we have our internationally acclaimed beauty queens, our world boxing champions, and our entertainers who are well-known and well-received throughout Asia, but in the field of science, art, invention, and philosophy, we are still to produce ones whom we could really be proud of. As I have said, this is probably a function of the massive inferiority complex we have developed. On the other hand, what we hear about ourselves in the largely biased international press are usually bad. In our own country we read of official corruption that is unequaled in grossness, of the wide and widening economic and social gap between the poor and the rich, of the oppression of labor by capital, of colossal acts of dishonesty among some of our leading businessmen, of professionals who think only of enriching themselves at the expense of their clients, of drivers who habitually break the laws, of an easy susceptibility to be bribed by fellow Filipinos and by foreigners, and thus, in effect, to sell our heritage for a mess of pottage. It is said that even our prostitutes prefer foreign to Filipino customers.

If we are to build our spirit of nationalism, we must first build a spirit of pride in ourselves as a people. He must not let foreigners freely insult us. A spirit of pride helps to protect us from incursions on our consciences from the outside, whether foreigner or local. In the course of four hundred years of foreign domination, we have somehow become conditioned to think that we and everything we do and produce are inferior. This condition makes us admirers and imitators of foreign ways and goods — and this stultifies the awakening of our native genius. We are told that even advertisements published here, which feature Filipinos, are much less effective than those that feature foreigners, especially Americans. Identification of products with foreign countries are here regarded as selling points in marketing. One whisky brand claims that its taste is stateside: “State-side ang lasa.” One brand of toothpaste brags that it is the most popular brand in the U.S. A locally produced orange drink has to use a Miss America to plug for it. Educated people in the Philippines read books by foreign authors and go to foreign movies almost exclusively. They usually cannot stand reading local materials. Our critics are guided by foreign criteria. Teachers educated abroad with new foreign ideas are usually regarded as superior to local products. We have to unconsciously cultivate our love for things Philippine. Love for things Philippine and pride in them include appreciation for things Philippine. I think that we are on the right tract when we require our broadcasters to air at least one Philippine musical piece for every so many foreign ones; when we set aside a week for showing exclusively Philippine movies annually; when we encourage Philippine textbook writers to write textbooks to replace those by foreign authors. In the field of philosophy, we can express our nationalism by reading the thoughts of our heroes and by encouraging our students to speak up and express their ideas and opinions on major issues. These initially may not be great ideas or great thoughts. Great ideas and great thoughts are not born in a day. Rather we must, like Socrates, help give birth to these incipient ideas, nurture them to adolescence and thence to maturity, until they are ready to take their places in the international auction block of ideas. I think we have a duty to give our students a feeling of affinity for philosophy and I think that Filipinos are inherently philosophical. Some students regard philosophy as the most irrelevant of subjects. This is probably so because the ideas we teach them are foreign ideas which are alien to our Filipino experience. We teachers often fail to relate them to specifically Filipino questions. And yet philosophy is really the most relevant of subjects, for what other subject addresses itself to the fundamental questions of every man: “Who am I?” “Where did I come from?” “Where am I going?” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What is the purpose of existence?” “What ought I to do?” “What can I really know?” What man has not been needled by these questions? What man has not at one time or another in his life not demanded answers to them?

One prevalent theory for this general feeling of the irrelevance of philosophy to our practical lives is that in the over two thousand year that men have philosophized, philosophers have not agreed on any definitive answers to the philosophical questions. There appear to be as many answers to the questions as there are philosophers who have proposed answers to them. Hence, to many a common man, philosophy seems to be an exercise in futility. I do not agree with this thesis. Many of the original problems of philosophy have in fact already been answered — or the way to their answers have in fact already been given. Note that the ancients asked themselves: “What is the world made of?” And gave various answers to this question: Water, said Thales. The Boundless, said Anaximander. Fire, according to Heraclitus. The atoms and the void, was the answer of Leucippus and Democritus. And yet today, almost all — if not all — physics textbooks are in agreement as to the ultimate, or at least the penultimate, constituents of matter. But it may be remarked that it was physics, not philosophy, which answered that question. In reply, we can only say that formerly, physics was a branch of philosophy. It was then called natural philosophy. It just happens that when a philosophical problem is answered — or nearly answered — it ceases to be a philosophical problem. The discipline is taken over by a new born science.

Who now thinks that the sun, the stars, and the planets are carried in their heavenly courses by intelligences? Science tells us it is gravity — or some curvature in the space-time continuum that is responsible for the motions of the heavenly bodies. People once thought that diseases were caused by demons and angry spirits. Today practically everyone believes that they are caused by germs or other physical malfunctioning. It used to be thought that earthquakes were caused by giant animals moving under the earth. Now we know they are caused by movements of the earth’s crust. Storms and lightning, as well as wars and pestilences, used to be blamed on the gods. Today we are wont to explain them in terms of natural causes. The question of the origin of man has been answered to the satisfaction of most scientists and philosophers as due to the mechanism of evolution theorized by Darwin, Mendel, and others. Even the beginnings of the universe is no longer regarded as unanswerable in principle and the consensus among scientists and philosophers appears to be that the world did not begin according to the literal account given by the first chapters of Genesis. Much of the human psyche and man’s consequent behavior has been explained and mapped by psychology, and a great deal of our social behavior has been clarified by sociology. The problem of the nature of Space and Time and their relation to the physical world has been greatly enlightened by the General Theory of Relativity, which incidentally, I believe, decisively — that is, as decisively as it is possible at this point, at any rate — answers the question of whether the world is mind-dependent or possesses a reality outside of the perceiving mind; whether causal laws are happenstances, as Hume claimed, or proceeds from a category of the mind, as Kant believed, or are due to the geometrical structure of Space-Time as Relativity itself suggests, and are, therefore, objective.

The reason why philosophical problems have taken so long to answer is that man must first acquire the technical and analytic tools and bring these to bear upon accurately described facts to answer those problems. Prior to the acquisition of these tools and the correct description of the relevant facts, definitive philosophical answers cannot be forthcoming. And yet, since man is impatient and demands immediate answers to his questions, he must be content with answers which contain a great deal of speculation, answers which often conflict with each other — answers which more often than not are heavy with the bias of the philosopher’s culture or temperament.

Philosophy is relevant and not a waste of time provided we take care to make it relevant to the student’s personal concerns. There has to be a balance between objective lessons and student response. We must allow the students some leeway for discussions, even if we disagree with the opinions they express. We must, if possible, situate the lessons and examples in terms of the students’ personal experiences — especially their experiences as Filipinos.

Nevertheless, a national philosophy must not be the ultimate goal of Filipino philosophizing. We must graduate from nationalism to a more global approach. Nationalism is a natural reaction, the response of a people who have been prevented by oppression or other forms of conditioning from experiencing and expressing their true nationhood. Once we have attained our sense of nationhood, once we are able to express our national experience and sentiments fluently, we must transcend nationalism.

The next great step is humanism: to think from the viewpoint of humanity. We should no longer think merely as Filipinos, as French, Germans, or Americans. We should now begin to think as men — as members of the great human race. In humanism, the world is seen as man-centered. In philosophy the main focus becomes anthropology — the philosophy of man. In philosophical anthropology, all categories are seen to revolve around man. In fact, some current philosophical anthropologists contend that there can be no world without man. The universe according to them is man-dependent. A great deal of man-centered philosophizing is going on in Europe, the Philippines, and elsewhere. These philosophizing take the forms of existentialism, phenomenology, and structuralism. It is important to focus some of our attention on man and the structures of human experience. But although this is important, this also cannot be the sole purpose of philosophy. For philosophy must also transcend the exclusive concentration on man. Philosophy must still step forward and think throw its light on being itself. Aristotle described the philosophy of being — metaphysics — as the first philosophy. And I agree. For man ultimately is a being. Because man is ultimately a being, he cannot he satisfied with any answers that is not grounded on being. For this purpose, we must adopt or discover methodologies that will allow being to emerge in our study of particulars. As Aristotle again said, to understand being is to understand everything — not in detail, but in their broad outlines. Being is Plato’s Form of the Good which — like the sun — enlightens all things and gives us understanding of all around us.

The ethics of being for me is the ethics of creative relation and enjoyment of all things. And creative enjoyment is that form of enjoyment which tends to bring out the creative best in all things — or as much of everything as we can. The ethics of being is not man-centered only, but centered on all things — regarding everything as possessing worth on its own. Yet, I think that a philosophy of being is the most completely human of all. It is the most human because it tends to bring out the best in every man, as well as in everything.

This I think is the course that Filipino philosophy ought to take.

From a lecture given in connection with the De La Salle University Philosophy Week celebration held on 15–19 March 1982.