Quum Justitiae Ratio Sic Exigit

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QUUM JUSTITIAE RATIO SIC EXIGIT: Reflections on Self-Nurturing and the

Political Life from the Works of Foucault, Arendt and Aristotle

A Paper Written for the Final Oral Examination of the course

“Ph 102: Philosophy of the Human Person II”

under

Fr. Luis S. David, S.J. and Mr. Patrick Momah

Submitted by:

Juliano, Hansley A.

III – AB-MA Political Science

Submitted at:

Department of Philosophy

Ateneo de Manila University

March 24, 2010

Given Question: Taking account of the disciplinary, that is to say, the

political, the social, etc. networks/frames/spaces in which

I have awakened to the realization of, what resources can I

draw upon to resist the lure of the “big picture”

(totalitarianism, mechanisms, biopolitics, ideology/”cog in

the machine” ideology of myself/ourselves), big-brother

type professional politics, scientisms, naturalized

identity formations, etc.) and to work my way instead into



the “rubber-meets-the-road”/ethical Foucault/political

Arendt practices of everyday living?

Sanity and Savagery

To speak of being a participant, willing or unwilling, in the

structures of disciplinarity by which modernity has envisioned and

transformed itself into, is inevitably an exercise of our capability to

achieve a more accurate picture of our current situations. I do not claim

that I as a person have already broken free of these disciplinarity

institutions. In fact, the idea is not necessarily to fight it via violent

denial but to engage it in a way that the identities and understanding of

oneself are at the same time reinforced by participating in the tensions of

formative and discursive power. French philosopher Michel Foucault himself

would propose a healthier engagement of power relations as a means via where

one can “transmit knowledge and techniques” by means of an acknowledged

authority in a particular “game of truth.” Practices of power, as he

willfully combats Jean-Paul Sartre’s view of power as evil, can remain

sensitive to the necessity of avoiding “subjection to arbitrary and

unnecessary authority” through the reframing of “rules of law, rational

techniques of government and ethos, practices of the self and of freedom.” 1

Modes and ways of thinking and perspectives are never and should not be

forecasts of potential future conditions: they are always implicated in the

existing environment within which those who dared to think are operating

from. Nonetheless, solely thinking of the present without understanding it as

lived out with people leads to the danger of subscribing to a generalized

notion of how peoples are presumed to live ideally; to the point that these

linkages with people are sacrificed for the preservation of what might be

simply a fiction. The primary example we can consider is the fall of German

philosopher Martin Heidegger to the allure of the German National Socialist

(Nazi) Party, as might be gleaned from James Bernhauer’s appraisal of the

evolution of his thinking. Seeing as how Heidegger came to a view of

Christianity as “historically bankrupt,” unable to sustain the longings and

aspirations of the German people for association attuned to the times, he was

convinced to support the declaration of the death of the Christian God yet

1Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” (trans

Robert Hurley and others). in Paul Rabinow, ed., Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth:

the essential works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1 (London, Penguin Press, 1997), 298-299.

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still “cherish a sense of the Sacred which is focused on the Fatherland.”2

This desire to uplift the German state, visibly a desperate measure for

“desperate times,” blinded him to the ramification of Nazi rule willing, as

Heinrich Himmler was noted for proclaiming: “to kill this people which wanted

[an exaggerated yet nonetheless grounded observation] to kill us.”3 We are

living in conditions in which, by sheer force of will or the careful

construction of systems of knowledge that encapsulate people’s lives, we tend

to simply live by our own mental fabrications even if they are already out of

touch with reality.4

There is a challenge, therefore, of acknowledging and renegotiating

spaces for resistance via which means of association are necessary for our

self-formation. At the same time, we are as well made aware of the fact that

our environment has been crafted by those before us to serve interests which,

though initially have been created to facilitate our self-formation, has

already begun serving counter to its purposes: virtually making us

recidivists who perpetuate ineffective structures and/or relations by our own

inaction. They are not only unable to solve the problems they were designed to fix,

but increase their incidences further.5

As such, what we seek is a mode of living in which we articulate

ourselves not as only forming our identities via the set labels and

limitations of our existing disciplinary structures. The forms of engagement

I choose, therefore, must correspond to an ethic of constant re-appraisal of

the self and the engagement I follow for my community. With this

understanding, I reflect on my engagement in critical citizenship: that is to

2James W. Bernauer, “After Heidegger: Towards a Post-Fascist Politics of Spirit,” in Budhi Vol.

1, No. 3 (Quezon City, Ateneo de Manila University, 1997), 57. This “desperate times, desperatemeasures” mode of thinking is usually attributed to the radical proposal of political engagementItalian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli has espoused in his classic work The Prince. Nonetheless,to credit Machiavelli as the originator of motivations for totalitarian rule is an insult to hisintention of promoting a politics of action and of interest-consolidation, which Heidegger’sstudent Hannah Arendt would put forward herself, as will be discussed later on.3James W. Bernauer, “Post-Fascist Politics,” 61.

4Supposedly, this is the detestable logic by which the Nazi concentration camps continued and

intensified operation despite Germany already at the losing end of the Second World War. Aspolitical theorist Hannah Arendt put it: “Behind its horrors lies the same inflexible logic whichis characteristic of certain systems of paranoiacs where everything follows with absolutenecessity once the first insane premise is accepted”; that is to say, immense manpower wasted on

wanton production of deaths. “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps,”Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (<http://www.jstor.org/stable/4464856>, accessed 28January 2010, Jan., 1950), 50.5

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Translated from the French byAlan Sheridan, 2nd ed.: Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1995), 264-265. As characteristicof penal institutions, “In the history of imprisonment does not obey a chronology in which one

sees, in orderly succession, the establishment of a penality of detention, then the recognition

of its failure; then the slow rise of projects of reform, seeming to culminate in the more or

less coherent definition of penitentiary technique; then the implementation of this project;

lastly, the recognition of its successes or its failure… Prisons do not diminish the crime rate:

they can be extended, multiplied or transformed, the quantity of crime and criminals remains

stable or, worse, increases.”

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say, the practice of a form of communal affiliation not based on the fiction

of nationalism but on the desire to improve myself and the lives of those

around me. This I carry out through information-gathering, question-seeking

and searching for kindred spirits through any possible avenues.

Men in Manila (or why Nation-Building is becoming Anti-Political)

Political theorist Hannah Arendt has always maintained a suspicious

viewpoint whenever the idea of the nation-state is put into play. As might

have been gleaned from past experiences, the surrender of many to the nation-

state argument as the sole arbiter of ideal communal formations have been

used by many anti-political elements to forward their agenda. Moreover, the

nation-state argument has given way to the articulation of a so-called form

of tribal nationalism, which in many ways deny the plurality of human

relations while uplifting association in the nation-state as the sole

identity one must hold:

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own

people is surrounded by "a world of enemies," "one against all," that a

fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It

claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others,

and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long

before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.6

By participating in the thought processes that govern an obsession with

the nation-state, one is prone to advocating generalizations and modes of

activity that promote the interest of the “social” (i.e., national

housekeeping, bureaucratic processes). Sadly enough, most of our presumed

avenues for public participation (i.e. forums on leadership and issues, noise

barrages, even electoral practice) has been clouded and, if one may use the

term, “emasculated” by private sensibilities and the desire for maintenance

of the status quo. With the fetishization (that is to say, the consideration

of a value without understanding its epistemology and ontological

implications with relations to others) of the pursuit of one’s own happiness

in the private became the presumed norm, the enthronement of public

participation to paramount concern of a citizen was placed asunder.7 As such,

it would not be perhaps surprising if people who are more enthralled with the

6Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (2nd ed.: World Publishing, Ohio, 1958), 227.

7 Ibid., The Human Condition (With an Introduction by Margaret Canovan, 2nd ed.: University ofChicago Press, London, 1958), 68. As illustrative of what she has condemned as “the rise of thesocial”: “When this common wealth, the result of activities formerly banished to the privacy ofthe households, was permitted to take over the public realm, private possessions—which areessentially much less permanent and much more vulnerable to the mortality of their owners thanthe common world, which always grows out of the past and is intended to last for futuregenerations—began to undermine the durability of the world.”

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maintenance of private interests would support anti-political and anti-

democratic processes of governance,8 whilst maintaining a veneer of public

participation via the appropriation of public symbols and turning them into

consumable products they were never intended to be.

And nonetheless, these ideals are what we applaud, what we deem as the

ideal form of nation-building: that is to say, the practice of dole-outs and

presumed problem-solving, not troubleshooting and practices of foresight.

This shallow exhibition of political participation is what allows, perhaps,

what Lisandro Elias Claudio (a Department of Communication lecturer here in

the Ateneo and Batch 2007’s valedictorian) would call an effect of the “anti-

politics atmosphere” that is not only prevalent inside the Ateneo de Manila

campus but in Philippine society at large more so.9 In denying the practice of

politics as a practice of virtue and preparedness (or, as José Rizal’s

penname placed it, Laong-Laan), we reify the unjust conditions within which

people are currently living and are trapped into. It would be difficult to

assume that they are aware of their current conditions: they need to be made

aware and, to use a metaphor, be led by those who are not blind.

Pehaps, then, it would be more ideal if we begin to engage issues of

national importance via a healthy and consistent understanding of our local

environs. That is to say, our efforts should not be participative in the

imagined and fictionalized understandings of human relations as they are,

ultimately, contributive to the mechanisms of disciplinarity that control us

and the totalitarian constructs that destroy our notion of commonality with

other people. Our challenge, as Foucault has done when he chose to see the

concentration camps at Auschwitz, is “to journey so deeply into those impure

events and contingencies that have fashioned our feelings for both life and

8Political scientist Mark Thompson, in a case study of the “good governance” rhetoric, took the

Philippine reform movement to task for advocating values of “good governance” even if it meansputting to question the safety of democratic institutions. As he mentioned, “In the name ofpromoting good governance, the middle class-based reform movement had destabilised the democraticsystem.” “Pacific Asia after 'Asian Values': Authoritarianism, Democracy, and 'Good Governance'”in Third World Quarterly , Vol. 25, No. 6 (Taylor & Francis, Ltd.,<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993752>, accessed 14 October 2009, 2004), 1090. It appears many ofthese middle class actors have still not learned their lesson and are still pushing for these

values even by resorting to un-democratic modes of action, as witness the coalition Kaya Natinwhich has its roots here in the Ateneo de Manila University.9Lisandro Elias Claudio, “Eagles without talons?: Nation-building and the Ateneo de Manila

University,” in “Post-Filipinism”, <http://l-claudio.blogspot.com/2009/12/eagle-without-talons-nation-building.html>, accessed March 20, 2010. The frustration against the anti-politics stanceis understandable due to the fact that “there is one major flaw in the university’s anti-politics

framework: the claim that activism with its attendant criticism of national politics does not

work. It does. In the 1970s, the “talk” of student activists (many of them Ateneans like Edgard

Jopson) conscienticized an entire generation, exposing them to the ills of authoritarianism. It

was a slow process - educating and opening people’s eyes takes time – but it worked. When the

crowd in EDSA overthrew the dictator, it was a victory for those who fomented dissent. It was the

legacy of the makibaka activism that is currently derided in the Ateneo.”

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death”10 yet emerge with that surge of energy that will enable us to undertake

a more exhaustive, more extensive and ultimately, more intimate practices of

identity-building through the care of the self.

The Execution of the Hermeneutics of the Self

The assemblages continue to affect our daily lives in means which we

ourselves are not even aware of, and therefore we are missing the point of

analyzing the pervasiveness of power if we attempt to look at it in high

places. If change should be enacted and to be catalysed, it must begin and

should be sustained within the capilliarities and the bloodlines of power.

The minuteness of an infectious invasion of power should be confronted at

however deep the level it has inserted itself in the systems and the bodies

that is under such influence.

If we would look at our day-to-day activities, there is always the

desire of our environment to make us useful and productive so as it would be

able to sustain itself. Thus, there is always the proliferation of such

taglines that says “we care for you,” “we got it all for you,” “everything is

here,” all intent on minimizing the costs, maximizing the extensive effects

as well as the outputs. The indulgent culture is so intensive to constitute

disciplinary structures by prohibition is almost certainly counterproductive,

if not resulting in further damages not only to the subject of regulation,

but to the prestige or capability of the executing body itself. It is in this

mode of thinking perhaps that Socratic parrhêsia, as Alexander Nehemas

discussed, becomes vital and appreciated:

Political parrhêsia, the public practice of telling one’s rulers orfellow citizens a truth they might not want to hear and for which theymight punish the truth-teller… Socrates does not transmit what he knows,or thinks, or pretends to know to others. He has no knowledge tocommunicate. As Foucault puts it, he shows courageously to others thatthey do not know and that they must attend to themselves: “If I attend toyou,” Foucault writes, uncannily identifying his own voice with that ofSocrates as he does throughout these lectures, “it is not in order totransmit to you the knowledge that you lack, but so that, having realizedyou know nothing, you will learn thereby to care for yourselves.11

What might be gleaned from this? It is our understanding that relations

are conduits of knowledge and exchange of information regarding one self and,

sometimes, our very selves. It is therefore essential that in the execution

10James W. Bernauer, “Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault’s Post-Auschwitz Ethic” in Philosophy

Today, Vol. 32, No.2 (Summer, 1988), 141.11

Alexander Nehemas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. (Universityof California Press, Berkeley, 1998), 166.

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of our relations with other people, mutual reinforcement of ideas and

perceptions are created in order to assure that those in a relationship are

capable of handling each other’s quirks while reshaping their own selves in

the process as well. It is practically the same logic that governs how

marriages are supposed to be maintained and made an avenue of mutual self-

development and enrichment.12

By participating in an exchange relationship, one does not only

participate in the creation of identities, they also reinforce linkages that

moreover contribute to a healthier and well-rounded being. Even Aristotle

approves of these linkages by calling them friendships of advantage, wherein

these friendships last “for as long as they supply each other with pleasures

and benefits.”13 While in our contemporary, liberal ethic of excessive self-

introspection and aggrandizement of self-worth, friendships reliant on use

sounds somewhat demeaning, as if a person’s worth is only dependent on their

capability of delivery. However, it must be understood that this form of

friendship is only intended in reinforcing the intrinsic idea of friendship,

which is, first and foremost, the valuable aspect of loving, not being loved.

As Aristotle would want to put it: “Friendship, then, consists more in

loving, and people who love their friends are praised; hence, it would seem,

loving is the virtue of friends. And so friends whose love corresponds to

their friends’ worth are enduring friends and have an enduring friendship.

This above all is the way for unequals as well as equals to be friends, since

this is the way for them to be equalized.”14

Forgiveness, therefore, leads to a more significant development of

relations because not only do they address questions of justice in

rectification15, it is also the means by which people can remain in the public

space and experience other peoples’ presence despite the danger and actuality

of being injured by each other. It is, as Hannah Arendt would put it, the

only means “can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to

change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power

12I remember in passing an anecdote that was shared to me by Fr. Thomas Steinbugler, S.J. when I

was serving during his masses every Monday afternoon. Supposedly, a marriage counselor he knewasked in a counseling session what are their definitions of an ideal spouse is. Most of theattendees gave their notions of an ideal spouse by saying that a spouse “should do this for me,to help me,” and the like. The marriage counselor, after having taken in all of them, responded:“These are right, but what can be seen as wrong is how you always impute the burden of perfectionto your other half. For a marriage to work, what we should think of is “I will be a spouse whowill love my spouse despite his/her shortcomings and give leeway for him/her to develop what hecan to his/her full potential. The moment you stop thinking of yourself and you think of yourbetter half, the more mutually-enriching your marriage would be.”13

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, (Translated by Terence Irwin: Indiana, Hackett, 1985), 1159b10.14 Ibid., 1159a35-b.

15 Ibid., 1132a14.

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as that to begin something new.”16 The creation of linkages is so powerful and

vital to the development of the self that to neglect it will only cause the

stunting of one’s growth as a responsible member of the public space.

The Road to Our Emmaus

It appears that there are a lot of things and products we need in order

to live the fulfilled and successful life, and these products masquerade as

appeals to the person’s stereotypical notions of beauty and fitness. Surely,

these beliefs did not appear in our collective social consciousness since the

beginning; we have been habituated into them and are made to patronize them

in order for us to be able to labor in more favorable circumstances in our

respective workplaces. That we are being asked to indulge in these forms of

lifestyles is something that we should not take seriously: after all,

Foucault has praised the “virility of moderation”:

Self-mastery was a way of being a man with respect to oneself; that is, away of commanding what needed commanding, of coercing what was notcapable of self-direction, of imposing principles of reason on what waswanting in reason; in short, it was a way of being active in relation towhat was by nature passive and ought to remain so. In this ethics made ofmen for men, the development of the self as an ethical subject consistedin a setting up a structure of virility that related oneself to oneself.17

That everything is interrelated is not only true in unexploited virgin

nature: it is a norm which, unfortunately, contributes to consistent and

increasing consumption. Other sectors of society which cannot subscribe to

these norms or choose not to be are labelled deviant and are excluded from

society. It aggressively maintains a growing feeling of paranoia which, more

often than not, permits and proliferates the sense of resignation and

hopelessness wherein “there is no way to defeat the system but to partake in

it.” This passivity is most likely what emaciates the efforts of our citizens

to reclaim the public spaces. It is, therefore, our responsibility to act

accordingly by maintaining a healthy tension between our submission to these

disciplinary structures while at the same time negating their “cog-in-the-

machine” ideology. As Michel Foucault himself has asserted in for what

purposes he wrote the second volume of The History of Sexuality , he mentioned

that it is “not for, but in terms of , a contemporary situation.”18

16Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 240.

17Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure (Translated from the

French by Robert Hurley; New York, Vintage Books, Random House, 1990), 82-83.18 Ibid., “The Concern for Truth,” interview by Francois Ewald, trans. Alan Sheridan, in Politics,

Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New

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Whenever I circulate around the structures of a locality and understand

the means by which these areas operate of their own logic, interests and

instinct for self-preservation, I make it a point that there would be

something good that will come out of these undertakings. As such, having been

reintroduced to the institutions of public order and interest as demanded by

my discipline of Political Science, I decided that every instance there would

be free allotted time for me to go to our city hall and listen to the

deliberations of our city council regarding interests and policies that

needed to be carried out. Having a handful of contacts inside the office of

the City Council, I deemed it my duty to invest myself with such forms of

knowledge available to me so that I would be able to further establish myself

as an agent of political articulation and change.

Of course, such a practice that I do in my hometown is not everyone

that people actually do, but nonetheless I always try in my circles to

influence them in the behavior I am espousing in order to create a counter-

culture of sorts in the little spaces I operate in. Despite the misgivings of

many intellectuals regarding its capability of establishing relations, the

online accounts I maintain (whether they be Twitter or Facebook accounts)

have become somewhat instrumental in my desire to disseminate information and

promote a more critical view of things. True, these online accounts are mere

projections of our identities and are not at all representative of them, but

then again they could help as a starting point of topic discussions when

people meet face-to-face.

Without the desire to aggrandize myself, perhaps my constant readiness

to answer the questions of people who are taking interest in political

participation (more so that the national elections are just a couple of

months away) helped in them making more carefully-weighed decisions. In fact,

most of the discussions I conduct with friends and colleagues in Facebook

carry over to real life, wherein then we truly tarry a while with each other

and exchange ourselves in the practices of friendship. In carrying out my

services to friends who find my company informative or at least marginally

enjoyable, I also benefit it the same way that my parents have always asked

me to “think as much times as you can when deliberating, and ask others you

trust about them.”

The context of the societies we live in dichotomizes action and

deliberation. To act in an environment alien to your interest through

rebellion, one cannot help but forego thinking for the benefit of

York, Routledge, 1988), 263.

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accomplishing the actions and the plans for change one has embraced. It is

only in speech and in breaking bread with each other that we truly form

ourselves into agents of a responsible polis, inviting Wisdom Himself to sup

with us as we are operating for justice that lives in His name.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 2nd ed. World Publishing: Ohio, 1958.

_____________. The Human Condition. With an Introduction by Margaret Canovan, 2nd ed.

University of Chicago Press: London, 1958.

_____________. “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps,” Jewish

Social Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (<http://www.jstor.org/stable/4464856>, accessed 28 January

2010, Jan., 1950), 49-64.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Hackett: Indiana, 1985.

Bernauer, James W. “After Heidegger: Towards a Post-Fascist Politics of Spirit,” in Budhi

Vol. 1, No. 3. Ateneo de Manila University: Quezon City, 1997. 47-70.

________________. “Beyond Life and Death: On Foucault’s Post-Auschwitz Ethic” in Philosophy

Today, Vol. 32, No.2. S ummer, 1988. 128-142.

Claudio, Lisandro Elias. “Eagles without talons?: Nation-building and the Ateneo de Manila

University,” in “Post-Filipinism”, <http://l-claudio.blogspot.com/2009/12/eagle-without-

talons-nation-building.html>, accessed March 20, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” (trans.

Robert Hurley and others) in Paul Rabinow, ed., Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and

Truth: the essential works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Press,

1997. 281-301.

_______________. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated from the French

by Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. Vintage Books, Random House: New York, 1995.

_______________. The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure. Translated from

the French by Robert Hurley. Vintage Books, Random House: New York, 1990.

_______________. “The Concern for Truth,” interview by Francois Ewald, trans. Alan

Sheridan, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed.

Lawrence D. Kritzman. Routledge, New York, 1988.

Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault.

University of California Press: Berkeley, 1998.

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Thompson, Mark. “Pacific Asia after 'Asian Values': Authoritarianism, Democracy, and 'Good

Governance'” in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 6. Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 2004.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993752>, accessed 14 October 2009. 1079-1095.

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