PHILOSOPHY FOR CITIZENS OF THE COSMOS

by

Ernestus Cardona Padilla

At the edge of the civilized world lies the makeshift home of an ageing seer. Practically a classroom of
seven special children taking “Philosophy for Kids” during the better part of the day, it may be the last
refuge of philosophy in this endangered human planet. Needless to say, even last ditch efforts to
drumbeat the relevance of philosophy to society by requiring philosophers in residence in universities
have been reduced to the third level of abstraction. The path to irrelevance is paved with good
intentions after all. But for these seven kids, the genes of forebears with forbidding names – Johann
Martin Chladenius, Friedriech D. E. Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wilhelm Dilthey, Emilio Betti,
Rudolf Bultmann, Richard Rorty – are just too strong to defy.

SOC: I am here to develop citizens of the cosmos!

SLY, BOLD, THY, EMY, & BULLY: Yes! We’re all meant to be citizens of the cosmosss!

CLAD: ‘meant’ is too soft for me. How about ‘predestined’?

BULLY: Clad, what happens to human freedom?

SOC: Words . . . words . . . words. Yes, the word is mightier than the sword, but folks it’s too early for
fencing. Wait! Aren’t we into a new topic?

CLAD: Hermeneeeuuutics Sir!

SOC: Oh I see why you’re so excited with words. There are worlds behind words pace Derrida. But since
you’re groomed, let me not use ‘meant’ for now, to be citizens of the cosmos, I’m handing you copies
not of the latest monograph from Stephen Hawking but of the first work of prose as far as I know. Let’s
call this earliest fiction or history or both by its first three words ‘In the Day’. It’s the hidden book
running through Genesis to the first two chapters of Kings similar to the Gospel Q in the synoptic
gospels. You’ll recognize it when you see it. Clad, kindly start reading aloud the first portion.

CLAD: “2: 4b In the day that YHWH made earth and skies 5. when all produce of the field had not yet
been in the earth, and all vegetation of the field had not yet grown, for YHWH had not rained on the
earth, and there had been no human to work the ground, 6. and a river had come up from the earth and
watered the whole face of the ground 7. YHWH fashioned a human, dust from the ground, and blew into
his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being. 8. And YHWH planted a garden in
Eden at the east, and he set the human whom he had fashioned there. 9. And YHWH caused every tree
that was pleasant to the sight and good for food to grow, and the tree of life within the garden, and the
tree of knowledge of good and bad. 15. And YHWH took the human and put him in the garden of Eden to
work it and to watch over it. 16. And YHWH commanded the human, saying, “You may eat from every

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tree in the garden. 17. But from the tree of knowledge of good and bad: you shall not eat from it,
because in the day you eat from it: you’ll die!”

SOC: Sly, take it from there.

SLY: 3: 1. And the snake was slier than every animal of the field that YHWH had made, and he said to the
woman, “Has God indeed said you may not eat from any tree of the garden?” 2. And the woman said to
the snake, “We may eat from the fruit of the trees of the garden. 3. But from the fruit of the tree that is
within the garden God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it, and you shall not touch it. Or else you’ll die.’”
4. And the snake said to the woman, “You won’t die! 5. Because God knows that in the day you eat from
eat it your eyes will be opened, and you’ll be like God – knowing good and bad.” 6. And the woman saw
that the tree was good for eating and that it was an attraction to the eyes, and the tree was desirable to
bring about understanding, and she took some of its fruit, and she ate, and gave to her man, and he ate.
7. And the eyes of the two of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they picked
fig leaves and made loincloths for themselves.

SOC: Bully, continue.

BULLY: 8. And they heard the sound of YHWH walking in the garden in the wind of the day, and the
human and his woman hid from YHWH among the garden’s trees. 9. And YHWH called the human and
said to him, “Where are you?” 10. And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden and was afraid
because I was naked, and I hid.” 11. And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten
from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?” 12. And the human said, “The woman, whom
you placed with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” 13. And YHWH said to the woman, “What is
this that you’ve done?” And the woman said, “The snake tricked me, and I ate.” 14. And YHWH said to
the snake, “Because you did this, you are cursed out of every domestic animal and every animal of the
field, you’ll go on your belly, and you’ll eat dust all the days of your life. 15. And I’ll put enmity between
you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He’ll strike you at the head, and you’ll strike
him at the heel.”

SOC: That’s enough Bully! It’s your turn Thy.

THY: 16. To the woman He said, “I’ll make your suffering and your labor pain great. You’ll have children
in pain. And your desire will be for your man, and he’ll dominate you.” 17. And to the human He said,
“Because you listened to your woman’s voice and ate from the tree about which I commanded you
saying, ‘You shall not eat from it,’ the ground is cursed on your account. You’ll eat from it with suffering
all the days of your life. 18. And it will grow thorn and thistle at you, and you’ll eat the field’s vegetation.
19. By the sweat of your nostrils you’ll eat bread until you go back to the ground, because you were
taken from it; because you are dust and you’ll go back to dust.” 20. And the human called his woman
“Eve,” because she was mother of all living.

SOC: Bold, take the floor.

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BOLD: 21. And YHWH made skin garments for the human and his woman and dressed them. 22. And
YHWH said, “Here, the human has become like one of us, to know good and bad. And now, in case he’ll
put out his hand and take from the tree of life as well, and eat and live forever:” 23. And YHWH put him
out of the garden, to work the ground from which he was taken. 24. And He expelled the human, and He
had the cherubs and the flame of a revolving sword reside at the east of the garden of Eden to watch
over the way to the tree of life.

EMY: There’s nothing left for me!

SOC: There’s always something left for everyone. You always focus your camera on the outside world.
Why not turn it inwards now? Does the text ring a bell in you?

EMY: That’s the story of ‘The Fall of Man’!

SOC: Why do you think it’s been dubbed as ‘The Fall’?

BULLY: The snake fell from the sky. How could there be a snake in paradise in the first place?

SOC: Bully, I’m asking Emy.

EMY: I’ve been told that it depicts how sin entered the world. Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s Will!

SOC: And where did he express his Will?

EMY: In his first commandment –

SOC: Which is?

BOLD: Never eat naked and with eyes closed!

SOC: That’s a sweeping statement! Clad, what did God forbid?

CLAD: Eating the wrong things!

SOC: Does the text say it?

CLAD: Not directly though.

SOC: What does Pappie Chladenius say about hermeneutics?

CLAD: The art of understanding the text fully.

SOC: Clad, you need the text to understand it fully. How is the command worded?

CLAD: Let me see . . . Here it is – “You may eat from every tree of the garden.” Oh, I’m changing my
answer.

SOC: Clad, too much from too little. You’ve got to read the text fully – to fully understand it.

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CLAD: “You may eat from every tree of the garden. But from the tree of knowledge of good and bad: you
shall not eat from it, because in the day you eat from it: you’ll die!”

SOC: Didn’t Pappie Chladenius say anything about the intent of the author?

CLAD: Oh yes, I remember him having written something about the text-seer (reader/audience)
attaining full understanding by capturing the intent of the text-source (writer/speaker) in relaying the
text.

SOC: And how about the rest? Do you think your Pappies wrote anything to that effect?

SLY, BOLD, THY, EMY, & BULLY: (in chorus) Yessssssss!

EMY: Pappie Betti considered the universe of understanding revolving around the trinity of the adopting
parent (the interested mind), the primordial parent (the interesting mind), and the adopted child (the
objectification of mind).

SOC: Well said. Hey, you said it better than Pappie himself! Must be celebrating in his grave. Does the
text capture the intent of God?

BULLY: Then God must be impotent! The man and the woman . . . what’re their names again . . . ah
Adam and Steve . . . I mean Adam and Eve, didn’t die in the very day they ate the forbidden thing.

SOC: Should the words “die in the very day” be taken literally?

SLY: Pappie Schleiermacher said that understanding is ineluctably a persistent appreciation of the
holographic nature of meaning – the interconnectedness of the universe and the units of significance in
both text and thought.

SOC: I couldn’t have said it better.

BULLY: That’s precisely my point! Pappie Bultmann advocated D-E-M-Y-T-H-O-L-O-G-Y-Z-I-N-G as a

matter of fact.

EMY: Are you saying that ‘The Fall of Man’ is just a myth. You can’t demythologize what isn’t a myth, can
you? You must have been immaculately conceived then!

BULLY: Emy, you’re putting a forbidden interpretation into my mouth. But I don’t blame you. Pappie has
been grossly misunderstood even in his own time. Critics have noticed only the coup d’etat portion of
demythologizing, missing completely the ineffable sweetness of the revolutionary enterprise. I’m glad
the mystics are doing justice to his cause.

SLY: And I sympathize with those visionaries whom the world has mistaken for fools. I shouldn’t forget
what Pappie Schleiermacher has been drumbeating for ages – understanding requires the seer to
familiarize himself with the language and the philosophy of the source, and the seer’s aim must be to
understand the text better than the sender understood his own message.

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SOC: Does the seer, therefore, need empathy to understand the source fully?

EMY: Now I know what Pappie Betti meant when he advises the adopting parent (the interested mind)
to accord the adopted child (the objectification of mind) full dignity thru a love that facilitates and not
stifles her journey to wholeness, that is, raises her within the preconditions of understanding necessary
for ‘Auslegung’.

SOC: And the preconditions of understanding according to Pappie are –

EMY: Attentiveness, open-mindedness, self-effacement, and understanding the other in the right spirit
by hurdling the following obstacles – the conscious or unconscious resentment of ideas and positions
which differ from the common ones, denigration and distortion, the attitude of self-righteousness, the
conformism towards dominant conceptions and the pharisaic acceptance of conventional bias in judging
others, the lack of interest in other cultures, and intellectual and moral narrowness or laziness.

SOC: Incidentally, that’ll be an excellent tribute to the cosmic mind. These are virtues that citizens of the
cosmos need. Must the empathic mind be also a questioning mind?

BULLY: The right to doubt must be included in the Bill of Rights of Cosmic Citizens!

SOC: Do you think Eve exercised such right?

BULLY: She is the Archetype of the Critical Mind!

SOC: Bully, don’t forget the serpent!

BULLY: The Serpent and the Woman are one and the same.

SLY: You mean Eve is talking to herself?

BULLY: Eve is reflecting! I’ve never seen in my young life any talking serpent except in movies, have you?

BOLD: But the text has the serpent talking. In fact, it has the serpent initiating the first dialogue in the
whole pageant of history. Maybe one of the penalties meted out to the serpent is silence. That’s why it
has been hissing since!

SOC: Nice touch huh?

BULLY: Bold, should I remind you what your Pappie Humboldt bandied about – that language is a
dynamic window to reality, to enrich one’s linguistic heritage is to broaden one’s vision, and vice-versa?

BOLD: Hush Bully, be silent like the serpent! Let Pappie speak through my voice. Understanding is not
the passive reception of meaning by the seer but the awakening in him of an innate linguistic
competence by a compatible linguistic competence in the source through the mediation of the text.

BULLY: And . . .

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BOLD: Hold your fire. Let me complete Pappie’s declamation piece – The seer must be sensitive to the
correspondence between the dynamisms in his inner world and in the outside world of the historical
phenomena he is studying, for the key to understanding lies in this correspondence.

THE DOOR BANGS. ROAR ENTERS THE ROOM.

ROAR: I heard the word ‘correspondence’. Pappie Rorty would have none of this non-sense. He had
jettisoned ‘representationalism’ a long time ago in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

SOC: Johnny-come-lately, you’re out of order! Pappie Humboldt’s correspondence has nothing to do
with the target of your Pappie’s bombing sorties – the correspondence theory of truth. We’re talking
about hermeneutic harmony, not objective mirroring. Bully, how does Pappie Humboldt’s perspective
help your case?

BULLY: As I was saying . . . Eve was reflecting. She was trying to listen to the music of life within when
she came face to face with the tree of knowledge. The inquiring serpent symbolizes the questions
stirring within her.

ROAR: There’s much resemblance between a serpent and a question mark. My Pappie must have been a
big question mark!

SOC: Many kids enter school like question marks but end up looking more like periods. Pathetic!

BULLY: It’s quite interesting that the first ‘homo sapiens’ – ‘wise man’ – happens to be a woman.

CLAD: How can that be since Adam was created first . . . and the woman an afterthought?

BULLY: Eve was the first to desire wisdom. And she ate the fruit – the gateway to the knowledge of the
gods – ahead of anybody.

EMY: Then we might as well congratulate Eve!

CLAD: Is it possible that ‘In the Day’ is the first feminist propaganda?

SOC: Clad, will you please control your unhistorical urges! Bold, what is historical understanding
according to Pappie Humboldt?

BOLD: For Pappie, historical understanding consists in seeing the unseen-overriding-idea that shapes, in-
forms, and connects the diverse forces and phenomena that bring about the evolution of human
destiny, and in painting the resulting big picture “in full truth, living fullness, and pure clarity.” But the
seer must manage to draw the general idea out of individual concrete phenomena of history, direct his
creative imagination to reckon with the dynamic interaction of the macro with the micro, and never
impose his teleological hubris on the procession of events.

SOC: In a nutshell – Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill!

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ROAR: Like the conclusion that the first worshipper was a woman because Eve was the first to
pronounce the name of God: YHWH. That God, and not Cain, was the first murderer because it’s written
that . . . where is it? . . . there in verse 21 “And YHWH made skin garments for the human and his woman
and dressed them.” Or that God was Dr. Hannibal Lecter in disguise.

THY: That’s too far off the mark! But maybe . . . just maybe, there’s a woman behind the story. Emy and I
can surely relate with female stirrings in this work of history, or fiction, whatever. After all, Pappie
Dilthey spoke of hermeneutics being the art of understanding an expression of lived experience (an
experience that has found its way into the outside world thereby acquiring a life of its own) via the
seer’s empathetic re-experiencing of the ‘Erlebnis’ of the source.

EMY: Well, the Book of Genesis is teeming with women standing out in a man’s world through strength
of character (Abigail), cleverness (Rachel), influence on sons (Rebekah), pestering (Delilah), deception
(Potiphar’s wife), and negotiation (Rahab).

BULLY: This only shows that the seer can’t do without the lens within – the lens of the self. No wonder,
Pappie vehemently exposed the pretensions of ‘presuppositionless exegesis’. This is as non-existent as a
square-circle. For him, exegesis presupposes a ‘life-relation’ of the seer to the text and, together with
this relation, a pre-understanding.

SOC: But doesn’t Pappie Bultmann add that the seer can tame his pre-understanding nonetheless?

BULLY: Oh yes, he characterized the pre-understanding as open, not closed, and the understanding of
the text as never a definitive one. You’re right Sir!

EMY: I remember Pappie Betti’s four canons. Let me give my contemporary version – The adopting
parent (the interested mind) must accept that the child (the text) is an organism (a deft interplay of the
whole and its parts), has her own DNA (the autonomy of the text), but is now one’s very own offspring
(the actuality of understanding) whose needs must be handled with great care (hermeneutical
harmony).

SOC: Women are really the gift of the gods – they make you feel alive. I love your metaphor of adoption
of the text.

EMY: Sir I’m not yet done. If you please, may I continue with the metaphor?

SOC: I’m listening my dear.

EMY: The adopting parent must be sensitive to her language (the philological moment), her reasons (the
critical moment), her feelings (the psychological moment), and h-e-r – w-h-o-l-e – b-e-i-n-g (the
technical-morphological moment). Bowwwww.

SOC: Now I believe Betti is aliiiiiiiive . . . Betti is aliiiiiiiive! Thanks Emy. You make Pappie really proud of
you.

ROAR: Why the hulabaloo about adoption? Emy, are you an adopted child?

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SOC: Roar, will you please be as civil as your Pappie? He worked all his life trying to bring a planet-wide
inclusive community into existence, have you forgotten?

ROAR: Sorry, just asking Emy. But you love inquisitive minds, don’t you Sir? That’s why we’ve been
referred to you . . . Sir!

SOC: It’s true. I want you to develop questioning minds. That’s what keeps me going – questions. That’s
what keeps my mind growing. Yes, questions are the most underrated and marginalized entities of the
underworld. They are the rockets of the mind that can propel us to strange worlds. But not all questions
are created equal. When I was younger, I loved to tell my students in college the secret of Isidor Isaac
Rabi, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1944 for unlocking the secrets of atomic nuclei. When
asked how he grew up to be a physicist, he invoked a childhood memory – while the mothers of his
friends growing up in Brooklyn asked their kids upon their return from school “So what did you learn
today?”, his mother asked instead “Izzy, did you ask a good question today?”.

ROAR: Let me redeem myself Sir. The text pushes me to the wall and I can’t help but fight back with the
following questions –

(1) Why do we insist on referring to the acquisition by humans of a god-like status as “The Fall”?
Would it not be appropriate to label it as “The Rise of Humanity”?
(2) Why does God seem to regret that we have become like Him when He Himself expressed the
intention to create us in His image and likeness? Is God capable of changing His mind?
(3) Why does God declare the fruit forbidden when it is the only avenue for us to become like Him?
Why does He have to place the forbidden tree right in the middle of paradise?
(4) Why does God need to ask questions when no answers are above Him? Would an omniscient
and benevolent God feign ignorance?
(5) Why does the serpent appear to be more truthful in its utterances than God Himself? Was God
willing to risk His reputation for straight talk?
(6) Why does God have to ‘enter’ paradise? Why does the serpent have to ‘be’ in paradise?
(7) Why does God refer to Himself as ‘us’? Does He talk to the Other Side of Himself?

SOC: I hope you’re done. We don’t have the luxury of time till Kingdom come to answer all your queries
my boy. But I’m impressed with those daring questions, though some of them presuppose the whole
Book of Genesis, which is far beyond the confines of the text under study.

THY: But Sir, I find some of his questions heretical!

SOC: But didn’t Eve entertain heretical intentions too – when she risked defying the Will of God?

ROAR: How in the world can you know God’s Will, Thy? Where in the world can you find it?

THY: Where have you been, Roar? Of course in His Word!

ROAR: What Word?

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THY: The Bible! Have you been born yesterday?

ROAR: The Bible was born less than two thousand years ago, and further down the line fundamentalism!

THY: The Bible is the Word of God period!

ROAR: How about the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Qur’an, . . . and the World – the Book of
Nature?

SOC: Thy and Roar, we’ve been through two World Wars. Please don’t hasten Armageddon by your
Word Wars! We might all be history in a moment’s notice. Thy, what does Pappie Dilthey say about
history?

THY: Pappie spoke of historical life as the ultimate framework of interpretation and this interpretation
must liberate us from the confines of the present, unfold the awesome possibilities of the human future
instead of delimiting the human essence in the formula of a lab jar.

SOC: And Roar, don’t you think that Pappie Rorty’s ‘democratic politics’ is precisely aimed at liberating
the awesome possibilities of the human future?

ROAR: We might be soul-mates after all, Thy!

BULLY: Open pre-understanding is the beginning of mutual understanding, I surmise. Pappie Bultmann
once wrote that an open pre-understanding has to give way to “an existentiell encounter with the text
and an existentiell decision.” In his 2001 Richard Dimbleby lecture “The Struggle for the Soul of the 21st
Century,” the former US President Bill Clinton singled out the basic question which needs to be
addressed in this age of global terror:

“Which will be more important – our differences or our common humanity?”

Allow me to sing a song composed by a heretic whose vision of a world without walls I share with all my
heart and soul. I believe his name is Ernestus Cardona Padilla. The title is –

THIS IS THE WORLD

I
I want to rise up every morning
Without the sound of needless mourning.
I want to fly across the border
Where I can find my sisters and brothers.

REFRAIN
This is the world where I want to live.
Can’t find it here but I still believe
We can build it if we try.
I want to see an ocean of humanity

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 Dousing the flames of diversity.
I want to see the flowers in bloom.
I want to hear the kids at play.
I want to say prayers with everyone.
Oh what a world we’d have
If we only mean to live in peace, love, and harmony.

II
I want to walk right through the valley
Without the sight of armies marching.
I want the sky to show the rainbow
Without a trace of bombers flying.

(Repreat Refrain)

BRIDGE
I know there’s no limit to what love can do.
We can say goodbye to wars
Create a world without walls now.

(Repeat Refrain)
(Repeat the last two lines of the Refrain)

SOC: Angelic voice. Beautiful song. I could die now. Music is indeed the language of the gods! What’s the
name again of the heretical composer?

BULLY: Ernestus Cardona Padilla, Sir.

SOC: It has a Latin ring to it.

BULLY: He’s from the Philippines. I gather there’s a population explosion of musicians there.

THY: Then God must be a Filipino!

SOC: But with a cosmic accent! Remember – “The true value of a human being is primarily determined
by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.” as Albert Einstein, Time’s
Person of the 20th Century, a True Citizen of the Cosmos, puts it.

THY: I guess Eve was the first citizen of the cosmos!

SOC: What makes you say so?

THY: She was the first creature to attain the knowledge of the gods. She saw a brave new world beyond
the forbidding word. This is the first Eureka moment. After Eve, everything is a text to be unraveled.

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True, there are lots of Eureka moments in history – Gautama attaining arahantship under the Bodhi tree,
Jesus unveiling the divinity of humanity in the river Jordan, Saul metamorphosing into Paul on the
Damascus road, Galileo breaking the terrestrial bonds of human vision, Newton discovering the “apple”
of universal gravitation, Edison recreating the light of day in a bulb, to mention a few. But after Eve,
every hermeneut is just a footnote! Eve chose to see the world in a different light – she chose to see it
with her own eyes. For me, Eve stands for ‘Exploring Cosmic Possibilities’ – the vision that tries to
encompass the widest and wildest possible vista of human space-time. She had an eye for wisdom and
the balls (no pun intended) to reach for it – the first philosopher, to put it differently; the first heretic, to
put it unconventionally.

ROAR: Thy, you’re beauty divine!

SOC: You’re Eve Incarnate in so short a time! Well, what else can I say – Pappie Dilthey lives on in you!

THY: If the forbidden fruit is all about broadening horizons, then nothing deserves the title of ‘The
Forbidden Fruit’ as much as ‘Hermeneutics’.

SOC: Nothing deserves the title of ‘Forbidden Fruit’ as much as Eve’s love for wisdom – PHILOSOPHY!
Don’t forget though that – I got this from a Buddhist monk, a friend, my brother, and your brother too –
“THE KEY TO THE GATES OF HEAVEN IS GIVEN TO EVERYONE. THE SAME KEY OPENS THE GATES OF
HELL.” Therefore, aspire for the cosmic vision of Eve!

THY: LONG LIVE EVE!

CLAD, SLY BOLD, BULLY, ROAR, & EMY: LONG LIVE EVE!

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