MAN OF HISTORICAL ACTION by Dr. Ramon C.

Reyes

As you know a philosopher usually talks of nothing but things that people already know. There
is an Italian saying which goes, “Philosophy is that which, with which and without which everything
remains the same anyway.” So, you will find out, probably, that what I’ll tell you this afternoon may not
be as exciting as the talks you heard this morning. But, on the other hand, insofar as man acts in view
of certain meaningful goals, perhaps there is a need for thinking about goals and not just of means of
action

I have only one idea really to talk to you about which I will develop in four or five ways. The main
idea is this, that man, to use the exact word of the author who started it, is a “cross-point” or point of
intersection of certain lines of events, lines of events, of course, on various levels, in other words, as I
will explain presently, a point of intersection of physical lines of events, interpersonal lines of events,
social lines of events, historical lines of events.

First, man as a point of intersection of natural events: I do not know if you realize it, but as a
physical body you and I are very old.2 In fact, millions of years old. If you recall your science course in
high school, nature follows the principle of conservation of mass and energy whereby the totality of
energy in the world is constant: what happens is simply that energy goes from one form into another.
In other words, the atoms, the particles, the matter, the energy that is in your body right now dates back
to the very first origin of our universe. Paleontologists and archeologists say that probably our earth
would be about 50 billion years old. How they figured that out we will leave to them. So, this earth, and,
thus, the elements that are in your body right now are at least 50 billion years old. After a period of
evolution, the first forms of life on this earth probably came around 2.5 billion years ago. Then a bit
later, around 700 million years ago, would be the emergence of what they call the first chordates. More
recently, about 500 million years ago, would be the appearance of the vertebrates and probably about
250,000 years ago is the appearance of the first man. Now if you consider that it took all those stages
for your body to have been formed by the process of nature, it took therefore the natural processes
about 50 billion years to form the nervous system, the brain which is in you, the body which is you.

The earth, the natural processes took that long a time to form your brain, to finally polarize, to
finally organize matter that is in you. Once polarized and organized, there came your consciousness,
there came you as a psycho-biological organism. At this point, therefore, we might say that you are a
conscious point of intersection of physical world events. If you were to take a chemical analysis of your
body, you would find all kinds of atoms in you and strands of physical elements coming together in you
and separating. When you ate your spaghetti this afternoon, there were atoms that came into you,
meeting the previous atoms in your body. Part of those atoms will remain in. you; other atoms in a few
hours will separate. The point, however, is that you are a cross-point, that you are a point of intersection
of physical world events and that it took about 50 billion years to finally polarize that cross-point in such
a way that cross-point now is conscious. It is a-conscious cross-point, a conscious point of intersection.

That cross-point is of a certain quality. In other words, although you and I are really more or less
50 billion years old, each of us is a different type of cross—point. One might be thin, another might be
a bit fattish; another might be muscular; and the psychologists tell us that depending upon whether you
are thin, fat, muscular, you have a certain type of temperament. The point is that each one of us finds
himself or herself as a certain gift of nature. You did not design yourself. At a certain point in our lives
we dis- cover ourselves as of a certain quality, a certain type of cross-point. Your body is a pro- duct of
nature and it is a certain particular product of nature.

Secondly, this cross-point, as we have seen, is a conscious cross-point. In other words, the tree
out there is also a cross-point, but it is not conscious of itself. Man is a ' cross-point of physical events
and he—is conscious of himself as a cross-point. He is conscious of the natural environment that
brought him about as a point of intersection of these trend-lines of the world. So, he is conscious; and
because he is conscious, he is conscious of himself in his limitations. And he is conscious of himself in
his possibilities. So, there are certain limitations. I think part of growing up is beginning to realize what
our limitations are. A child usually is not conscious of limitations of his body, that is why he easily gets
hurt. As we grow older, we become more conscious of what are the limits, and, on the other hand, what
are the possibilities of our body. To the extent that you have found your career, partly that career has
been found because you have learned to adopt a certain type of work activity that is in consonance
with the type of body that you have.
Hence, this cross-point is capable of activity. In other words, before you became conscious, the
physical world events met in you, but met in you in a blind way. Now that you are conscious of it, now
that you are conscious of the fact that you are a point of intersection, you have a certain power, a
certain creativity to let future physical events cross and meet and to let future strands of physical events
separate by your conscious intervention. Insofar as you are a cross-point of physical events with a
certain consciousness of your limitations and possibilities, you are a source of creativity. As a body,
you are a source of activity. You are a source whereby from now on future physical lines of events can
come together or separate because of you.

Going back to my original idea, it took 50 billion years for nature to develop the nervous system
and especially that brain in you. What are you doing about it? As a conscious point of intersection, you
have a certain power, a certain creativity for future lines of physical events to come together or to
separate. As a creative agent, you can transform nature; you can deform nature. What is work? Nothing
but precisely man deliberately, consciously, making world Wheat lines of events come together. Man
is a working being. And the philosophical idea of- work is precisely that, insofar as man is a conscious
point of intersection of world lines of events, he has the power to control these lines of events up to a
certain point within certain limitations.

Let us go then to the second level. While it remains ‘true that as a body, you and I are physical
points of intersection, we are also points of intersection on another level—on the interpersonal level.
This time, we borrow the idea from the psychologists and the psychoanalysts. If you read, for example,
Freud or Erickson, the human psychological personality is really a cross-point of various personal
relationships. For better or for worse, you and l emerged one day as the fruit of intersection of your
father’s and 106 mother’s personal lines of events.‘ The psychologist tells us that your personality right
now, to a great extent, was determined by the relationship you had and still have with your mother and
with your father, and then, by your relationships with your brothers and sisters, your peers, your friends.
Therefore, your personality right now is not just you. To a great extent, you as a personality are a fruit
of intersecting personal lines coming together in you.
If you have a certain personality today, it is because of a certain personality your father had, a
personality your father had because of a certain family he had. The same way with your mother. Partly
your personality, of course, is the product of the family, and the background she was in. Therefore, you
are again a cross-point, but this time a cross-point no longer in the physical sense but a cross-point in
the personal sense. Right now, your personality is made up and still being made by the intersection
and the separation of personal lines of events. Having established that, we can go back to those three
points that we have gone through 'in the first part. You are a certain personal cross-point of a certain
quality of a certain type, depending upon how happily or un-happily this personal cross-point has
emerged in you. We are different persons and the difference lies not only in our physical body but also
in that each one of us constitutes a different type of point of intersection of personal lines of events. So,
if you are a Martha or a Mary or a Maria or a John, or a Juan or a Pedro, it is because you are product
of a certain network of personal lines. The second point of course you know: you are not simply a
product of personal lines, but you are conscious. You are conscious of yourself as an interpersonal
cross-point. You are conscious of yourself as a person with certain limitations and certain possibilities.
And the third point, of course, insofar as you are conscious of limitations and conscious of possibilities,
you are a source of activity, you are a source of creativity because insofar as you are a point of
intersection ‘of past personal lines of events, you will also be the cause of future points of intersection
of personal lines of events or the cause of separation of personal lines of events. As you will discover
in the group activity you will have in the following days, you as a person are not only a pro- duct of past
interpersonal lines of events, but because of you as a consciousness, because of your limitations as
well as your possibilities, you can put together future personal lines of events or you can separate future
personal lines of events. Insofar as you are a nucleus, a focus of personal relations in your family and
your group, you are a possible meeting point and bond. Insofar as you are a cross-point of personal
lines of events, you can be a cause of more men coming together through you or men separating
through you. Here I think is the second level of creativity of man. Precisely because he is a cross- point
of interpersonal lines and he is a conscious cross-point, he can in the future deliberately pull together
strands of personal lines of events or separate them.

Third level. Not only are you a physical cross-point. Not only are you an interpersonal moss-
point but now we come to the social, which is not quite reducible to the interpersonal. Insofar as you
are this time a social point of intersection of social events, you are a social product. In other words,
whether you like it or not, whether you try to hide it or not, you are of a certain set of social traits that
we might call the Filipino. just as you are a physical cross-point and interpersonal cross-point, you find
yourself as a certain social product, a product of many events in the past beyond your control, a product
of many things that happened in our society in the past, our Malaysian past, our Spanish past our
American past, our Japanese-occupation past. In so far as you are a social cross. point of social events,
you find yourself as a certain event without your having decided it. You are there As the French love to
say, you are deja Ia, you are already there. Whether you like it or not, you and I have a certain set of
social habits, just as an individual after a while forms certain individual habits which finally characterize
him as a 107 personality. A society after a while generates a set of social habits which we ultimately
can call culture. And, therefore, as a Filipino, as a social product of this Philippine society, you may try
to change yourself, you may try to hide yourself; the point is: it is there. Whether you like it or not, you
are of a certain quality, a certain type for better or for' worse, precisely because you are a point of
intersection of social events. And then, of course, because you are conscious, you are conscious of
yourself, conscious of certain limitations, conscious of certain possibilities.
Looking through the program for this week, I would think that many of the talks that you will have
this week would fall under this—trying to make you a bit more conscious of yourself as a social point of
intersection and trying to make you conscious of the fact that as social products you have certain
limitations and on the other hand certain possibilities. And precisely because you are conscious,
conscious of limitations and possibilities, again you are a source of creativity, a source of activity. Very
close to the social, we come now to the historical. It overlaps with the social, the only difference is
whereas the social perhaps would be a static view, the historical would be dynamic and temporal. As
a point of intersection of historical lines of events, you are a. historical pro- duct whether you like it or
not; you, are born of a certain age, of a certain period of history, not earlier, not later. Some of us may
wish we were born during the time of Cleopatra, others in the future age of 2001.

Man finds himself .as a fruit of historical lines of events. Because of history you emerge at a
certain period, a certain point and it is not within your control, at least the past is not. We can go through
various strands of the history not only of our country but of the world that has generated us. I suppose,
included here would be: the history of Christianity coming into human history, the history of Islamism,
the history of modern experimental science, the history of industrialization, the history of modern
medicine, the history of European nationalism, the history of colonialization and decolonialization, the
history of the two world wars, the history of the Cold War. In other words, we come to realize that as a
person, as cross-points, we would be other than what we are if history had been different. But the point
is: we are what we are. We have to start from a certain set of data, literally, data, given, something we
have to accept just as a physical set of data, interpersonal set of data, social set of data. As historical
products, we have to start from a certain set of data given. We cannot deny the facts of our past. If not
for the history of science and medicine, if not for the invention, let us say, of various vaccines, probably
you and I would not be here today, or perhaps here in a decrepit fashion, due to smallpox, polio,
dysentery. If Spain had not come, if Philip II had not decided on a certain policy for Spain, perhaps we
would have been another type of country. If Magellan had not taken sail, there would have been another
course of history for us. If America did not intervene at that point when we were revolting against Spain
if. . . . The point is that these are all historical speculations. The only purpose of speculating this way is
to realize that while it could have been otherwise, history is what makes us what we are now. As a point
of intersection of historical processes, we have to start from a certain set of past historical facts. 0n the
other hand, as we become conscious of ourselves as historical products, we also become aware of the
historical possibilities that we have. And becoming aware of the limits as well as of the possibilities of
history that are in us, we become a source of historical creativity.

We come now to the last line or level of point of intersection. Just as you are a point of
intersection, physical, interpersonal, social and historical, I think at a last level you are also; shall we
say, a point of intersection between yourself this time as an individual, unique person and a certain
form of absolute, a certain form of an ideal, a certain form of ultimate goal for which you live. Even
psychologists tell us there is an ultimate element .108 which constitutes the human personality and that
is his relation to a certain existential framework whereby he is able to see his own person included in
some kind of a permanent whole, not only social, not only historical but transcendent or spiritual,
whereby he can see himself included in- some kind of permanent totality. Whatever that permanent
totality is, it could be in a form of religion, it could be in a form of some kind of a cause in capital letters,
the point .is that each man is also a point Of intersection at the very end between his very personality,
this time as a unique person, and on the other hand, and ideal, an ultimate framework of meaning; and
that point of intersection is what determines the final meaning of man’s individual life.

Insofar as you are a point of intersection of an ideal and yourself as a person, you find yourself
deja la, already there. In other words, up to a certain point in your life, you live according to a certain
set of ideals inherited probably through your society, through your family, but nonetheless, a set of
ideals that is already there, a set of ideals which has called upon you maybe, in a blind way in the
beginning, in an unconscious way. Then, at a certain point in your life, ‘you become conscious of these
past ideals that have been accepted in the past but now you try to make them more authentic, more
personal, more dependent upon your own deliberate decision. In other words, you become conscious
of yourself as a person of meaning. Thus, on this highest level of point of intersection, we find also that
you are a source of creativity. Aside from our physical task, aside from our interpersonal task, aside
from our social and historical tasks, there is what I might call an existential task, which ultimately
determines the meaning of our personal life. Our life will be judged by what we do physically, what we
effect interpersonally, what we create by way of social and historical institutions. But over and above
that, man shall be judged by his own conscience, by the way he lives according to his personal, most
intimate ideals. There in outline, in capsule, I might say would be the framework of man and historical
action.

As I stated in the beginning, all these ideas, in a sense, you already knew, but maybe not too
consciously. It is just a question then of trying to recall, as Plato might say, “rememorize,” to make
yourself more aware of them. You find yourself therefore, first of all as a physical cross—point, deje la,
a certain body, but a body which is conscious with certain limitations, with certain possibilities. But
precisely because as a conscious body you are a source of creativity, you are a source of energy. As
an interpersonal cross-point, again, you are conscious, conscious of limitations, conscious of
possibilities and because of that, through you; future personal lines of events will come together and
will separate. That I think is a frightening responsibility, but it is there. Socially, the same way you find
yourself already there, a certain type, a certain social product to a certain extent not as old as the Indian
or the Japanese or the Chinese culture, but with certain possibilities, certain traits which are totally our
own, not to be found in the Indonesian or the Chinese or the Indian. And to that extent we have a certain
deia la, a certain set of limitations; but also, possibilities. As a historical product, the same way; you
find yourself as a historical point of intersection at a certain time and equipped by history with a certain
set of possibilities precisely because you are a point of intersection. So far as you are conscious of it,
you can do something: you can be a man of action in history, of course, accepting your limitations as
well as your possibilities. And, ultimately, as a cross-point between the call of meaning and your own
response, you are given to yourself; and yet you will be what you make as yourself.
To summarize: you find, therefore, that, insofar as a man is a point of intersection of all these
various kinds of events in all these various levels, you and I can be characterized In one sense by what
we might call destiny or fate; on the other hand you and I are also characterized by a certain creativity
and, therefore, a certain task or responsibility.

And that would be the main point of my talk this afternoon. Seen as destiny, I am a set of
limitations. On the other hand, seen as a task, I am asset of possibilities—destiny but also task. I
remember very clearly a former student of mine in the past. He was always blaming his father for
everything that happened to him. “if we are poor today, it’s because of my father, his lack of ambition
and stupidity”. Well, I met him when he was a second-year college student; and up to fourth year, he
would still blame his father for what he was. Well, up to a certain point it was true. We are destined for
better or for worse; we have certain types of personality because of what our father was, because of
what our mother was. But, on the other hand, given that destiny, given a set of limitations, we can do
something. We can do something within that situation. We can do something as a point of intersection
of personal events. As a social product you are again destiny; and that I think is one thing a social
reformer must always keep in mind. This is the difference between a utopian who deals only with ideal
moral principles and a true social reformer. Because a true social reformer has a sense of destiny, a
sense of realism, he knows what the social forces are. The social forces do not necessarily agree with
what he wants it to be. But the first point is to accept them as they are. A philosopher once said, “a
social reformer must be able to serve not only as a conscience of his own individuality but as the
conscience of his own society.” To consider the faults of the society as his own and to consider the
possibilities of the society as his own, there I think is the difference between the moral utopist and a
social reformer. He has a sense of destiny; in other words, certain things he considers as fate. I was
brought up by the social forces to be here and I must work within this certain framework. But then within
that framework, I am task, I am responsibility. It is a point of departure from which I can go somewhere
else. As historical being, as a historical product, you are a man of destiny—destiny in the sender that
you are born product of a certain set of historical forces and you cannot change that. You can spend
all your life cursing things that should not have happened or should have happened in other ways. The
point is: where you stand now is what history has brought about and this is the only stand-point. the
first step in historical change is to accept your position of destiny. But accepting that point of destiny is
also realizing your task and responsibility.

A mature person is one who can look at his life as destiny, a destiny which is not perfect, but it
is what I am. It is destiny, it is my calling, it is ultimately my vocation, it is what makes me, me. It is the
call of the absolute, the call of the absolute which determines me to be in this state, in this destiny, in
this social, historical position. And, on the other hand, in this destiny lies my life’s task. Ultimately the
meaning of my life will depend upon the response to that destiny that life has placed me in. here I think
would be the outline of my idea for is afternoon which I propose for your consideration. You and I are
destinies as well as tasks—destinies and task in a physical sense, interpersonal, social, historical and
existential.