The outsider as Negro in modern

black novels

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

The phenomenon of the outsider both as a “marginal” man and the man “from underground” is neither new nor confined solely in American society. Yet it is not too farfetched to say that the outsider as archetype has found no turbulently modern expression than in the fabric of the Negro life in contemporary America. Notwithstanding the existence of other minority or ethnic groups in America whose encounter with mainstream American experience must of necessity produce outsiders in different guises, the black outsider is here given focus for analysis because of the overridingly explosive history, let alone the problematic character, of the Negro situation. But this study is not interested in mere sociology although that will not be brushed aside if it throws light on a fuller understanding of what it means to be a Negro on American soil. It assumes that an insightful probing into the Negro question may be found in the works of no less than the committed Negro novelists themselves.

It must be conceded that modern American writers other than the blacks have written with sympathy and understanding about the plight of the American Negro. There is Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance, or Harper Lee or Mark Twain or even William Faulkner. Yet it takes a Negro to speak for his own kind how it is to be black in a world where he is at once an insider and outsider. The major novels by two notable black writers are here selected not only for being pivotal in the literary history of modern black fiction, but also for their perceptive treatment of the Negro as outsider. Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are deemed to provide an in-depth perspective on the Negro dilemma. No pretensions are here made as to exhaustiveness of analysis, limited as it is to the works cited. Still, if some shards of truth into the Negro reality are afforded by looking into Wright’s and Ellison’s representative works, then that is justification enough for this essay. Extra-literary knowledge is brought to bear on the exploration of the black man’s problem to make possible a view of it on a wider perspective.

What is the outsider, to begin with? He is a man sundered both from within and from without. As a self-divided man, he is torn between two conflicting personalities in himself. As an outsider to society, he is painfully aware of his essential otherness or separateness from the rest of his fellowmen. He feels he is so different from others including even his family and friends. A virtual stranger even to himself, he cannot live side by side with other people without a danger of divorce. This existential situation breeds in him a sense of estrangement so that he either retreats into a shell of indifference as a kind of defense mechanism or else turns into a rebel out to defy the untenable scheme of things. Shuttling between two worlds in neither of which he fully lives, he ultimately emerges without roots; the very ground shifts under his feet so that he is rendered a vagrant without moorings, without a place to lay his head on.

The Negro outsider easily fits into the above sketch of the outsider. So, too, does a host of other fictional outsiders who may be said to be his prototypes if not actually his ancestors—from Dostoevsky’s man from the underground to Camus’ stranger or even Kafka’s K. They all share the weird feeling that there is a slip somewhere in the machinery of the universe. Both Wright and Ellison do not hide the fact of their common indebtedness to these old Continental masters. It devolves on them to translate their shared inspiration to their own personal idiom and the characteristic temper of their time and race, and in the process enable the Negro to see the spectacle of himself up against societal forces that shake the core of his being. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Camus’ Meursault are both outsiders implicated in a crime against society. In their Negro counterparts, violence also figures prominently in the surface action. For the Negro, as for their European models, it assumes a meaning larger than the life it blots out.

The Negro, like the other ethnic groups in the States, is often referred to as a hyphenated American, i.e., “Negro-American” or “non-white.” This label, attached to the blacks, explicitly suggests the blatant discrepancy in their peculiar identity. The hyphen fulfills two contradictory functions—that of dividing an entire nomenclature into dual components, or that of combining elements to form a compound. Applied to the almost nominal entity that the Negro has been reduced to, it cannot but confound his wits. It is as if splitting one’s personality into opposed fragments and then living a socially integrated, happy life as a flesh-and-blood human being is the easiest thing there is. W.E.B. DuBois says: “The Negro ever feels his twoness—an American Negro, two souls…two warring ideals in one black body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”¹

Fundamentally, the problem of the outsider as Negro is the problem of identity. Divided against himself to the quick of his being, he is in desperate need of wholeness. He is a man in search of himself. His salvation consists in finding himself, that is, in self-realization. But the whole trouble with being a Negro is that he is not even accepted for what he is. He is not defined on his own terms as though he does not really exist in his own right. He is conferred existence, if at all, only in relation to and by virtue of, the whites. It is with reference to the latter that the black man assumes a shadowy existence of sorts. The struggle for self-definition in the particular societal setting he is in thus becomes the Negro outsider’s all-consuming passion. For him it all amounts to a question of all or nothing.

It is for the foregoing reason that he cannot come to terms with a social setup that denies him the right to be himself. Richard Wright, in describing the genesis of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, writes, “…he is a product of dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man, he is all this…and he is looking for a way.”² And Wright quotes Henry James’s statement as pointedly applicable to the tragedy of the Negro: “No more fiendish punishment could be devised…than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by the members thereof….”³

The truth of the matter is that the Negro is not really turned loose if we take Bigger’s word for it. He said all his life his restrictive society never gives the chance to make something of himself. He wants to be an aviator or a soldier so that in spite of himself he could relate himself to the world and live a normal life like all the rest. The blocking forces of that world however relegate him to the status of a dog, giving him no room to assert himself as a man. In the country of the white man, one gathers from Wright, to be black is a big joke, an error, an act of crime. That is the grim reality that Bigger is confronted with. Wright explains his hero and his kind, thus: “There was in…their minds…a wild and intense longing…to belong, to be identified, to feel that they were alive as other people were…to feel satisfaction of doing job in common with others.”⁴ But in a Jim Crow country where the Klansman holds a reign of terror, where white is might, where one race of men lords it over another, that is simply next to impossible. In the words of Bigger himself, “…We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.”⁵ A compartmentalized social structure that excludes rather than includes, that smothers rather than uplifts the scums of the earth, may not long perpetuate nor serve the ends of the powerful without being met with its antithesis of rebellion.

It is against this backdrop that Wright intends Bigger’s crime to be understood. Bigger has always feared the white man before whom he cringes in humiliation and shame. Hence, he could not bring himself with all his cohorts to rob a white storekeeper although he could have done so and get away with it. He communicates with the Daltons, his white masters, mostly in timid monosyllables, saying yessuh and yessum only when spoken to. And because he fears them, he hates them all. It is true that the Daltons take him in their employ. But they are a part of the system that brutalizes the Negro. Mr. Dalton owns the slum tenements that keep the Negro in his place. Conditioned in accepting his own insignificance in the face of WASP superiority, and degraded to an almost sub-human level of penury by man’s exploitation by man, Bigger is brought to the limits of his patience or endurance and thus becomes a kind of a perverted Cartesian: I murder, therefore I exist.

The reader knows all too well that Bigger has accidentally killed Mary Dalton. He knows that in his heart of hearts he has killed a thousand Miss Daltons before, and the physical fact of her death in his hands is but its concrete objectification. In killing her, Bigger kills by extension all his white enemies of whom she is the symbol. That Bigger has killed is not however merely a matter of getting even with his oppressors. For him whose existence is rendered meaningless by a world that denies him out of hand and tears apart his personality, murder gives him a sense of freedom, of wholeness. At least it is an act he can call his own, something he has done of his own accord in assertion of his rebellion against the powers that be.

No burden could be more terrible than proving one’s inherent worth as an individual by an act of violence unconscionable as it is. But when one is driven to it in order to show a cruel world that one is not an abstraction nor “an empty husk of identity,”⁶ then one could stand up to the consequences without fear. That is why Bigger could feel no compunction nor feel sorry for it all. That is also why he refuses audience to the Negro preacher who persuades him to repent and turn to God. Bigger later throws away the cross given him, for he knows that the picture of life the preacher represents and even his own mother’s religiosity are nothing but evasions of reality, an escape from the truth he had known in the act of murder. “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ‘em…”⁷ he says. The whites and others have been blind to the truth of his own humanity, to the hard fact of his own being. Mrs. Dalton’s sightless eyes are a symbol of the blindness of the world around him, the same blindness that almost leaves him scot-free. Bigger merely wants to be treated like a human being, and not made to feel like a dog. Only Max, his lawyer, sees him as he is. For once in his life there is the one man who understands him. “You treated me like a man,”⁸ he tells Max. Purged of fear and hate by his crime, made whole at last in the core of his personal reality by a baptism of blood, he accepts now without bitterness or rancor and without hope of mercy the sentence of death meted out to him by the society he has outraged.

Ellison’s “invisible” man also pursues the same struggle for self-discovery as does Bigger. But while it is Bigger’s creator who asserts that the Negro is America’s metaphor,⁹ it is Ellison who has thought of that metaphor in the negative, that is, while other writers present the black man as all too conspicuous, he presents him as invisible.¹⁰ The dramatic impact of Bigger’s violent action is a bit subdued in those of Invisible Man. But their common search for identity and the meaning of that quest stems from the same built-in contradiction of being a black man in a white man’s world. Though they differ in their personal reactions to their respective milieus, with Bigger turning into a defiant rebel and Invisible Man remaining a nameless wanderer, they are both drop-outs of a callous society blinded by racial prejudice. But Invisible Man makes one discovery unknown to Bigger. It is that his search for himself entails struggle not only against whites but against blacks as well.

The reason why Ellison’s hero is invisible is that he is black. Black is actually the absence of color, reflecting no light. But this invisibility is more than mere opaqueness. Because he is black, no one takes notice of him. Invisible Man’s obscurity is not so much ontological as it is social. The other’s look is either one of recognition or non-recognition. If the former, then one feels sure of himself, of the solidity of his being, of his humanity. If the latter, one begins to doubt one’s existence. Invisible Man complains: “I am invisible…simply because people refuse to see me….You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds….You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world….”¹¹ A nonentity, a nobody, he can have no name. Remaining nameless, he is catapulted from one adventure to another in an attempt to discover who he is. He goes forth in complete non-identity to continuing non-identity. And he is full of illusions about life as he ventures forth into mundane reality. When reality catches up with illusion as it must, he withdraws into his hole to piece together the shattered fragments of his hopes. He then goes through some change in his outlook after being shorn of illusions. His misadventures have almost destroyed him but they made him learn his lessons.

In dealing with the white man, Invisible Man arms himself with his late grandfather’s code of subservient rebellion. In effect it is a sort of nonviolent resistance: “Son, after I’m gone, I want you to keep up the good fight….Our life is a war….I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction.”¹² These words practically ask him to put on a show of smiling acquiescence while drowning the White persecutor in a surfeit of his own venom. This ethic of disguised servility assumes that the white man is indeed powerful. But as the reverse of this could be the truth, then it simply becomes suicidal. In fact it easily makes a prey of the whites who envy the Negro for his legendary potency. They mock what they themselves do not and cannot have and then turn it against the Negro who is the real source of strength.¹³ Invisible Man, for instance, remembers having participated in a battle royal in which he fights with other Negro boys for the entertainment of white dignitaries who reward them with gold coins put in a rug that is actually electrified. Here is a case of brutish “mocking of Negro’s envied potency,”¹⁴ a potency turned against itself! What the whites themselves cannot do because of their impotence, they relish in the Negro’s doing it for them. This also explains Mr. Norton’s giving Jim Trueblood a hundred dollars after listening to this story of committing incest with his own…daughter. The local Negroes ostracize Trueblood but the whites appear to be outwardly understanding and generous to him—to undermine him with grins, agree with him to death and destruction? The very words of Invisible Man’s grandfather are turned against themselves as if to give them a dose of their own medicine.

What if the face of the enemy turns literally black? Obedience no less becomes tantamount to self-destruction. The equally devilish blocking characters in the novel are opportunistic Negroes who have gained influence by kowtowing to whites. Their loyalty is to the source of that power for whom they are ready to turn traitor to fellow Negroes. As Invisible Man is expelled from the college for Negroes for inconveniencing the white benefactor Mr. Norton, Dr. Bledsoe tells him: “I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. Yes, I had to act the nigger.”¹⁵ Bledsoe virtually stabs him in the back with a letter of reference that, he is to learn some years later, is actually derogatory. Another elderly Negro victimizes him. Brockway, a boilerman at a paint factory in the north and blindly loyal to the white management, tricks him into overpressuring a boiler which explodes and kills him.¹⁶ Nothing hurts so hard than betrayal by one’s own people. Yet, Invisible Man relates it all with ironic detachment. He is not spared the pain for sure, but he can see through the almost farcical drama in which he is caught. He muses: “…one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker…and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray.”¹⁷ Given this confusion of color and identity, real invisibility could after all be a means toward authenticity. It could even be immensely preferable to false masks.

Invisible Man’s urge to help his own people in spite of it all derives from a superior knowledge denied them in their blindness. As an outsider he has the ability to see deeper through the larger issues of life that affect the fate of everybody. This messianic motivation gets him involved with the Harlem Brotherhood. Endowed with oratorical skills, the same talent that wins for him scholarship in college, he attracts the attention of the Brotherhood which is committed to the cause of underprivileged Negroes. Encouraged by his newfound white friends, he enlists in the party. But his first speech before an assembly of Negroes on the theme of social justice gets the disapproval of the party leader and its theoretician as being evasive of ideological principles. Under strict discipline, he is made to study its scientific doctrines. Here he stumbles again on another blind alley. With Tod Clifton gone, a young party worker who wills his own death because of disillusionment with party discipline, Invisible Man later on severs relation with it and attempts to come to terms with Ras, founder of a rival organization called Black Nationalist Party that champions Negro separatism and hate of all white people. But Ras calls him a traitor and tries to have the mob lynch him. He luckily escapes and lands on a coal bin through an open manhole as the sound and fury of race riot above go on unabated.

Invisible Man feels being used by the Brotherhood as a sort of a natural resource for the furtherance of their own ends, to be dispensed with after outliving his usefulness to the party. He says: “Here I had thought that they accepted me because color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men….”¹⁸ It may be recalled that Bigger was similarly treated by the communists, except Max, who looked upon him as some kind of abstraction, a symbol of exploitation.¹⁹ The outsider who is possessed by a will to an integrated life cannot find fulfillment in political organizations that actually value ideologies more than persons. The process of dehumanization around him is thus interminable.

There is also in Invisible Man a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that he has no control over the things which happened to him. It is as if his fate is thrust upon him without his having participated in shaping it. Even the major decisions that shape his destiny are being made for him by other people who do not give him the opportunity to have his say in the matter. Or if he speaks up at all, the message of his speeches simply goes over the heads of his listeners. All this could be the result of his being a person of no consequence, of his being “invisible.” Yet his “invisibility” sharpens his hindsight that enables him to philosophically assess the meaning of the events in his life. Being nobody, no man with no name, he winds up as everyman. All through the course of his hard-luck adventures, he has donned on dubious identities, and even gets mistaken for other persons so that he is at once every man and no man in particular. Refused recognition as a man both by whites and blacks alike, he turns his gaze inward and finds for himself the authentic self that has for so long eluded him. His feverish search for identity comes within his ken at last. “All my life I had been looking for something….I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer….I am nobody but myself.”²⁰

The world of Invisible Man is a dizzying wasteland of black and white, each vying with the other in convincing him of his nonexistence. For all that, having encountered his authentic selfhood after peeling off the false ones, and dying to them all, he achieves a new sense of freedom. This sense of personal liberty, born of self-discovery, makes him realize his infinite capacity to love. “In spite of it all, I find that I love,”²¹ he says. From that freedom premised on love originates the idea of social responsibility, an almost mystical consciousness of one’s stake in the fate of all. Thus he says as the novel winds up, “…even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.”²² In saying this, Invisible Man’s story assumes a far-ranging meaning outside the race controversy, even beyond the ambience of the fictional landscape delineated with virtuoso strokes. After the storm of his life and the better wisdom gained underground, he hopes to transform the world without. Reculer pour mieux sauter. Invisible Man on the higher frequencies speaks for us all who are engaged in the business of living in a community of people who are rendered puppets of their own conditioning. His quest becomes ours, too.

In the case of Bigger Thomas, the world is polarized into a clear-cut duality of black and white, and to the latter he vents the full force of his fury. Unlike Invisible Man, the essence of his entire being is anchored on hate, which is actually but the inability to love. His quarrel with society is the protest of life wronged and maimed to fit the sinister schemes of those who exercise power. Bigger Thomas revolts to show that no one can willfully abuse the dignity of a human being without having to pay the price for it. As Bigger in prison examines the loose ends of his life, he goes a bit further in the contemplation of the larger purposes of existence. He takes the long view and raises the eternal questions: “If he were nothing, if this were all, then why could he not die without hesitancy?...Why this eternal reaching out for something that was not there?”²³ And as Bigger’s story draws to a close, one realizes that his revolt is not really confined within the limits of his immediate environment, but has taken on a metaphysical dimension. His crime is also a dramatic defiance of the transcendent principle operating in a temporal scheme that to him makes no sense. He asks thus: “Why this black gulf between him and the world, warm red blood here and cold blue sky there, and never a wholeness, a oneness, a meeting of the two?”²⁴

The final redemption of the outsider as Negro may come about when people around him begin to see him less of a Negro and more of a human being. From the moment the black man himself transcends the parochial dichotomies of color or lack of it, he stands above the ordinary rabble in the awareness of the essential oneness of all that live. Invisible Man’s credo of social responsibility and Bigger’s metaphysical questioning of the human predicament indicate that they may not have strayed too far afield. To really find back one’s feet upon the right track would entail a radical turnaround of consciousness so that, seeing oneself in the other, there really is neither underdog nor topdog, neither black nor white but only one common humanity under the skin.

ENDNOTES

1 Quoted by Addison Gayle Jr. (ed.) The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1972), xxi.

2 Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), xxxi.

3 Quoted by Sanders Redding, Soon One Morning (New York: Alfred A.Knoff, 1963), 56.

4 Wright, op.cit.

5 Wright, ibid.,

6 Richard Wright’s term quoted by Edward Margoli, ed., The Art of Richard Wright (Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 21.

7 Wright, ibid., 358.

8 Wright, ibid., 354.

9 Quoted by M.G. Cooke (ed), Modern Black Novelists (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 1.

10 Albert H. Morelicad, Harold Blum and Others, One Hundred Great American Novels (The New American Library, 1966), 194.

11 Ralph Waldo Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, Inc., 1947-8, 1952), 3.

12 Ellison, ibid., 19.

13 Cooke, op.cit., 66-67.

14 Cooke, ibid.

15 Ellison, passim,

16 Ellison, ibid., 436.

17 Ellison, ibid., 12.

18 Ellison, ibid., 18.

19 Ellison, ibid., 437.

20 Ellison, ibid.

21 Wright, op.cit., 351-352.

22 Wright, ibid.

23Wright. ibid.

24Wright, ibid.

  

Si isay ca man?

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

“Who do you think you are?” Si isay ca man?

This is invariably the question we throw at somebody who comes on too strong or happens to be overbearingly haughty to our sensibilities. We ordinarily have very little patience for the ego-tripper, much more so with the egomaniacal barbarian. If someone comes along who puts on airs for one reason or another, we can hardly wait to cut him or her to size instead of just letting the guy alone. What is it that the small-town braggart, the ordinary citizen with delusions of grandeur, or the arrogant public official drunk with power have in common? Well, they all share one thing—a bloated ego.

Why does that kind of behavior get on our nerves? Moreover, why is it that on the other hand we lavish praises on an individual who is known for his or her modesty, who does not puff up himself or herself with pride even when there is every reason to do so? Something in our value system prompts us to favor one as admirable and despise the other as undesirable. I suppose it is not just an issue of ethics. It is also a question of aesthetics. When we disapprove of somebody’s actuations, we do not only say “sala.” We also say “macanos.” One of Shakespeare’s characters remarked that it is great to have a giant’s strength, but that it is cruelty to use it like a giant. What we truly are simply speaks for itself. There is really no need for self-advertisement.

We are not here advocating non-assertiveness or self-deprecation as virtues par excellence. Even humility becomes vice when indulged in self-consciously. In which case it becomes false modesty. Besides, weakness is the refuge of the inferior. The great German philosopher Nietzsche frowned upon meekness and lack of elan vital as roadblocks to the full realization of man’s potentials for greatness. There is in fact nothing wrong with self-affirmation and a sense of satisfaction in one’s noteworthy achievements. Superior strength of character, intelligence and ability are the hallmarks required of those who would dare to make a difference or escape from the human antheap. In the works of Ayn Rand, enlightened self-interest and native talent are extolled as the cornerstones of the individual’s accomplishments. Timidity has no room in the fictional edifice she fashioned or the philosophy she conceived. One of her books bears this catchy title ”The Virtue of Selfishness.” Oh, well.

At this juncture, it would be immensely useful to clarify, if we can, the commonly muddled issue as to whether or not selfishness is the same as self-love. Let us have for our springboard Christ’s command “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This sentence may be considered as elliptical as it can be restated fully as “You shall love your neighbor as (you love) yourself.” But then the original formulation stands: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So, it is not really loving one’s neighbor as if he or she were one’s own self, but loving one’s neighbor as oneself. There is here no literal separation or division between oneself and one’s neighbor. There is only a unity. At any rate, even if we take the explicit rendering of Christ’s original statement, it is still evident that love of others is premised upon love of one’s self. They are not diametrically opposed since, to begin with, the latter is the precondition of the former. Self-love then does not really run counter to love of others. It is evidently true that I cannot love my neighbor if I do not love myself in the first place. Love of oneself and love of neighbor are thus not mutually exclusive but interlocked.

Now, the minute I love myself solely without regard for the other so that I only think and act in furtherance of my own self-interest, that self-love all too easily turns into selfishness. Then, we see the birth of a monster that goes by the name of narcissism.  On the other hand, once I sacrifice myself for others even at my own expense, or even perhaps at the cost of my own life, not that I love myself less but that I love others more, then that gesture amounts to what is called as altruism, the highest form of love that is divine. The Greek word for it is “agape.” Jesus Christ put it thus: “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lays down his life for his friends.”

Agapeic love was exemplified by Christ himself when he submitted Himself for humanity’s redemption. But the question naturally surfaces: Is anyone, human as we are, capable of such kind of love, which is absolutely unselfish? May it not be asserted that only Christ can love in this manner as He is the greatest expression of God’s own love for mankind? In modern situation ethics, all moral laws are considered to be relative, depending upon the concrete surrounding circumstances. But there is one exception. The law of love is declared to be absolute. Its command is: "Love and do what you will." The unwritten assumption is that if any man can but love in the agapeic sense, he cannot make any moral error. Thus it is that moral perfection is achieved through its highest expression in unconditional self-giving.

Are there stories that unmistakably demonstrate that ordinary humanity is capable of manifesting “agape” in our dealings with one another? Well, I suppose we may not be disappointed. A poem by Phoebe Cary, “A Leak in the Dyke” comes to mind. It tells the story of a heroic Dutch boy who plugged the leaking dyke with his finger to save his people from drowning and died in the process. There is too the story of Sydney Carton in Charles Dicken’s novel,  A Tale of Two Cities, who decided to be decapitated in the guillotine in place of another man for the sake of the woman he loved, even if he knew his love would remain unrequited. But these are fictive characters. Are there flesh-and-blood heroes who offered their lives in self-sacrifice? 

In 1990, following the 7.8 Ms Luzon killer quake which claimed the lives of countless people trapped in the debris of collapsed buildings, a man labored his way through the rubble of Hyatt Hotel in Baguio City and saved the lives of a number of injured victims. The imminent danger attendant to what he was doing did not deter him from his determination to save others. As he was pulling one more wounded victim to safety, a concrete block mortally struck him down. He was buried alive there together with the wounded that he had tried to rescue.

Another true story of bravery and heroism happened in 1993 during the Krus sa Wawa feast, an annual Bocaue pagoda festival. A 13-year-old boy pulled out from the jaws of death four kids who would have drowned when the pagoda capsized. He did not think of his own personal safety while swimming to their rescue. Unfortunately, he died after saving the kids from drowning.

A recent incident was reported on TV involving a father who threw himself in front of a speeding motorcycle to shield his daughter from being directly hit. True, he suffered serious physical injuries. To him, however, his broken bones were nothing compared to the fact that his daughter was spared what could have been a certain death. I bet there are yet more true-to-life stories of rescue, perhaps even more spectacular, that may not have been reported in the news. But for our purposes here, let these three real incidents suffice.

These guys may not have heard of “agape.” All they knew was that in those crucial moments they were badly needed by fellow human beings in distress. And they responded spontaneously without counting the cost to themselves. It may then be asked:  What made them do their selfless acts? For personal glory? That’s out of the question. Or is it because they must have felt it in their bones that deep within they and those victims were one? An idiom in Pilipino expresses this idea beautifully: Lukso ng dugo.

Joseph Campbell made mention of the German philosopher Schopenhauer whose interest was said to be aroused by similar incidents recounted above. It struck the latter as curious what is it in the human makeup that impels us to perform selfless acts of heroism. The conclusion he reached is that though our individuality is essential in functioning on our plane of manifestation, yet our affinity with one another is more than just physical. It is true that the life force coursing through the veins and arteries of our separate systems is one and the same, even as the current flowing through or lighting up a series of different electric bulbs is one and the same. Campbell said that our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy. But even more than our common humanity or blood kinship, what truly binds us together is one spirit, one consciousness.

So then, once we transcend our separate self-sense and attain true communion with our fellowmen, we won’t be hard put to find it in our hearts to make allowance for the foibles of our pet peeves, the ones with bloated egoes. We can perhaps excuse the most offensive A.H. hereabouts on the ground that s/he may not be fully aware of the irritating impression s/he is creating in the other people's perception. Besides, legions are there who have not awakened to the eternal dimension of their individuality, but content merely to act out the vanity and quirks of their person. If it were not so, then they would have known what to say with conviction when asked, "Si isay ca man?"  

The knowledge of ‘what is’

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

There is a process called defamiliarization, that is, triggering in an individual a mental somersault such that he now sees more truly what heretofore he assumes to have seen all the time.

Indeed, there is a need to shake off the snowblindness deceiving us into thinking that we already know when we do not, or see what we see not. Then perhaps the arrogance of bigotry, the intolerance of one-track mindedness, or the pettiness of intellectual snobbery would give in to the mellowness that comes with the setting in of what could be the beginning of wisdom--to know that one does not know enough and admit it.

Socrates, said to be the wisest of the Greeks, laid no claim to knowledge. He said he knew that he knew not. The irony is that the truly wise profess ignorance, the truly virtuous the first ones not to know they are virtuous. And when the converse of this happens, when the worst, as Yeats put it, are full of passionate intensity, trouble begins.

Then, too, there is a certain presumptuousness in any thought system purporting to say the final word on everything. Reality or ’what is’ cannot be forced into the Procrustean formula of any one particular discipline. In fact, a field of study that does not redefine its conclusions or reexamine its methods may soon become fragmented and find itself irrelevant. At least this should be clear after an acquaintance with Korzybski’s general semantics. Hence, the current vogue of presenting old academic wines in new wineskins: the new journalism, the new mathematics, the new morality, etc. Yet the so-called new is but the old seen through the opposite end of the barrel.

What is needed in the effort to reinvent an effective program of study for our college students is the realization that knowledge is one and its subsequent specializations should not blind us to their essential interrelatedness. No less imperative, if not more so, is the awareness that thought, which is the instrument of knowledge, is itself limited. Only then can we move ahead in our academic journey.

I.Q. or E.Q.?

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

It is not really a question of one or the other. The integral view sees the human being’s system of control as consisting of rational intelligence (IQ) and emotional maturity (EQ). In the academe, however, brainpower has been traditionally held as the hallmark of genius; hence, the overemphasis on academic excellence. Academicians worship at the altar of critical thinking and go on to define man as a rational being. This is as it should be.

Nevertheless, what is glossed over is the fact that there is such a thing as the egotism of the intellect or the pride of reason which could bring man to his downfall. This has been dramatically exemplified by Dostoevsky in the figure of Ivan Karamazov whose intellectual pride is at the root of his atheistic defiance of God and his eventual suicide. Man’s reason cannot carry him beyond a certain point.

There is something parochial if not simplistic in the view of man as solely a rational animal. Obviously, he is much else besides. As Joseph Campbell would say, man is an entity with a thousand faces. It must be a recognition of this truth that a book which redefines intelligence has become a New York Times bestseller and whose subject, which is also its title--emotional intelligence--was featured as the cover story in one of the issues of Time.

The main thesis of the aforesaid book is that emotional competence could matter more than IQ as a determinant of success in life. This conclusion is not idle speculation but has actually been buttressed by scientific research. Intelligence, interpreted as intellectual capacity, is too limited a conception as there are other abilities within our power like love, compassion, etc. The author, Daniel Goleman, shows these other forms of intelligence as factors that explain why sometimes bright people fail and the not-so-smart ones succeed.

The bottomline is that along with the cultivation of the mind, there should be the education of the heart. Emotional literacy could spell the difference for our survival. We need to rediscover the capacity for feeling, for friendliness, for goodwill if we are to transform our world sundered as it is by man’s inhumanity to man.

The uncanny world of Franz Kafka

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

Franz Kafka’s name has become synonymous with the “absurd.” Dubbed by Time’s Lance Morrow as a “genius of the blackest impulses,” Kafka explored in his novels and stories the sense of the absurd in the human condition and the ways people variously reacted to it. His vision of the world is apocalyptic and gloomy, yet his fictional works may deepen our sensibilities to hitherto unsuspected modes of feeling, or even possibly sharpen our awareness of hitherto unfamiliar dimensions of human reality.

But just what is the absurd? Albert Camus, a French Nobel prizewinning writer, described it as the feeling of unrelatedness to the scheme of things; or of estrangement from a world bereft of metaphysical foundation without being able to escape it. This state of affairs may bring about fits of utter helplessness as well as hopelessness; or it may impel one to defiant rebellion. This weird feeling may be triggered by a realization of this surreal predicament; or it is the uncanny feeling itself that first registers the idea of absurdity. Whichever way it is, the absurd is more a matter of emotional attitude than a philosophic stance.

In fact, as a writer Kafka never consciously engaged in a philosophic exposition of his worldview nor was he specifically thinking of the absurd in Camus’s terms. Yet it may be said that he is Camus’ precursor. In one of Camus’ philosophical essays, Kafka’s stories were used to substantiate absurdist views. I take this as evidence of the affinity of Camus’ artistic temperament with Kafka’s, though they lived and wrote at different times and in different cultural contexts.

Kafka pictures man as a helpless pawn in a universe that he cannot comprehend. His major novels, The Trial and The Castle, not to mention his short works, expose the reader to the harrowing experience, if only vicariously, of being sundered both from within psychologically and from without by forces which he cannot control, much less overcome. Such an experience may be more graphically described by the metaphor of the rim of the wheel that endlessly turns round and round without getting any nearer the hub or center. This conveys the impression of motion that does not, as in a dream, get one any farther thereby resulting in giddiness or exhaustion. Yet one continually renews the effort, hoping against hope that the next turn would bring him somewhere somehow. We have here a retelling in modern trappings of the tragedy of Sisyphus, the mythological symbol of the absurd.

The Trial relates the story of Joseph K. who one morning finds himself arrested for a crime he never committed. Nor is the charge specified. He wears himself out trying to vindicate himself. But the court proceedings are so bungled and muddled that he never really gets in direct contact with the judges. He gets himself entangled in a network of relationships that set him adrift from the court instead of bringing him right to those who would give him justice. In the end, two executioners lead him away and stab him right through the heart.

Thinly characterized, Joseph K.’s traits are not so striking. But his story assumes a wide-ranging significance for contemporary man who lives in an increasingly baffling world. Through Joseph K.’s struggles, we are given an artistic rendering of the sense of futility that gnaws at the heart of man as he wades through the maze of criss-crossing paths, which in the modern setting could assume many forms such as bureaucratic hierarchies that lead astray the very people they profess to serve, or establishments and institutions that dehumanize human beings.

The Trial also delivers the message that for man there could be no permanent security. He is forever on trial—his loves, friendships, freedom or even his very own life. One of the imperatives for his survival is vigilance lest any lapse of attention could spell disaster. How far can he hold out in the strife is the crucial question, for the odds are against him. Right at the beginning, his eventual destruction is a foregone conclusion. Man ab initio is implicated in a crime he could not figure out. What really is his original sin—the crime perhaps of being alive? But where is the judge who will mete out the sentence? He is nowhere around. At best the accused may lay down his defense before the lower functionaries of the Law while his fate is being decided—or has it been already decided?—by the invisible hands of the powers that be. It is a terrifying world in which the accused can have no say nor influence in the forces that shape his destiny. What can he truly accomplish for his own salvation when he has no understanding of the workings of the machinery of justice?

“Like a dog!” was Joseph K.’s death rattle “as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.” Zhivago’s utterance that “man does not die in a ditch like a dog” would be mere cant for Joseph K. who had spent himself out vainly seeking vindication in the eyes of the judge who remained inaccessible. The absence and remoteness of the authority that holds in his hand man’s fate down here is nothing short of a cruel joke. Yet even to say that would not perhaps be right. We are told that it is wrong to say anything at all about the absent judge because his ways are not our ways, his ways being beyond our human measure of good and evil. Thus, there is no chance that the judge and the defendant can ever see eye to eye. So, Joseph K. dies as he must. True, a shadowy figure stretched out his arms by the window as Joseph K. was being executed. But whether in sympathy or to help he could not figure out. All the same he died. That, in Joseph K.’s world as in ours is the only thing certain.

In the Fable of the Law recounted to Joseph K. by the priest, a man, after spending a lifetime seeking entry to the Law whose door, so the guard tells him, was intended only for him, dies without being admitted to it. Is this not also a telling allegory of the tragic futility of man’s struggle to know the mystery of being so he may understand the meaning of his being human? What is the reason and justification of the sentence of death which hangs over the head of every man or woman? And, what of the unjustified sufferings of the innocent, the trumped-up accusations and high-handed persecutions of the underdog? If the lot allotted to man is to be truly vindicated, his conception of what is just must be satisfied on his own terms.

What has been said so far about Joseph K. may also be said of the other K. in The Castle, Kafka’s unfinished novel. Here, the protagonist is a land surveyor who comes to the village to survey an estate owned by a certain Count Westwest. There stands a nearby hill on which perches a castle that houses government offices. K. decides to go right to it for instructions. It turns out that all his efforts to reach it only lead him astray. The villagers, his assistants, or even his mistress are of no help to him either. All of them even prove to be stumbling blocks. At long last, an official tells him to try a different approach to succeed. But K. in his weariness has fallen asleep, not hearing the message. K. goes on pursuing his goal until he dies of exhaustion.

K. fares no better than Joseph K. He, too, goes through endless rounds of futile attempts to contact the authority that would confer meaning to his life and vocation as a surveyor. Unseen powers adversely influence and rebuff his every movement. Even the roads mislead him instead of bringing him right to his destination. “For the street…did not lead up to the Castle hill, it only made towards it, and then as if deliberately, turned aside, and though it did not lead him away from the Castle, it got no nearer to it either….”

The maze he contends with could be endless like the Chinese contraption of the box within the box within the box and so on ad infinitum. K., like his counterpart in The Trial, gets himself locked up in a trammel of relationships that he mistakenly supposes to bring him close to the distant authority. For instance, he sees in Frieda a link to get Klamm, a Castle functionary, by the tail. So, he wins her love to have a hold on her and Klamm, her lover. But Klamm proves to be elusive. The village superintendent cannot help him beyond impressing upon him the uncertainty of his summons, a fact that somehow ensures him the benefit of the doubt, that is, of not being summarily thrown out of the village. The assistants, too, turn out to be mere nuisances.

Before long, K.’s struggle to obtain recognition from the Castle of his status in the village as a surveyor practically becomes a fight for his survival as a human being. “Never yet has K. seen vocation and life so interlaced that sometimes one might think that they have exchanged places.” Even the Castle begins to mean to him something more than the physical structure that it is. “The Castle…lay silent as ever; never yet has K. seen there the slightest sign of life…perhaps it was quite impossible to recognize anything at that distance, and yet the eye demanded it and could not endure that stillness. When K. looks at the Castle, often it seemed to him as if he were observing someone who sat there gazing in front of him, not lost in thought and so oblivious of everything, but free and untroubled, as if he were alone with nobody to observe him, and yet must notice that he was observed, and all the same remained with his calm not even slightly disturbed…and the gaze of the observer could not remain concentrated there, but slid away.” It is these impressions of K. that support a metaphysical reading of his story.

Notwithstanding the transcendent aspect, the element of the absurd permeates the whole atmosphere of the Castle. The dark, menacing surroundings in which K. gropes his way to it accentuate all too well the irrationality of his situation. Though mentioned early in the narrative, the Castle owner never appears for once. The configuration of this condition recalls Camus’ description of “the vast indifference of the sky” or more blatantly Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead.” The hiddenness of God and his silence on the question of man’s irrational sufferings and repetitive but fruitless strivings can drive man to bouts of anxiety and despair. Man really needs a respite if not a reprieve in the Sartrian sense.

In the Castle bureau, there is “the ludicrous bungling…which in certain circumstances may decide the life of a human being.” The arbitrary will, the illogicality, or even downright caprice of whoever holds man’s fate in his hands puzzles him out of his wits. It appears that nothing he may do can alter a whit what has been decreed for him from the foundation of the world. What can possibly close the gulf between the human and the Divine?

For all these, The Castle is tinged with a faint glimmer of promise. For the first time, a Castle functionary deigned to speak to K. about how to get ahead with his bid to reach the Castle which, so he is told, also desired to communicate with him. However, at the moment when the path was being charted to him, he slept off his weariness and missed his chance. The supposed ending of the novel resembles the foregoing scene in that a gesture in K.’s favor was definitely made, though quite ironical and no less absurd. Kafka was said to have told his literary executor that as K. lay dying, the Castle sent him the message authorizing him to live and work in the village at long last. At least K. might have died in that knowledge. On that score, The Castle may be said to represent an advance in Kafka’s tragic view of man, just as The Plague moves beyond The Stranger as expressive of Camus’ vision of the human adventure. Yet, as long as the question is not settled why Kafka failed to write down that ending to his novel, he stands identified with his works as they were written, not as they were supposed to have been written.

What is conspicuous in both novels, as already noted, is the absence of the judge or the lord of the castle. The continued non-appearance of these authority figures and the fact that they are unreachable has alienated no end Joseph K and K. It is the chief cause of their travails, leaving them to their own devices absolutely clueless and bewildered as to what to make sense of their situation. It is the ultimate source of power that confers support and authenticity to existence. Absent that and the loss of direction and significance leaves one with a sense of futility and despair. So, the wielder of authority to whom is paid obeisance provides validation and legitimacy through the act of confirmation that puts a closure to uncertainty. No such reassurance from the governing entity in the temporal order was enjoyed either by Joseph K. or K.

It may be said that the tragic sense conveyed in these novels rests upon a theology that posits the total eclipse of God in a world gone mad, a theological stance that holds a Maker apart from His creatures, one that emphasizes the chasm that separates God and man. The Divine here is completely other, distant, and uncaring about the affairs of mortals. This is fundamentally a Western perspective that has spawned secular humanism, atheism and nihilism. In the atheistic brand of existentialism, defiance of the transcendent order makes for dramatic, if nauseating, story line. The feeling of the absurd springs from too much reliance upon dualistic thinking that is evidently inadequate in plumbing the depths of the multi-dimensional enigma that human reality is.

Kafka was quoted as saying that no people sing with such pure voices as those who live in deepest hell; and what we take for the song of angels is their song. He may well have spoken for himself personally as he himself went through insufferable turmoil in his private relationships—with his father especially. He once remarked that all his fictional works were long letters to his father who could not understand him; and his struggles with him must have been waged in the inferno of his subconscious steeped, according to his biographies, in neurosis and guilt. Just as he sought relief in the light of his literary Muse, so his protagonists battled through their condition by relying on their native intelligence. The rub of it all is that in the main their attempts to withstand the overwhelming pressures that threatened them on all sides amounted to striving after the wind.

The aridity, the dreary bleakness, the irrationality of the human lot projected through the spectrum of Kafka’s tragic vision cannot but bring about in us what in higher criticism is called as the “shock of recognition.” We find ourselves gasping for breath in his fictional landscape in which we witness disturbing scenarios of the spectacle of human beings pitted against forces that put to the test the limits of their endurance. Today, his fiction is regarded as “monuments to the cloven spirit of the 20^th century.”

“We must love one another or die”

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

Human beings have twice gone berserk on a global scale within the short span of three decades. With over thirty-seven million casualties, slaughtered and injured, the incalculable havoc and dislocation wrought by World Wars I & II are brutal historical facts whose shocking reality should have brought us to our senses.

That is why in the wake of the last war the United Nations was set up to launch concerted campaigns against the birthing of war in the mind of man. This international body reaffirms the universal brotherhood of man regardless of nationality or skin pigmentation, religious or political creeds, social standing, age or gender.

Even so, we have all but forgotten that there are certain inexorable laws that govern human existence, violation of which punishes the offender right on the spot. One such law is the principle of causation, of action and reaction, which holds that a cause is behind every effect, which in turn becomes the cause of another effect, and so on down the line.

Hence, hate begets hate. Arrogant show of force can only be met with a corresponding show of force locking the contending parties in a vicious circle of conflict. Only love can overcome hatred. The timeless truth of this precept was shown by Jesus Christ who taught it more than two thousand years ago; Gautama Siddharta likewise preached the same guiding principle some six centuries earlier than Christ.

Still, what rules our lives is violence. We are a hard-headed lot. When we were created the command was to subdue the earth, but not one another. There is not much option for humankind if we are to ensure our very survival on this planet; and the sooner we realize this, the better for us. Certainly, armed conflict, brute force or any form of violence is not the way to go. The mushroom clouds that once hovered over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are wicked reminders that technologically we have it in our hands to wipe out the human race from the face of this planet. An eminent poet could not have said it better, “We must love one another or die.” Love is our redemption. There is no other.

But when shall we ever wake up and learn our lessons so that history is literally stopped from repeating itself in the groove of eternal recurrence? When it is finally too late for all of us?

Vaclav Havel, playwright and three-time president of the Czech Republic, said that if the world is to change for the better there must be a change in human consciousness. We are all caught in the prison of our own limited thinking, and this is the bane of every man, of every nationality. Was this not the cause of such madness as Hitler’s “final solution” or such recent phenomenon as “ethnic cleansing” or even in the extended sense the gruesome tragedy of the September 11 attacks? The animal instinct of a home turf or being ethnocentric distorts an individual’s otherwise broad orientation in the same way that a pair of blinkers limits a horse’s peripheral vision.

It is imperative that we see with the eyes of the poet Archibald MacLeish as he contemplated the view of the earth as seen from outer space. “To see the earth,” he wrote, “as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on the bright loveliness in the eternal cold--brothers who know now we are truly brothers.” Only an enlarged vision, an expanded consciousness can enable us to regard that fellow next door as our brother or sister and not an alien. But getting to the farther reaches of consciousness is an inward journey. The way without is the way within. No other path could there be. As the Chinese put it, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step. To travel far we must begin near. The nearest, of course, is our own mind.

Indeed, we have to find a different way of relating to one another--as individuals or as a community of nations. We have to begin our exploration in the inner space within ourselves. This is the wisdom which the ancient sages of the East and the West have come upon ages back. The germ of the Eternal resides in the inner space of the heart and when once you and I have realized our own identity with “It” as well as our oneness with each other, not intellectually but actually, then there will come about a flourishing of goodwill and goodness in everyone.

Then at last peace shall descend in our lives. Not in some distant future, but right here and now.

The new morality and the way

of Aristotle

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

Should a person tell a lie? Or should any man or woman engage in premarital sex? Or may abortion be performed on a woman? The foregoing issues are a few of the thousand and one common yet critical problems that pressingly demand answers resolved in the individual's forum of conscience. How would a situationist go about these problems? And what would Aristotle, the Greek encyclopedic thinker, have to say about the same?

This essay is concerned in the main with mapping out of commonalities in the working approaches of the two aforementioned types of casuists that are separated from each other by some two thousand four hundred years. Hence, I have advisedly used the connective "and" in our title, the assumption being that the two concepts in fact lend themselves to comparison. Then after a comparative analysis of the philosophic procedure of Situation Ethics, so called The New Morality, and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, a look at how the methodologies of the two ethical theories work with our sample questions will be done. This will be followed by some concluding comments about the implications of both ethical systems to the moral problems facing humans in contemporary society.

Situation Ethics has emerged out of a markedly 20th century syndrome: the philosophic movement that posits an absurd world devoid of meaning in which man himself is solely responsible in creating the values he chooses to live by and the sociological phenomenon of secularization in which the temporal process of changing the world devolves squarely upon man's shoulders and not thrown up upon some transcendent, providential Heaven. Harvey Cox observes: "Paul Tillich once called this age...'the land of broken symbols'--an apt image. Secular man's values have been deconsecrated, shorn of any claim to ultimate significance. Like nature and politics, they are no longer the direct expression of Divine will."¹  In the wake of this distinctively modern, or postmodern, developments, we see man fall back upon himself, alienated, quite bewildered, and virtually left with nothing but his terrible freedom.

The pagan ethics of Aristotle, on the other hand, was written in the 4th century B.C. as a carryover of an anthropocentric concern so characteristic of Hellenic culture over the question of man's place in the universe, the nature of his being and the meaning of his existence. And Aristotle, in trying to make sense of human life and its purpose, charted his way through the ticklish issue by making man himself as the point of departure. This is to say that he made man himself the standard and not some outside measure. It is in this respect that Aristotle broke faith with some fundamental points in the philosophic idealism of his teacher Plato, especially with respect to the treatment of the ethical question of human good and evil.

Then, of course, it goes without saying that across the centuries, from Aristotle or even Plato and the pre-Socratics to the modern-day situationists, many a different ethical systems were fashioned to suit the temper and exigencies of the times or particular epoch. Yet the methods of the whole spectrum of Western moral philosophies may be narrowed down, notwithstanding the various shades in-between, to two diametrically opposed philosophic approaches, namely the Platonic and the Aristotelian. And just as the procedure in Nicomachean ethics in dealing with  moral questions developed in reaction to Platonism, so the situationist approach may be said to be an index of the modern temper, a struggle of sorts against the crippling constraints of Sunday school morality. It is in this regard that both ethical philosophies share a common denominator. The situationist pits himself against the moral absolutes of traditional church morality with all its emphasis on guilt and repentance; Aristotle directed his assault against the universals of Plato who looks upon matter as an insubstantial will-o'-the-wisp.

What course of action should an individual take in the face of problems that call for sound moral judgment such as those which we have posed at the outset? Are there universal norms by which the morality of human acts may be gauged once and for all? The schoolmen have provided them in black-and-white. The situationist would reply by saying that everything is relative. And because human reality is characterized, among other things, by eternal flux, it is claimed that there is thereby no ultimate yardstick that can correctly measure the multifaceted terrain of human behavior, in the same manner that no prefabricated shoe-model can fit everybody's feet or even those of a single individual at various stages of growth. Situationism is case-oriented, that is, it proceeds by factoring in the ensemble of circumstances surrounding the act, and only in accordance with the demands of the particular case in a given context that a decision or moral pronouncement is made.

Aristotle, in a similar vein, begins with particular perceptual fact. As a relativist, he too recognizes no immutable standard of moral truth. His ethics reasons to first principles (a posteriori), not from them (a priori). In Aristotle's conception, individual things are the primary substance, a view that runs counter against Plato's universal ideas having an absolute and eternal, objective existence in some sort of supra-mundane realm of the universe. Like his situationist brother, he does full justice to the concrete particularity of individual facts, for, in his methodology, the concrete fact is the beginning, the starting point. He says: "... When we are treating of conduct, it is experience of the facts of life that is the test of truth, for here it is experience that has the last word. We are bound then in our ethical studies to bring our preliminary statement of the case to the test of the facts of life...."²  And in view of the irregular character of the empirical data of human acts, no preconceived deductions can adequately deal with them. Therefore, the procedure which Aristotle deemed proper to ethics as a practical field of study is descriptive rather than prescriptive, that means working with contingent thing as the given, he goes on to make deliberative choice without forgetting that his moral choice are not 100% demonstrable. This is actually non-arbitrary, even superior, compared to imposing conceptual categories on the given whose uniqueness all too often escapes the pale of general codes that more often than not are but mental constructs.

The relativization of absolute values, however, may carry with it its own seeds of danger--that of absolutizing the relative. And this can easily fall into ethical anarchism. To grant that one man's meat is another man's poison is to grant that all things are absolutely relative--which is to ultimately grant that anything goes. If any man must subjectively decide for himself what is good or bad, then morality suffers the existentially conditioned and circumscribed perspective of the individual. To claim that what I personally think is right is the right certainly amounts to solipsism pure and simple.

Modern situation ethics, in the formulation of Joseph Fletcher, parries the objection by   contending that ethics is relational. It operates by testing the truth of morality in the crucible of interpersonal relationships. Man does not act ethically except in relationship to himself and his fellow man. His actions are done relative to the human social context. Hence, situation ethics is personalistic. In other words, it is other-directed. It asks the moral agent, in coming to grips with the conflicting points in a dilemma, to do the most loving thing under the circumstances. It is not just a question of doing or acting according to the requirements of the occasion simply because one is left, after the manner of a despairing Stoic, with no choice but to adapt his will to the inexorable scheme of things he cannot alter. It is a question of willing the greatest good of the individual, his well-being, after the shape and every angle of the human setting have been duly taken into consideration.

The situationist's invocation of the love ethic while declaring all other moral laws to be relative appears to be a logical self-contradiction comparable to the self-contradiction of the postmodernist when he declares that “all absolute principles are not true.” But love actually lends a liberating dimension to the rigidity of “absolute relativism,” a phrase, which is no less a contradiction in terms. How else, indeed, can one transcend the hard-and-fixed confines of an otherwise subjective morality without at the same time losing sight of the particulars of the given case except by the introduction of an ethic of concern, an outgoing regard for the individual for his own sake? It is assumed that a human agent, acting on the path of love, cannot err in matters moral. The situationist’s categorical imperative is the Augustinian precept “Love and do what you will.” The corollary to that may be stated thus: “The only sin is the failure to love.” The whole of the law and the prophets was summed up by Jesus Christ in terms of the command to love God, to love God in the neighbor, and to love the latter as one’s self. Immanuel Kant’s second maxim has special relevance here. It says: “Treat persons as ends, never as means.” Fletcher writes in a similar vein: “Love is of people, by people, and for people. Loving actions are the only conduct permissible.”³

In saying that man is a social animal, Aristotle shares the situationist’s recognition of the centrality of the social dimension in human reality. That is why he made politics an integral part of the study of ethics. That is also why he devoted Bks. VIII & IX of the Nicomachean Ethics to a longish discussion of the subject of friendship in which he discussed the moral significance of “Philia” (love between friends) as an essential component of man’s life as a social being. In fact he describes here the good qualities of those who lay down their lives for others—prefiguring a few hundred years the man who, in a supreme act of self-giving, acted out his very own words: “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Within the frame of reference of the body politic, Aristotle first focused his field of vision to an in-depth study of man as the ethical subject. Unhampered by no preconceived notions of man, he proceeds with the teleological observation that all things have a purpose and that the good of every natural thing is its ideal development. Man qua man has a function, a purpose, the realization of which constitutes his final good. To know the end of man as man is also to get at his essence. Now, man is a thinking entity. Since his reason defines his uniqueness, it follows that the intellect is the man. It is his soul’s essence. Therefore, in the soul’s activity of mentation—not found among the lower animals—man attains his full human possibilities. Virtue or human excellence can only consist in a life lived in accordance with reason, and this is something which every man, or woman, at least potentially, can achieve. Morality which consists of acts governed by intelligence can only bring us “happiness” which is Aristotle’s name for the final good. It can be gathered from all this that our philosopher lays stress upon the paramount importance of the role of inductive reason in his ethical system. His categorical command would bid us to reason well, and act accordingly. For, what is moral but the reasonable; and what is immoral but the unreasonable. Furthermore, the right is that which accords with practical reason, the wrong is that which goes against our better knowledge.

It behooves man as a moral agent to keep his aim centered at the target. In Aristotle’s parlance, the bull’s eye, as earlier mentioned, is the good of man, which is in his power to attain. Reason, as the marksman’s weapon in this case, can however fall short of the mark because of putting the critical sense to sleep by letting his baser element get the better of it. Now, the target, which is man’s good, is hit by keeping to what lies midway between the extremes of human conduct. By avoiding the too much and the too little, one treads upon the middle course of moral excellence. Continence, temperance, courage, etc. are some of the moral virtues developed by veering away from the polar end of vice. The “Golden Mean” also works with justice especially the distributive kind, though not the rectificatory one that seeks to restore balance between unequal categories.

There is another aspect of reason that is capable of bringing the human person not just his good but his summum bonum: the theoretical intellect. The end-all and be-all of human existence as far as Aristotle’s thinking goes, is the contemplation of the eternal. For him, this constitutes the highest activity man can ever engage in. The happiest man is the contemplative man. Philosophic wisdom is all a man needs if he is to transcend his humanity and realize the divine element in his frame. For the contemplation in question is not a quest for the truth, but the contemplation of the Truth. This is a reaching out of the mind towards the infinite in such a way that one becomes mystically identified with that which is contemplated and, in the process, become all the greater for it. Obviously, it is now the Platonic influence in Aristotle (having been Plato’s student) that is talking to us in this fashion. And as if to hold himself in check, the Aristotle in Aristotle hastens to remind us that all this is well and good, only that there is a need for us to remember that we are still in or of the world and must of necessity bring ourselves back from our metaphysical never-never land, if we have ever been to it, into the order of mundane reality, and once again relate ourselves to the stream of historical process. For the experiential knowledge of the truth, if obtained, must be put at the service of humanity in order to have any significance at all. Otherwise, it all becomes a sterile accomplishment.

If in the Nicomachean ethics Aristotle permitted himself, at least for a moment, the luxury of such philosophic flights, it must be for the sake of consistency. Having singled out reason as the very heritage of man that links him to the Divine, Aristotle cannot but be drawn to the inevitable conclusion that with it man can aspire to scale the heights where the gods dwell as it were. But it is a mark of his genius that he did not thereby invoke divine sanctions in explaining human conduct. Instead, he had concentrated upon an empirical analysis of the inner dynamics of the soul as the wellspring of action at the same time also included motive, memory or lack of it, intention, passion and the like as factors to reckon with in determining the shape of behavior as well as the extent of moral responsibility. For man, first and foremost, is a living being, not a marionette on strings. As Aristotle says: “No living process can be thought of as devoid of psyche for it is the first principle of living things.”⁴ Without such basic understanding of the human framework, any moral philosophy purporting to serve as a guide to human action would be doomed to be superficial, to say the least. Without a proper understanding of the psychological mechanism of behavior, any sweeping categorization of an ethical subject as either moral or immoral betrays myopic self-righteousness. It is nothing short of cruelty, for instance, to apply to a person the full force of the law without looking into the conglomeration of forces behind the act.

It should be evident by now that just as the Nicomachean ethics must have been revolutionary during Aristotle’s time, so is situation ethics during our time. Both of them sound off a clarion call to set matters back in their proper perspective: Aristotle by arguing in effect that any study of man should begin with man himself as an empirical fact, and the situationist, especially the Christian brand, by insisting that in case of conflict between the impersonal universal and the personal particular, the latter should prevail. Aristotle thinks that reason is man’s redemptive faculty, the situationist believes love will save the world, that is, love in the agapeic sense. Both together, the pagan’s reason and the situationist’s love, would not abandon flesh-and-blood human being for the sake of lifeless abstraction.

From what has been said all along, it may more or less be surmised how the relativist approach would tackle the specific problems of morality sampled in this article at the outset. To lie or not to lie, to fornicate or not to fornicate, to abort or not to abort—those are the questions.

The situationist would proceed by considering the particulars of the given case. It all depends upon the circumstances, he would characteristically say beforehand.  He will demand to be told the whole story, fleshed out with the factual details. To lie or not to lie? Well, to begin with, who lies to whom? And what are the four other W’s? Should one, let us say, lie to the would-be murderer the whereabouts of his intended victim? By all means. Lying in this case is the same as merely withholding the truth. Besides, life is of greater moment and depth than the academic question whether the greater lie is white or nonwhite, material or formal. Only an exteme legalist of Shylock’s cast of mind can betray that victim. People of that kidney would subscribe to Cardinal Newman’s view as quoted by Fletcher that it were “far better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremist agony…than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin.”⁵ The situationist simply refuses to stick to the letter that kills but abides by the spirit that gives life.

What about fornication, abortion and the like? The conservative moralist would surely be appalled by the situationist’s answer that even these may be permitted too. But, of course, the contextualist has to go through the same thoroughgoing analysis of each cases with an eye for details that turn on the green light. He makes sure that his decision is steeped in agape strictly understood as loving-kindness. The question of having sex before or outside marriage is okayed not to humor libertine licentiousness. It is given the go-signal only if and when the individual’s well-being is secured and no one gets reduced to the status of an object or one’s dignity trampled upon. The same principle, but not rule, the situationist applies to the matter of abortion. The ramifications of the case are scrutinized with extra-careful attention: the woman involved, her emotional, mental and physical health, the legality or illegality of impregnation, the man’s identity, the state of his sanity, the stage of foetal development, etc. Then after a painstaking scrutiny, judgment is reached on the basis of the greatest good served. So, if the woman concerned happens to be an idiot forcibly taken advantage of by a sex-maniac, and the foetus is in the very early stages of germination, the question of abortion becomes academic. Often it is the labels we use that screen us from the ramifications of a problem, get stuck at them as a kind of straitjacket and eventually come up with an unfair decision.

Aristotle would have no pat and ready-made answers to the problems in question. Presumably he would invariably say yes or no to lying, sex, and abortion after rigorously subjecting each of them to the test of reasonableness. He would start with an examination of the bare facts and proceed to inquire into the whole array of ends and means. To be sure, lies are not told for their own sake. If it stands to reason that human truth is best served by a harmless lie, then one may do so without remorse. Similarly, if the consummation of sex under the given circumstances promotes an end that is its own justification such as restoring the psychophysical balance of the individuals concerned, it is unwise to stand in its way. On the other hand, if the harm that the act produces far outweighs the good, say, doing violence to the sense of integrity or dignity of the sex partner or whetting the performers’ libido to the point of turning them to slaves of passion or even sex machines, then Aristotle would intervene in the name of justice in the former instance and temperance in the second. As regards abortion, he would consider if the end is of such overriding importance as to necessitate or justify its performance. Thus, if the mother’s life is at stake, humanitarian considerations will deem it to her best interest to nip the embryonic bud as a precarious growth in her system.

There emerges out of the Nicomachean ethics an implicit faith that reason would not turn upon itself and will its own destruction. Being its own arbiter, reason can only will its own good. No wonder, then, that Aristotle rests upon the cornerstone of reason the whole structure of his ethical system. But man, rational animal that he is, does not always listen to reason. As he himself quite rightly admits near the end of Ethics, the average individual cannot be changed by the use of arguments. Man’s soul appears to be so immersed in materiality that it takes almost superhuman effort on his part to transcend himself. In fact, he finds excuses for his endless foibles and say with Pascal that the heart has its own reasons which reason cannot understand. But the truth is that, as revealed in the studies of modern scientists and thinkers, he is much else besides. Even so, Aristotle’s principle of moderation and his uncompromising conviction that other than the bar of reason and experience, there is no ultimate arbiter to appeal to—all these ring out across the ages to modern man with a note of urgency.

The situationist puts Aristotle’s self-absorbed reason at the service of love, the all-embracing kind that, like the sun, reaches out to saints and sinners alike. But while it may be understood at least conceptually, it may fail to sink into the consciousness of contemporary man. Ivan Karamazov, the tormented intellectual in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, remarked that he can love man in the abstract but finds it simply difficult to love man in the concrete.⁶ Love, like Aristotle’s reason, demands of man to curb the Yahoo⁷ component in his nature and aspire to become like gods. It is actually a call to heroism. In declaring all moral laws to be relative, situation ethics frees modern man from the fetters of rigid rules. Yet in holding as absolute the one exception which is the command to love, it has placed upon his shoulders a deadweight only individuals of Christ’s caliber can carry. The senseless orgies of bloodbath in which humankind has twice been involved attests to the fact that people have not till now fully learned their lesson of love. But from the moment love or agape gets internalized or woven into the moral fiber of man, it is not wishful thinking to expect the emergence in our world of Maurice Nicoll’s new man⁸ or even Krishnaji’s new human being⁹.

ENDNOTES

¹Harvey Cox, The Secular City (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1965, 1966), p.44.

²Ethics, Chap VIII, Bk X, 308-309.

³Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), p. 51.

                

⁴De Anima, 420a.

⁵Op.cit.

⁶Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Constance Garnet (New York: New American Library, 1957), passim.

⁷Yahoos are despicable creatures with primitive, distasteful traits in the satirical novel of Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

⁸Maurice Nicoll, The New Man (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Ltd., 1950, 1972), passim.

⁹J. Krishnamurti, The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1970), passim.