CRITICAL THINKING IN TEACHING THE LIFE AND WORKS OF JOSE RIZAL

Diego A. Odchimar III

Following Plutarch, who concluded that the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire
to be kindled, I purposely problematize Jose Rizal’s life and works to provoke the minds of my students
to think.

Following Renato Constantino (1972), to avoid venerating Jose Rizal without understanding,
I started the semester with Jose Rizal’s “Manifesto to Certain Filipinos”, written in his prison cell
at Fort Santiago on December 15, 1896, where he vehemently repudiated the revolution.

I constantly challenge my students to reflect on Jose Rizal’s views on reforms and revolution,
assimilation and separation, liberties and independence, hispanization and decolonization.

Jose Rizal was a truly brilliant figure. But it is not flattering to be tagged as “The Tagalog Hamlet”
and “An American Sponsored Hero”.

For Miguel de Unamuno (1968: 8-9), Rizal was only a hero of thought, in substance a Hamlet, a
fearless dreamer, irresolute and weak for action and for life. He observed, “Rizal is both Ibarra and
Elias…. 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.”

Could Rizal's indecision and ambivalence be a consequence of his petty bourgeois class
background?

For Leon Ma. Guerrero (1963), Rizal's development as a middle-class intellectual explains
"the puzzling absence of any real social consciousness in [his] apostolate so many years after
Marx's Manifesto or, for that matter, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum."

I recommend that Jose Rizal’s life and works be studied according to his social and economic
context.Instead of merely parroting the conventional wisdom that he was soul of the revolutionand
martyred for his sacrifice, a close examination of his life and works is necessary.

Did Jose Rizal become the national hero only because of the Americans who sponsored and
encouraged his cult?

For Ambeth Ocampo (1990), consistent with the William Howard Taft’s strategy of pacification,
the American commission chose Jose Rizal as the foremost national hero because he was non-violent
and reformist, unlike Bonifacio and Aguinaldo. As Governor William Cameron (1928) put it,
“Rizal never advocated independence, nor did he advocate armed resistance to the government.
He urged reform from within by publicity, by public education, and appeal to the public conscience”
 Why did Jose Rizal end the El Filibusterismo with the death of Simoun
and Father Florentino’s monologue?

Aside from the obvious homage to the three martyred priests Father Mariano Gomez,
Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora, to whom the book was dedicated, the El Filibusterismo is a cop out.
Jose Rizal reneged on his own project of liberation.

As Gregorio Zaide (2008) detailed, Paciano put his brother Jose Rizal to task
with a secret mission in Berlin, which was "To liberate his oppressed people from Spanish tyranny."
Jose Rizal was an independent thinker. He had his own mind. If he were just following Paciano's orders,
he would have had been a revolutionary leader of an independent movement against the Spanish
colonial. In his own estimation, pursuing reforms from above was the right path than seeking
radical changes from below. While it is romantic to die to his illusions like the moth, Jose Rizal chose
to heed his mother's advice and carefully avoided the revolution. According to Claro Recto (1968),
this made Jose Rizal as “realist,” which in the context of the times could mean “cautious” and therefore
not yet prone to act. To justify his pragmatism, through Father Florentino’s monologue, he associated
the revolution with vengeance and condemned it as evil.

Like Marcelo del Pilar, I am not impressed with the El Filibusterismo. Although his insistence
on the importance of civic virtue and spiritual reform is prudent, his diagnosis of the inexplicable
sufferings during the Spanish colonization was sabotaged by his own hesitation.

I agree with Epifanio San Juan Jr. (2012) that Jose Rizal's founding of the La Liga Filipina
on July 3, 1892 must be remembered as the prime catalyst for the founding of the Katipunan
by the radical Andres Bonifacio on the eve of his exile to Dapitan on July 7, 1892. However, Jose Rizal
never sanctioned the revolution. Apolinario Mabini and the conservative members of the La Liga Filipina
formed the Cuerpo de Compromisarios, which pledged to continue supporting the La Solidaridad.

Regarding his death, Jose Rizal pondered on a good death in his letter to Mariano Ponce in 1890.
He said, “One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present
itself again.”

How would history treat Jose Rizal if he was not martyred at Bagumbayan? Would Jose Rizal
be immortalized if he was not implicated in the revolution that he refused to align himself?

The study of Jose Rizal’s life and works is an ongoing discourse on his relevance
to the development of our national consciousness. According to Renato Constantino (1972),
“We have magnified Rizal’s significance for too long. It is time to examine his limitations and profit
from his weaknesses just as we have learned from the strength of his character and his virtues.
His weaknesses were the weaknesses of his society. His wavering and his repudiation of mass action
should be studied as a product of the society that nurtured him.”

Existentially, as it is with the study of the life and works of Jose Rizal, I remind my students
that the purpose of the study history is to learn how to live from the flawed lives of mortals.
 REFERENCES

Constantino, Renato.1972.
Veneration Without Understanding. Journal of Contemporary Asia, Volume 1, Issue 4,
pages 3-18.

Guerrero, Leon Maria.1963.

The First Filipino. National Historical Institute.

Forbes, William Cameron. 1928.

The Philippine Islands. Houghton Mifflin

Ocampo,Ambeth. 1990.
Rizal Without the Overcoat. Anvil Publishing, Inc.

Recto, Claro. 1968.

"Rizal the Realist and Bonifacio the Idealist." In Rizal: Contrary Essays, edited by D. Feria
and P.B. Daroy. Guro Books.

Rizal, Jose.
El Filibusterismo (1891), translated by Soledad Lacson-Locsin. University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

“Manifesto to Certain Filipinos,” dated December 15, 1896. Retrieved from

http://nhcp.gov.ph/rizal-issues-a-manifesto-to-proclaim-his-innocence/

San Juan, Jr., Epifanio. 2012.

Rizal in Our Time. Anvil Publishing, Inc.

Unamuno, Miguel de.1968.

"The Tagalog Hamlet." In Rizal: Contrary Essays, edited by D. Feria and P. B. Daroy. Quezon City:
Guro Books. the Bewitched" (dated 15 November 1895) part of which I quote here (1964, 178):

Zaide, Gregorio. 2008.

Jose Rizal: Life, Works, and Writings of a Genius, Writer, Scientist, and National Hero, 2nd edition.
All Nations Publishing Company, Inc.