A Reaction to F.Sionil Jose's Why We Are Shallow

By Raphael Lactao
BSEd - English Student

In all the heated arguments and pithy analyzations about the papers given to us by our professor, F. Sionil Jose’s “Why we are shallow” had the most different number of interpretations. We have read plenty of academic papers by venerable researchers and educators, but I did not expect that the great minds in our classroom would become turbulent because of a newspaper article from the literary section. Some thought about it hardly, and some hardly thought about it, and some just over-analyzed the trivial matters in the paper. The thing is, when you read a literary article, you should not be thinking at all, you should be in a meditative state that causes you to process the words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that you would not judge it at first glance because it is somebody else’s experience. F Sionil Jose did not write that with any form of intellectual back-up or provisions, because he had no need for such, for he only wrote from experience, and that is what writers do. As the arguments rise up in the classroom, I cannot help but keep looking at the part where he said: “We do not read”. Readers know that they should be empathic for the writer, because that is what reading does, it causes people to look through other eyes so they would either: 1) Know that there are some people out there who are just like them; 2) To provoke them intellectually and morally, so as to widen their perspectives and grant them empathy. Because of that I realized that even if we deny it with all our pride and all our dignity, we are still shallow.

F. Sionil Jose made some good points in his paper but we still chose to argue over his words rather than thinking about the cause. We are shallow because we think too much about progress when we do not even know how the writer came to his point. We are shallow because we do not know the essence of our thinking. We are given the gift of thought but we use it in such trivial matters. We must think things over in profusion; as if sinking into deep waters, we must let ourselves reach the bottom of a given thought or feeling, all the way to where the causes lay and reside. It seems to me that to recognize causes is precisely what thinking means. We must let the main idea diffuse its contents, then it will become firm realizations, and we would not get lost in our progress. We look around as if we know the essence of things but in reality we only know the tip of the iceberg. We have been bombarded with problems (that we also made) in a way that we have become complacent in the progress of our consciousness.

That is what I am doing in this paper, I am thinking about the causes and not supporting the already given provisions. I wish to trace the steps backwards. I am thinking about the raw origins that causes man to be shallow. One thing is lack of psychological observation. Meditating on things human is one means by which we can ease life’s burden. By exercising the art of psychological observation, we can secure presence of mind in order to get out of this shallowness. I am not talking about the stuff of novels, short stories, or philosophical meditations, for these are the works of exceptional men. This is more on judging of public predicaments and personalities. We lack the art of psychological dissection in all classes of society. There are lots of talk about men, but none at all about man. We must learn how a person thinks, how he gets to his thoughts, what forms his thoughts. A better understanding of how the human mind actually works grants us empathy, and in the long run, we might actually understand ourselves.

An objection to my former statement that psychological observation can make us less shallow is one might be too persuaded of the unpleasant consequences that one might intentionally divert thinking about the causes of human action. It is a scary thing, knowing one’s intention, or the causes of his actions. It reflects upon the self. Sometimes blind faith in the goodness of human nature may really be desirable for man. Perhaps the belief in goodness and actions has made man better and less distrustful. This might also help humanity forward, and awaken our consciousness. However the former statements stand, one must still have the necessity of moral observation. We must still investigate the origin and history of thoughts. But being shallow is a good start. Philosophical theories has always started from false explanation of human feeling and erroneous analysis of behavior.

We are shallow because of our perverse concepts of morality and ordering of the good. In every place, I always sense a hint of shallowness and false selflessness. Our morality is based on how high or low our desires are. When one desires a low kind of goodness, for example, drinking alcohol, to one that is esteemed to be higher, for example, health, is taken for immoral. But we do not realize that the hierarchy of the good is not fixed, it is relative and it is subjective. In a world where there are classes, we cannot submit to one absolute form of morality. There are uneducated people who, because of lack of money, did not have the chance to see morality as one who has formal education. So in a sense, one cannot blame a person for being shallow, as one cannot blame a rock for being a rock.

We are too serious when it comes to everything. We do not have much negative capability. That is why we are shallow. We are impatient and insatiable. We deny things that we need because of our desires. We take ourselves too seriously as “humans”. We became too serious because we hold a concept that we are the most powerful beings on this planet. But in reality we only stray away further from who we really are because of this seriousness about things that are unnecessary; about all the trivial factors that we think makes us “human”. We have been inhumane for hundreds of years because of our obsession in socioeconomic progress. We hold on to beliefs that and we hold them to be “unquestionable”.

We are shallow because we do not search for the meaning of things. True wisdom lies hidden because in some point in history, the human race has become complacent in its progress. Why is it that the safest and purest form of understanding life has always been unacknowledged? Why did we create a society where existence is trivial and money is the meaning of life; a search for perpetual pleasure. We must be stripped out of our pretences in order to realize that the key driver in human motivation is the search for meaning.