Remmon Barbaza

This essay seeks to show, mainly through Heideggerian phenomenology, that the forgetting of walking in Manila is not merely a problem that requires a practical or technical solution. Rather it is more radically and ontologically rooted in what Heidegger famously referred to as Seinsvergessenheit, or “the forgetfulness of being,” particularly our way of being human. The forgetting of our being human in turn reveals itself in the way we design our cities, the spaces we inhabit, which yet again determines how we move about and navigate through such spaces. The acceptance of the way we are as humans, built as we are primarily to walk, is surely the first step in finding our way to retrieving this long lost habit. But there is also language to guide us. A brief consideration of the Filipino language itself shows that walking is so much part of who we are as human beings.

In November 2012, Amsterdam-based Spanish visual artist Paloma Polo came to the Philippines for the initial phase of her project on land use and vulnerability. She was hosted by the Department of Philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University, with some of whose members she began collaborating, including Remmon E. Barbaza, an associate professor of philosophy who is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on disaster risk management. Polo is currently based in Manila to develop a research project and to work on a film project on the topics mentioned earlier, and is collaborating and teaching as adjunct professor with the Center for International Studies at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, Quezon City. In this conversation, Polo and Barbaza exchange ideas on such topics as interdisciplinary work, art, philosophy, history, human agency and the necessity behind the creative impulse, in both artistic and intellectual works.

The environmental crisis, the threat of global annihilation, and the domination of technology over humanity are but symptoms of an underlying homeless that afflicts the human race, says Barbaza (Ataneo de Manila U., Philippines): people know at some deep level that they have forgotten how, or perhaps have yet to learn how, to live on the earth. Using the German philosopher as a guide, he searches for a new possibility of dwelling. The study began as his doctoral dissertation for the Hochschule fur Philosophie, Munich in 2003. It is not indexed. Annotation 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).