Life, Works

and Writing
of Rizal

Sub. By: Rommel Paul Gorospe

Sub. To: Sir Eric Pasion Tamang
Name: Al Francis Diaz
Program of Study (Course = Bachelor of Science in Criminology/Life, Works and Writings of Rizal/
Block 08)
INTRODUCTION Term (Please Check) ____ Second ___ Third____Summer
Local Address: San Pascual, Rizal, Kalinga

MODULE NO. 1
1. Write a concept paper about the relevance of the Rizal course in our contemporary era.
2. Identify situation which you can use the teachings of Rizal

Format
1. Introduction (use 1 to 2 pages double spacing)
2 Teachings of Rizal (at least 5 use 1 page only double spacing)
3. Application to Current Situations (uses 1 to 2 pages, double spacing)
4. Conclusion (uses 1 page only, double spacing)
INTRODUCTION
Rizal is the great "enigma," so goes the official doxa and conventional wisdom. Because of this
indeterminacy, the ruling elite and its state agencies are utilizing everything in their power to make
Rizal, his life and writings, help to resolve its legitimacy crisis. For the centennial of his death in
1998, Rizal will again be invoked as the one of the doctrinal foundations of the neocolonial state, his
teachings on the importance of civic virtue and spiritual reform rehashed while his critique of
injustice and inequality is kept safely in the margins. To echo "the first Filipino," you get the Rizal
you deserve.

There have been many proponents and advocates of the enigma syndrome since Rizal's canonization
by the U.S. colonial administration. The most internationally renowned is Miguel de Unamuno, the
fierce thinker of Spanish existentialism (in the opinion of Julian Marias), who recorded his reaction to
Wenceslao Retana's Vida y Escritos del Dr. Rizal. Unamuno agreed with Retana's view of Rizal as the
"Oriental Don Quixote," basically a romantic personality; but for Unamuno, Rizal was only a hero of
thought, in substance a Hamlet, "a fearless dreamer," irresolute and weak for action and for life.
This malaise infects the Noli Me Tangere. Unamuno delivers his judgment (1968, 8-9):

Because Rizal himself is the spirit of contradiction, a soul that dreads the revolution, although deep
within himself he consummately desires it: he is a man who at the same time both trusts and distrusts
his own countrymen and racial brothers; who believes them to be the most capable and yet the least
capable - the most capable when he looks at himself as one of their blood; the most incapable when
he looks at others. Rizal is a man who constantly pivots between fear and hope, between faith and
despair. All these contradictions are merged together in that love, his dreamlike and poetic love for
his adored country, the beloved region of the sun, pearl of the Orient, his lost Eden.

In his prologue to a 1908 edition of El Filibusterismo, Retana seems to reaffirm his interpretation of
Rizal as the Tagalog Quixote, though now made more multidimensional with the addition of
influences like Nietzsche, Leopardi, and Alexander Herzon, the instigator of Russian nihilism. This is
suggestive; in general, however, Retana's patronizing tone and his anatomical determinism
(influenced by the notorious Cesar Lombroso) can only be pathetic and risible from our vantage
point.

Other commentators have pursued Unamuno's line of typologizing. Nick Joaquin, the vindicator of the
populist wing of the ilustrado tradition, presents his own version of Rizal as the "anti-hero" by
marshalling and replaying the ideas of Ante Radaic and Leon Maria Guerrero. Radaic's
psychoanalytic diagnosis of Rizal as a victim of an inferiority complex, if taken as the decisive key to
his life, strikes many as mechanical and even trivializing if not a symptom of Radaic's own
obsessions: "Because of an excess of spirit, Rizal saw his body as inadequate, and this, in turn,
influenced his complex psychological structure." For Guerrero (1963), the causal sequence has to do
with the social and economic context: Rizal's schizophrenic temperament derives from his petty
bourgeois class background, even though Rizal is credited with inventing the idea of a Filipino
nation.
The anguish of exile was modulated by the presence of Josephine Bracken, an Irish Catholic from Hong Kong,
whom Rizal later married a few hours before he was executed. (Isabel Taylor Escoda [1996] has tried to
document what happened to her later on; she died a pauper's death in Hong Kong and her body was interred
by the city's Sanitary Department in an unknown grave.) Despite such a distraction - he apparently did not
lose his mind over her, as he did with Segunda Katigbak, Rizal could not "deny that his being transported to
an alien place" was demoralizing. Terrified by the "uncertainty of the future," he seized the opportunity to
volunteer his medical skills to the Spanish military then engaged in suppressing the revolution in Cuba.
Amplifying distance and strangeness, he could resign himself to the demands of duty, the necessity of
accepting destiny in order "to make progress through suffering." A certain amount of fatalism, plus the
compulsive sense of vocation or fetish of duty, coalesced to shape the peculiar ethos of this Filipino exile at the
time of revolutionary ferment.

Contrast this with the exile of another austere and disciplined freedom-fighter of the time, Apolinario
Mabini. Mabini chose exile to Guam instead of swearing allegiance to the sovereign power of the
enemy, the United States, who wreaked havoc on the country and killed a million Filipinos. The
"sublime paralytic" conceived the deportation as a crucible of his insurrectionary determination. His
intransigence became proverbial even after he returned and made a sort of peace with the
conquerors. So far nobody has researched what he did during those two years of exile. One can only
surmise that his shrewd and proud spirit endured the time of banishment because he was busy
forging the "conscience of his race" - his memoirs on the Philippine Revolution. He employed his
cunning, his intelligence, his power of remembering to bridge the distance between that
godforsaken island and the homeland he never abandoned because, as in the labor of mourning, it
was interjected and preserved as an object of adoration. One suspects that something like this
happened to Rizal except that for him, the family and loyal friends constituted the ground of hope
for ultimate redemption.

Exile could not destroy Rizal's trust in the emancipatory potential of the multitude. In the "Letter to
the Young Women of Malolos," among others, he affirmed his rationalist belief in the inalienability
of rights: "God gave each individual reason and a will of his or her own to distinguish the just from
the unjust; all were born without shackles and free, and nobody has a right to subjugate the will and
spirit of another." Natural right is coextensive with each individual's power. In this he approximated
Spinoza's radical view, elaborated in the Treatise on Politics, that human rights cannot be alienated
by a social contract, or by the system.
APLLICATION TO CURRENT SITUATIONS

In these times of unprecedented exodus abroad of youth searching for jobs or the fulfilment of their
dreams; of public servants going back on their oath of honest service, in exchange for the returns of
Mammon; of activists who continue to disappear and die in the course of their mission to change
society for the least of that society; or of the rare Filipino who risks his own life and family if only to
serve the cause of truth- it would be fitting to remember Rizal’s timeless call to all patriots of past,
present and future as a gauge of our own place and worth as Filipinos at this point in our history.

It may be said that Rizal’s foremost mission in life had been determined for him by fate- and early
in his life. In 1872 Fathers Jose Burgos, Mariano Gomes and Jacinto Zamora, priests whose names
were identified with the movement to reform the priesthood, and the Catholic Church itself, in the
Philippines, were executed on the ground of inciting the Mutiny of Cavite. That execution proved to
be Rizal’s political epiphany, the beginning of his coming of age as a Filipino aware of being part of
one nation. It was to culminate in full fruition at his death more than 20 years later, but by then a
generation of his fellow natives had been molded, by his life’s work, into Filipinos with a sense of
nation.

The generation into which Rizal was born was the generation that up till then produced the
greatest of Filipino youth. It grew up in the worst and best of times, a time of upheaval, and
revolution and sacrifice, the call to which Rizal and his fellow youth had unhesitatingly, and without
looking back, answered.

Among them, however, Rizal and Marcelo H. Del Pilar, a fellow Propagandist, stood out for their
determination. Del Pilar had left homeland, wife and two daughters to wage his political struggle in
Spain. He would die there. Rizal was driven by one thing and one thing only: to serve the
nation. He spoke of it a year after he left his homeland for studies in Spain: “In my heart I have
suppressed all loves, except that of my native land; in my mind I have erased all ideas which do not
signify her progress; and my lips have forgotten the names of the native races in the Philippines in
order not to say more than Filipinos.”

Rizal’s chief aim was to reform Philippine society, first by uncovering its ills and second, by
awakening the Filipino youth. His enemies were the oppressive colonial government, but especially
the corrupt elements among the friars, members of the religious orders that exerted the greatest
influence over the government and thereby held complete sway over the lives of the Filipinos.

Rizal knew the best way to awaken the youth and lead them toward right action was through
education, but especially foreign education. For local education, being controlled by the friars then
kept the Filipinos in the dark, ignorant of their rights and heritage- and meek in the face of
oppression. This was partly why he left for Spain in 1882, to continue his studies there
Championing the cause of the nation for him entailed becoming the best person he could be. He
carried over to his activism the mental and physical disciplines he learned from his elders.

His capacity for self-denial had developed to such a degree that enabled him -when he was short
on funds abroad- to breakfast on a few biscuits for days on end; to take exams on an empty stomach
or go for hours without food; to burn the candle at both ends studying his lessons or learning a new
language; to steel himself from falling into the trap of drinking and gambling, which had waylaid
many of his compatriots from their mission; to retain his empathy for the downtrodden as when
moved upon encountering a child begging in the streets of Madrid, perhaps reminding him of the
child beggars back home.

He plunged himself into the thick of the Propaganda, a movement that agitated for government
reforms in the Philippines, foremost of which was Filipinos’ assimilation in the Spanish nation
through representation in the Cortes (Spanish Parliament). He waged his campaign among
progressive members of the Cortes and Spanish intellectuals; he wrote letters and articles for La
Solidaridad, the Propaganda mouthpiece, as well as other publications, producing some of his best
work during this period such as “The Indolence of the Filipinos”; “Message to the Women of
Malolos”, or “The Philippines a Century Hence”.

Despite his deprivations, he continued to push himself to serve his nations because finally producing
his greatest work, the novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, works that paved his way to an
untimely death but also to a lasting place in the hearts and minds of his compatriots.

Of his vision for the Filipinos, Rizal wrote his comrade Mariano Ponce in 1888: “Let this be our
only motto: For the welfare of the Native Land. On the day when all Filipinos should think like him
[Del Pilar and like us, on that day we shall have fulfilled our arduous mission, which is the formation
of the Filipino nation”. To Rizal that nation was a nation free of injustice, oppression and
corruption. May the Filipinos of today finally begin fulfilling this timeless challenge of Rizal.
CONCLUSION

Rizal’s statement that he had no desire to take part in conspiracies, which to him seemed
“premature and risky,” was an expression of a disagreement over strategy and tactics of how to
steer the revolution. Back in my university days, I always heard this premature and risky advice from
reformist activists in the campus. Although they usually said that they agreed with the revolutionary
calls; when it comes to practice, however, they said it was not yet time. Perhaps, Rizal never liked
the tactic used (as he portrayed it) by his character Simoun in his novel El Filibusterismo, of inciting
violence and the insurrectionary/put schist’s persecution of the people to force them to revolt.

Elmer Ordonez, in his article “Rizal and the Literature of the Left,” commented that the essays of
Epifanio San Juan, one of the leading scholars in Rizal studies, “attempt to recuperate Rizal
(appropriated by U.S. colonialism and Ilustrado collaborators in search of a national hero for their
Filipino wards) from his perceived apostasy, the December 15 Manifesto, where he abjured the armed
revolution. San Juan recalled Recto’s ‘landmark synthesizing of both revolutionaries’ (Rizal and
Bonifacio’s) parallel lives’ in 1958. For San Juan, Recto pointed to a ‘fatal and unbridgeable dualism’
which today, our wide-ranging endeavours to integrate history and practice, is trying mightily to
resolve.”

The question again arises as to who benefited from that dualism. What forces in Philippine society
might have consciously fanned this dualism to their advantage? My view is that this dualism would
last until a social movement that linked reform and revolution triumphed and became the dominant
narrative.
The root of the problem was the persistent maneuver of the interest groups, such as U.S. colonialism
to create a disconnect between reform and revolution and make it appear that Rizal was a pacifist
through and through, thus turning him into a propaganda tool for social inertia in the face of
colonial oppression. The right-wing tendency was a clear result of this disconnect. It was the
tendency to absolutize reformism that, in turn, assured the continuation of the survival of the status
quo.
Grasping the reality of the revolutionary situation could make one arrive at the proper analysis of
Philippine history and of what is happening now. All the ills of the Philippine society can be traced
back to the outcome of the dialectics of the time of Rizal. The way many of our community leaders
think on how to achieve social change for our country of origin is also characterized by this
tendency. Up to now, many people still pit Rizal against Bonifacio. They have missed the great lesson
of the Revolution of 1896 that the two pillars of Philippine history were representative of a single
historical process of the Filipino peoples’ aspiration for freedom. Hence, given all these lessons of
history, only a social movement that is able to grasp the dialectics between Rizal and Bonifacio,
reform and revolution will be able to lead the Filipino out of its pre-industrial and agricultural state.
Life, Works
and Writing
of Rizal

Sub. By: Al Francis A. Diaz

Sub. To: Sir Eric Pasion Tamang