M AN AND HISTORICAL ACTION

by 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, pro­
bably, 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 intersec­
tion 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. 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 wherebj' 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 par­
ticles, 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 pro­
cesses 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 ybu 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, meet-

’ Reprinted with permission of Dr. Ramon C. Reyes from talk delivered to the Fifth Annual Student
Leaders SeminarDevelopment in the Seventies, Tagaytay City, March 19-24, 1973.

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ing 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 {joint 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 psycho­
logists tell us that depending upon whether you are thin, fat, muscular, you have a cer­
tain 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 con­
scious 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 con­
scious 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 bave 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 con­
scious, 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 in­
tersection, 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 in­
tervention. Insofar as you are a cross-point of physical events with a certain con­
sciousness 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 ner­
vous system and especially that brain in you. What are you doing about it? As a con­
scious 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 de­
liberately, consciously, making world physical lutes 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 o f 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
Dsvchoanalvsts. If vou read, for examplp. Freud or Erickson, the human psychological
personality is really a ci oss-point of various personal relationships. For better or for
worse, you end I emerged one day as the fruit of intersection of your father’s and

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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 m other 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 w ith your mother. Partly your personality, of course, is the product o f 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 o f 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 cer­
tain 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 in­
terpersonal cross-point. You are conscious of yourself as a person with certain limit-'
ations and certain possibilities. And the third point, of course, insofar as you are con­
scious of limitations and conscious of possibilities, you tire a source of activity, you are a
source o f creativity because insofar as you are a point of intersection o f 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 o f 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 interper­
sonal cross-point but now we come to the social, which is not quite reducible to the in­
terpersonal. Insofar as you are this time a social point of intersection o f social events, you
are a social product. In Other wore®, 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. Insofar 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 cue deja la, you arc already tnere.
Whether you like it or not, you and I have a certain set of social habits, just as an in­
dividual after a while forms certain individual habits which finally characterize him as a

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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 socie­
ty, you may try to change yourself, you may try to hide yourself; the point is: it is there.
W hether 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 li­
mitations, 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 con­
scious 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 cer­
tain 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 w hether 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 b ro th e r 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 o f 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 hot 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 cer­
tain 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 i f . . . . 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. On 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 poin. of iuiei Section between ycurself 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

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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 perma­
nent 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 perma­
nent 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 pwint of intersection at the
yery 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 poinfof 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 con­
scious of yourself as a person of meaning. Thus on this highest level of point of intersec­
tion, 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 of 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, v/ith certain possibilities. But precisely because as a conscious
body you are a source of creativity, you arc 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 In­
donesian or the Chinese or the Indian. And to that extent we have a certain deja la, a cer­
tain set of limitations; but also possibilities. As a historical product, the same way; you
find yourself as a hisTWltal polttt of intersection at a certain time and equipped by
history with a certain set of possibilities precisely because you are a point of intersec­
tion. 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, ulti­
mately, 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 of 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 cha.v.vcriz
ed in one sense bv 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.

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 And that would be the main point of my talk this afternoon. Seen as destiny, 1 am a
set Of limitations. On the other hand, seen as a task, I am a set 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 had happened to him. “If we are poor to­
day, 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 bet­
ter 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 reforriier. 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 philo­
sopher 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
serial 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, sis a historical product, you are a man of
destiny—destiny in the sense 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 a 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 deter­
mines me tp 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 de­
pend upon the response to that destiny that life has placed me in. Here I think would be
the outline of my idea for this afternoon which I propose for your consideration. You
and I are destinies as well as tasks—destinies and tasks in a physical sense, interpersonal,
social, historical and existential. -