Anti-essentialist political/social philosophy

The most popular post-Heideggerian philosopher in the department is Emmanuel Levinas. I do think that Levinas' language of totality and infinity is very helpful. And I have no complaints about Levinas as a philosopher of the human person.

The reason why I myself never pursued Levinas as much as some of my colleagues have is because I was not content with just a philosophy of the human person. Marx translated his philosophy of the human person into a political philosophy, and it was imperative for me to find a philosopher who did the same. And this was how I discovered Arendt.

The health of a political philosophy depends on a thinker's philosophy of the human person. I realized this vaguely when I was studying Marx. For my undergraduate paper on Marx, I did something that surprised even myself. For many years, I had been reading Marx's political and economic philosophy on my own, outside of class. But when I had to finally submit a paper on him, I didn't turn to any of his later works; instead, I went to the heart of Marx--his philosophy of the human person--and that is what I wrote about. That writing experience startled me. Inasmuch as Marx's historical analysis had fascinated me, his philosophy of the human person disappointed me with its narrow conception of the human.

Only now, in hindsight, do I realize how important that discovery was. The causes of all my disillusionment with Marx in succeeding years, as I moved into graduate studies, could be traced back to the narrowness of his conception of the human. Marx, for all his intelligence, was a materialist, through and through. (Perhaps it was my faith--I mean, my religious faith--that was the final line of defense against Marx.) My infatuation with Marx turned into a sense of betrayal as it began to dawn on me that Marx's faults were not merely the sorry shortcomings of an ivory tower scholar, but had directly translated into the mass murder of millions of people throughout the world in nations that had exalted him as their messiah. Many Filipino pundits want to brush over that fact, that Marx's mistakes led to totalitarianism. But the reality is there for all to see, and it happened not just once or twice but over and over again. Again, I repeat what I said in a previous post: The author is not, should not be dead, in philosophy. Every philosopher writes out of a unique historical context, and the validity and strength of his/her arguments spring from that unique historical context. Philosophy is meaningless without history. (Later, I was astounded with Arendt's brave assertion of a parallelism between two ideologies that, at the time of her writing, seemed diametrically opposed to each other: Fascism and Communism.)

Discovering Arendt was like having the shuttered windows of my mind finally opened to the brightness of the sun. So many of the questions that had been simmering throughout my college life suddenly found articulation and insight in Arendt's work. I devoured The Human Condition like I had no other book in my undergraduate years, and I pencilled in exclamation point after exclamation point in the margins of her work. I was floored, flabbergasted, amazed.

Nobody could accuse Arendt of writing ahistorically. She wrote from her heart, from her experience, from her observations, from her marriage, from her love affair. She wrote reacting to the Nazism that had sought to annihiliate her Jewishness; she wrote as a German who had been displaced from her home; she wrote as a political prisoner; she wrote as the wife of a Communist philosopher; she wrote as the lover of the most brilliant mind of the 20th century who ironically could not see what was wrong with Hitlerism; she wrote as a journalist watching Eichmann's facial expressions; she wrote as friend and colleague of Benjamin and Jaspers and Auden.

And she wrote with a philosophy of the human person that I agree with. She wrote understanding humans' Weltanschauung, but believing strongly in humans' freedom. What makes as humans, and not animals, she said, is that we can begin things entirely anew. We are unpredictable, never tied to the behavior of the past. But at any moment, we can initiate something that has never been seen before. It is this initiation that allows us to promise, and that allows us to forgive. It is this natality that makes our history not one unbroken account by a meta-author, but a fabric of millions of interwoven stories, each unique and valuable.

And--perhaps the most feminine thing about her, in comparison with all the noisy, ranting masculine thinkers of the 19th and 20th century--she believed in the sacredness of life. Of each individual life. She believed in the value of each unique story. She spoke of infancy, of babies. She wrote biographies, not just of famous men, but of a dispossessed woman, a parvenu and pariah. She believed that the dispossessed, the marginalized, the small, the meek had stories just as valuable--possibly even more valuable--in the fabric of stories that form our history.

"It's ideas that change the world," a colleague of mine said many years ago. I agree to a certain extent, if we understand, by "ideas," not just the systematic ideas of foundationalist thinkers, but the Weltanschauung, the language, the principles, and yes, the individual stories.