Department of Philosophy and Humanities Polytechnic University of the Philippines—Manila
It is remarkable how man has been a subject for philosophical scrutiny,
even its prolific existence that espoused a lot of things that contributed to its development and to its relation to the world. However, it is with the ascent of reason that man was preoccupied to identify it-self; thus rendering a forgetting to what it is, contrary to what the romantic man presupposes, what it ought to be. With regards to this, it is needful to probe on the subject ‘man’ not alone through the lens of rationality but also in its very subjectivity and its irrationalities.
Charles Bigger in his book Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood claimed that what Jacques Derrida says about chora1 and its dialectic that oscillates between participation and exclusion could also be said as the soul or life2. This soul or life may refer to the human person and its subjective self. This self which is a subjective project of the human person is that which is given to its own, and that which cannot be grasped by any person apart from himself. The self is the seat of man’s prolific thoughts that espouses love, freedom, and ideas of peace, of solidarity, and joy. It is the
1 Etymologically, the term chora is derived from the Ancient Greeks that is designated to the territory of the polis outside the city walls. In Timaeus, Plato used such term as a representation of a receptacle, a space, or an interval. Heidegger also used this term to refer to a clearing in which being happens or takes place. However, the term chora that appears in this paper is that which was coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to a radical otherness that gives place for being. It is chora that gives space, like that of a womb. 2 Charles Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood p. 370 ON THE HUMAN PERSON: AN AESTHETIC REFLECTION
picture of man’s ardent existence as a reverberation of its articulate
interconnectedness with other what-is available around it, including the abiotic ones. Without the realization of the self, there can be no realization of the soul, or of life, or even inter-being. As the self is the point of departure for man’s both philosophical and non-philosophical expressions of its subjectivity, it is rightful to look at the self as a situation to grasp the moment of its existence in order to know what man is and what man is not.
Man in the language of his subjectivity is an aesthetic self that gives place for it-self to become. His existence as a situation of his becoming eventually eradicates the prison bars of reason that he has constructed around itself of which we may refer to as identity. It is because of this identity that the human person has forgotten3 that there is such a place outside the city walls, an event for freedom and a moment to express the most articulate man it wants to be regardless that at the end of the day, it will go back inside the city. As man is preoccupied to identify it-self, it ceases to realize the beauty of what it is looking. The human person willingly suppresses the subjective self in order to act with accord to the institutions of thought and practice it has built thus limiting the possibility to be. Man attached itself to reason, logic, e.g., and made these ideologically-instituted mode of thinking as a foundation of its
3 The term forgotten (forget) as used in this paper refers to the act of un-remembering. This act of un-remembering as Francisco Guerrero puts it is the human preoccupation to deduce the articulate human subjectivity into the limits of reason in order to project an identity acceptable to the institutions (political and social system, e.g.) it has created. He also adds to this that this act to forget (un-remembering) is the preliminary requirement in order to be a corporate slave which he dubbed as a situation of subtle stupefication which un-develops the human person. ON THE HUMAN PERSON: AN AESTHETIC REFLECTION
identity. With these, man did not really identified it-self; rather, it created a maze where the endpoint is forgotten.
It would be beneficial for man to go to chora, to dive into that which
gives place for being to take place. However, in order to do so, man is required to go beyond the cliffs of reason and formal thinking to grasp the moment of making a decision to dive over the ocean of situation of which we may refer to as existence. For the human person to give-in it-self for the being man to take place, it needs to get out of the city walls and experience the vastness of the possibilities and the beautiful whereabouts of who really it is.
Man’s existence is a symposium of being where the subjective human
self is a subject and an object, inter-changing, inter-being, and inter-becoming.
