[Music] good day and welcome to today's lecture the topic for today is something your teacher may have already introduced to you but i'd like to take it up using gabriel marcel's primary and secondary reflection so the question we're going to answer is how do we philosophize tagalog so this is the outline we will follow we will have a very brief introduction about the relationship of life and philosophy and then we go right into doing philosophy i'd like to start with a quote from a french philosopher maurice blondell and the quote is philosophy doesn't explain life but helps constitute it so obviously there are two very important concepts here the first one is explain and the second one is constitutes so philosophy does not explain life but constitute it what does that mean let me start with an example how do you make a baguette french bread okay flower yeast eggs and then you knead and you let it rise for a long time and then you bake a baguette is more than its ingredients and baking instructions no matter how much i describe it to you no matter how i show you pictures you cannot enjoy savor what a baguette is a baguette is about baking it making a lot of mistakes until finally you get the perfect combination and most of all a baguette is about eating it letting it dwell in your mouth enjoying the sensation okay so what did i just do here okay let's compare it to life what is life we have all of these cliches you know ups and downs stages it's about career religion making the right decision in these areas but have we captured life okay what is life really the truth of the matter is life is about our everyday mundane experiences and like philosophers who love to say it in a more profound way they call it kotidium ordinarium in other words as father prayers love to say it father failure says his famous expression lundagenmo baby narada just live it okay so this is philosophy this is what it does for you it helps you live your life okay but how can it do it we do it by teaching you what is famously known as philosophical reflection pagnila nilay how do we philosophize so let me now give you mars cells primary and secondary reflection so let's define terms what is primary reflection primary reflection dissolves the unity of an experience an event or a thing in other words for you to find out what a flower is what do you do with a flower in primary reflection you break it up very so primary reflection however tells you there are petals whatever and whatever so primary reflection obviously is not enough to capture what makes a flower a flower so what do you do you do secondary fraction secondary reflection not tries to put together what you have broken apart so that you locate this object this experience within a bigger scheme of things you know father johnny gore wrote a beautiful song it's called in the greater scheme of things and many times that's how we understand something by putting it in the greater scheme of that is not primary reflection that is secondary reflection so let's try to do primary reflection on a question which every college sophomore college junior is wrestling with and for some of us who am i so let's use ourselves primary and secondary reflection on this pesky question that never goes away so remember i said primary reflection dissects an experience a thing and so on and so forth so how do we do this let's ask the question who am i i'm sorry i use my picture okay so instinctively when you ask me who am i i would say my name is antonette palmer angeles i'm bach seven seven per first batch of coins i have three children catholic so i ask you now the answer is score of course is no we cannot capture who we are with these categories singly or even putting them all together because in fact and this is the irony of these categories i try to enumerate as many as i can but you can be sure that any one of those categories will apply to a million other people i say i am about 77 there were about 300 of us i say i'm a koi there were about 100 of us i say i'm catholic i don't know i don't know how many millions there are of us i say i have three children there are so many people who have children and then the other thing is all of these categories are meaningful only in relation to other people let me explain when i'm saying female your femaleness is defined only in other words all of these attempts at categorizing and putting categories to who i am is supposed to be self-referential but in the end what did you do you actually were other referential you define yourself only in relation to others and so i tried to establish myself as a somebody what did i do i used categories that were supposed to be unique to me and what did i find out in the end i found out that those categories apply to other people so okay i realize that that i am more than those categories i am more than those categories so the question is how am i different okay who am i beyond these categories and what can i say about myself but this is the problem what's happening here if you look at your slide you'll see that what's happening here is i am looking at myself i object i subject the word object means in fro in fact it really means what is in front of me what can i say about this i the subject this eye subject when i can't go behind it i want you to look at some experiences which many of you probably went through and this experience is a boy loves me really loves me and i have this wonderful feeling i am on top of the world i love life everything becomes beautiful because a boy loves me and then have you ever been to a family reunion where you meet cousins aunts uncles everyone and you just sit in a corner and you say why do i have this warm feeling where is it coming from i feel so affirmed i'm so happy and then there are also instances when after a personal crisis has finally been resolved you feel this sense of peace which you cannot get anywhere else and then there is this experience of having disliked a person immensely and then one time back inside again the feeling is not replicable i call these moments moments of strong sense of self i realize who i am during these moments okay but i cannot capture these moments i cannot capture the love feeling i feel i cannot capture my warm feeling i cannot capture my feeling of peace during those times i cannot categorize them as father rocket always says hindi wedding i cannot capture them in the way i capture myself as gender religion and so in tagalog it's a beautiful phrase that is the time i really feel that there is an eye that is out there okay but this i subject emerges not in concepts and categories i used to describe myself it emerges only in the experiences only in my relationship with others so what's the irony here what does secondary reflection tell us secondary reflection tells us that only in relation do i in fact aware that i exist the i here being not just the objective eye but the i that i'm trying to capture the dissatisfied eye marcel says i exist so that then it becomes very clear that existence is an exclamatory awareness and some experiences are more intense but this is an exclamatory awareness of existence made possible only because of other people but i cannot go behind these experiences i cannot capture them in categories not in any explanatory way so let's go back to where we started who am i primary reflection dissects an experience so what do i do i dissect myself into speakable categories which apply to other people that's what primary reflection does but what does secondary reflection do primary reflection if it dissents secondary reflection brings you back into a hole that is bigger than yourself and what do you realize here you realize that the i in fact is going to be discoverable only as it communes with other people as intensely as it can so that the eye is a mystery to treat the eyes as a problem is a disservice to the eye because my sense of eye polaga so i object i can talk about eye object but i subject that can only be lived and discovered in a network of relationships with other people over time so my young students it's very important that if you want to live life you have to learn to stop to reflect and to dwell and as mr spock says if you reflect this is the only way you can really prosper or if we talk about a philosopher aristotle will say go and thrive only because you reflect [Music] you