Becoming More Human, More Filipino by Nourishing Oneself on Things French

(cross-posted from: http://ls.ateneo.edu/module.php?LM=articles.detail&eid=1222232227810&id=1200713868481)

Dr. Leovino Ma. Garcia, Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, was conferred the rank of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Letres by the Republic of France on September 17, 2008 at the residence of French Ambassador and Mrs. Gerard Chesnel in Makati.


The "Officier" is one of the three “grades” of honoraries given twice a year by the French Minister of Culture and Communication to scholars and artists who have distinguished themselves in culture and the arts and helped cultivate these fields in France and the world. The first grade, the "Chevalier," has up to 200 recipients. Officier, the second rank, has 60 recipients. The third and highest rank "Commandeur" is given to 20 awardees.


Following the conferment, Dr. Garcia gave the following response (printed in full):

Becoming More Human, More Filipino
by Nourishing Oneself on Things French

Leovino Ma. Garcia, Ph.D.
Ateneo de Manila University

Votre Excellence, Monsieur Gerard Chesnel, l’Ambassadeur de la République Française aux Philippines, Madame Ning Chesnel, distinguished officials, distinguished guests, Dr. Antonette Palma Angeles, Academic Vice President & OIC of the Ateneo de Manila University; Dr. Patricia Licuanan, President of Miriam College; Dr. Ma. Assunta Cuyegkeng, Vice President of the Loyola Schools; Dr. Anna Miren Intal, former Vice President of the Loyola Schools; Dr. Marlu Vilches, Dean of the School of Humanities; Mr. Rodolfo Ang, Dean of the John Gokongwei School of Management; Fr. Jose M. Cruz, S.J., Dean of the School of Social Sciences); administrators, colleagues, staff, and students from the Ateneo de Manila University; dear family members--my sisters Cora and Bless, my nephew Emmanuel, my niece Jennifer; faithful friends.

Thank you for being here at such a very short notice, even without receiving the "cartons" or hard copies of your invitations. Je tiens à exprimer ma profonde gratitude à vous tous. Vous êtes des vrais amis. You are true friends who are really here for me and not for the Schengen visas you hope I will be able to intercede for you from France.

I promise to follow three rules in public speaking. Rule 1: I will be brief; rule 2: I will be bright (let me be more humble, I will strive to be bright); and rule 3: I will be gone even before you realize it. I will be brief, be bright, and be gone. Also, I will not be impressing you with my French but rather confirm what you have perhaps suspected—that I do speak French with an Ilocano accent.

Like any thinking person, I searched long and hard and came up with two reasons why the French Ministère de l'Education Nationale is conferring upon me the rank of "Officier" dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques. First reason: I am now old enough at 63 and ready for it. Let me explain this. When I was young (with jet-black hair and not with the platinum mop you see me sport), and full of hope, I attended an event where an aged Belgian missionary received a decoration, the Order of Leopold or something. I asked him innocently how one obtained such an award. He bent over me and whispered: "Just keep breathing. Sooner or later, they will give it to you." I feel tempted to suppose therefore that I have been breathing long enough to be conferred this decoration. This first reason, however, seems frivolous and cynical.

Second reason: I may have been predestined to receive this award. Thanks to the good Sisters of St. Paul de Chartres in Vigan, Ilocos Sur—my name “Leovino” comes from a French saint--Saint Lubin (pronounced by my family as Lubín) a 5th century A.D. Bishop of Chartres who happily happens to be the patron saint of wine growers. This is all very well indeed as I profess a weakness for French wine, a weakness which can sometimes lead to more fluency in French and the shedding of inhibition.

Ah, wine, one of the first delights that come to mind when one thinks of France! I suspect many of you here consider me as an odd Ilocano-Ibanag, who prefers to travel to Paree (Paris) rather than to Aparri. But I do not mind that. Hemingway once told a friend: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

Of course, after French wine, other French delights are: cheese (fromage), fries (frites), French cuisine, French bread (which is simply baguette), perfume (parfum), high fashion (haute couture), cinema, and last but not least, French kiss. You notice that I have not yet mentioned French philosophy. Please kindly wait.

When we think "France", we remember liberté, égalité, fraternité—liberty, equality, fraternity--values that now belong to all humanity. Still other terms like “coup d’état,” now absorbed into Filipino as “kudeta”, “bourgeois” but simply pronounced by us with a hiss as “burgis”, and "hors d'oeuvres" pronounced as "horse d'ouvres". This second reason is arrogant.

Between the cynical and the arrogant reasons, I would like instead to focus on the significance of this Conferment—on what it has done, on what it is doing. It has incredibly brought us all together. It has brought about the convergence of various "worlds" (in alphabetical order) of academe, art, business, cartography, culture, diplomacy, feminism, law, literature, media, medicine, music, philosophy, politics, science, theater, tourism and other worlds that escape me now. This decoration from the French Government has brought us all together, at such a very short notice, to celebrate the often-unnoticed kinship, the deep-seated friendship between France and the Philippines.

This evening, I want to acknowledge this vibrant friendship not only in my life but in the life of our country. Who would not like to associate with the French—according to Emmanuel Levinas, "a people who equal humanity" ("un people qui égale l'humanité"), and the French nation, "a nation to which one can attach oneself by spirit and heart as much as by roots" ("une nation à laquelle on peut s'attacher par l'esprit et le coeur aussi fortement que par des racines")? Will not one agree with John Adams (the second U.S. president) that France is "one great garden" filled with everything that can "soothe, charm, and bewitch"? Who will not like to exclaim with René Descartes, the father of modernity: "Je pense, donc je suis" ("I think, therefore I am")? This is something dreaded by my students because if they do not think, they cease to exist for me! With Descartes, the Greek and Latin philosophia became philosophie. Descartes first exclaimed to himself “Je pense; donc, je suis” before proclaiming to the wider intellectual community: “Cogito, ergo sum.” He attended the Jesuit college of La Flêche where he was given the privilege of sleeping late because of his poor health. Old habits die hard. Summoned by Queen Christina of Sweden, who insisted on having philosophy lessons very early in the morning, Descartes caught a cold one winter morning and died of pneumonia. I once saw, at the old Musée de l’Homme in Paris, his skull marked with the appropriate label—“homo sapiens.”

Who has not memorized Antoine de St. Exupéry's "On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur; l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux" ("one can only see rightly with the heart; what is essential is invisible to the eyes")? Or recited unashamedly, during a light shower, Paul Verlaine's Ariettes Oubliées III:

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville,
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon coeur?

It weeps in my heart
as it rains on the town
What languorous hurt
thus pierces my heart?

I first started to learn French in the early sixties, when my Jesuit guru, Fr. Roque J. Ferriols bought me long-playing records of Edith Piaf. I remember listening over and over again to "Non, rien de rien, je ne regrette rien!" ("no, nothing but nothing, I regret nothing!") At the time, I didn't understand the full implication of another song by Edith Piaf-- "Allez venez Milord, il fait si froid dehors!" ("come on in Milord, it is so cold outside!"). In 1970, I came home with an M.A. thesis on Mikel Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Phénoménologie de l'expérience Esthétique", and in 1981, a doctoral dissertation on Ricoeur entitled “Between Responsibility and Hope: The Meaning of Human Existence in Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of the Will and Social-Political Writings” (Entre la Responsabilité et l'Espérance: Le sens de l'existence humaine dans la Philosophie de la Volonté et dans les écrits socio-politiques de Paul Ricoeur), both from the Universite Catholique de Louvain. Since 1982 until the present, I have been carrying a "loving struggle" with the philosophies of Ricoeur and Levinas.

What have these thinkers taught me? What I give here are provisional, approximative, non-conclusive answers. From Paul Ricoeur, I have learned principally this: "The human being is the Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite" ("L'homme est la Joie du Oui dans la tristesse du fini". From Emmanuel Levinas, using Dostoevsky's words: "We are all responsible for all for all human beings before all, and I more than all the others" ("Nous sommes tous responsables de tout et de tous devant tous, et moi plus que tous les autres"). For Levinas, the condition for there to be thought is a conscience. It is remarkable that in French, the word "conscience" is both "consciousness" and "conscience". One cannot become aware of oneself without at the same time becoming aware of the Other, without becoming aware of one's responsibility for the Other.

After lovingly struggled with the philosophies of Ricoeur and Levinas, I firmly believe that French philosophers have more interesting things to say on what it means to become human than what it means to be French. I believe that no life can be full until it has at least a French element in it just as I believe that no life can be full until it has also a Filipino element in it. By a strange paradox then, I feel and I think I have become more Filipino, more human because I have been nourished by philosophers like Ricoeur and Levinas. I would also like to think that in my passing on their wisdom to my students, I have inflected them with my own accent, with my own being.

Fr. Ferriols likes to tease me as someone who is "marunong tumawid sa mga lansangan ng Paris" ("adept in crossing the streets of Paris"; "quelqu'un qui sait très bien traverser les grands boulevards de Paris"). That may be true. But for as long as the color of my skin remains the color of tobacco, I will always remain as "the poor boy who knows the fields and rivers of the Cagayan Valley."

Thérèse de Lisieux (Monsieur l'Ambassadeur Chesnel is from Lisieux) once exclaimed "Tout est grace!" Vraiment, tout est grâce! (Truly, everything is grace!) Comment imaginer qu'un garçon, d'origine très humble, recevra ce soir la decoration d'Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques? (How can one imagine that a boy of humble origins is receiving tonight the rank of "Officier" in the Order of the Academic Palms?) C'est pour cela que je vous remercie, de tout coeur, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur et ausssi le Ministère de l'Education Nationale de France, pour l'honneur que vous me donnez ce soir. (It is for this reason that I thank you, Mr. Ambassador, and also the French Ministry of National Education) from the heart, for the honor you bestow upon me tonight.

Un grand merci à vous et à tous ici présents. My profound gratitude to you and to all those present here.

Merci infiniment. Maraming salamat. Dios ti ag-ngina.




Congratulations! Maraming salamat din, Dr. G. I am truly grateful that you were part of my formation. :)