To think of the Trillanes coup (in the loose sense of the term) last Thursday as a failure or as naïvete is once again to think within the limiting and restricting rationality of utility.
Last Thursday’s standoff showed that utilitarian reason gets us nowhere as it severely privatizes human capacity for collective action by plotting it within the calculus of means and ends.
If there was any failure in what occurred, it was the Filipino people’s failure to act for the sheer love of acting.
This is also the failure of progressivism and of groups brandishing a progressive outlook.
Many of them now retrospectively claim that had Trillanes and company made clear their objectives and aims they would have come to their defense.
But sheer human action cannot always be circumscribed within equations of means and ends. Instead, judgment of human action and reason should be based on whether such activity is an act of beginning.
The Greek word for action is archein – to begin. In Greek society, only free men can set out to begin. What distinguishes the freeman from the slave and the woman is that the slave is tied up to the natural process of labor while the woman to the reproduction of the conditions for the maintenance of the household. The freeman on the other hand can choose to lift himself out of these conditions and set out to begin adventures into the world. The philosopher Hannah Arendt has much to say about this.
I think it is in this light that we have to judge the Trillanes coup last Thursday. And I think that it is also in the same light that we have to evaluate what we have been doing so far.
A story in the Inquirer (Saturday, December 1, 2007) entitled: “What was Trillanes thinking” sums up the sentiments among progressive groups that were “surprised” and “caught off-guard” by the Trillanes coup.
Such statements, however, were no different from the military’s response: “We knew Trillanes and Co. were hatching something.”
They were both attempts to make sense of what was happening.
In different ways, to separate theoria from praxis.
To abstract an ontological truth from the truth revealed by political action.
Dinky Soliman’s question what was he up to? points to the sad reality of how bad we have lost our trust in the revelatory character of human activity.
It shows how unwilling we are now to subject ourselves in an exercise of thinking outside.
This inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else is what Arendt calls evil.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she writes:
(the) inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such . . . proof against reason and argument and information and insight of any kind
Trillanes would have only failed if our sole criteria for success is production and productivity.
That is if we replace action with fabrication. Acting with making.
Action is always prone to tragedy. In contrast, fabrication seeks to form the tragic into a manipulable product. To demarcate the boundaries and shape of existence.
Why did Trillanes succeed?
Because it was a tragic event, highlighting the futility of putting life (the mere life of the civilians and journalists in the middle of the crossfire) as the primary consideration of human action.
Because it showed how life, security, economy and private happiness undermine collective human activity.
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