Dr. Florentino T. Timbreza
Conferred AY 1991-1992
Professional Profile:
Introduction to Dr. Florentino T. Timbreza
From the Florentino T. Timbreza Reader
Ed. by Alejandro D. Padilla
DLSU Press Inc 2004
Gawad Guro 2002, National Book Award, Gantimpalang Quezon sa Panitikan, Gawad Paraluman Aspillera, Natatanging Gawad ng Pagkilala mula sa Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino, Gawad ng Lahi at Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan ’99, Special Award for Philosophical Research in Filipino Culture, Thought and Values – what did Dr. Florentino T. Timbreza do to deserve these accolades?
Nobody can discount the achievements of Dr. Timbreza in the field and teaching of philosophy. His professional life – spanning some four decades – concretely translates to the dedicated pursuit of scholarship in both teaching and research. For many years prior to his mandatory retirement at age 65 in 2003, Dr. Timbreza was at his best element embarking on his continuing education, taking on the task of a school administrator, writing textbooks, attending conferences and presenting papers, giving lectures and delivering speeches, undertaking research projects, and popularizing philosophy along with other diverse academic and professional preoccupations.
With other homegrown practitioners, Dr Timbreza has contributed significantly to the growth of philosophy by popularizing the Filipino variety, tracing its primal roots, and intellectualizing its form and content in intelligible Filipino. The Ensayklopidiya ng Pilosopiya which he coauthored with Dr. Emerita S. Quito, Dr. Romualdo Abulad and Herminia Reyes, and his very own Mga Hugis ng Kaisipang Pilipino and Pilosopiyang Pilipino are considered milestones in the annals of local publishing, and truly trailblazing in the efforts not only to develop the domain or system of Filipino philosophy but to propagate the intellectualization of the Filipino language.
This Reader, in some measure, is a tribute to Dr Timbreza. It contains a sampling of his prodigious written output on a wide range of subjects. In the articles featured, he treads on the realms of the natural and of the moral and, in the process, encounters head-on unresolved questions and problems that continually bedevil humankind: a person’s primordial search form the meaning of existence, the concepts of life and death, evil, God and the human soul, ecology and way of life, and timely or topical issues such as terrorism, violence and nonviolence, coup d’état, sex selection and abortion.
For instance, in his translation of Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu, he mines golden nuggets of Asian/Oriental wisdom serving as guideposts/signposts that clot life’s right path. In Alternative to a Dead God, he espouses the idea of a relevant, “personalized” God no longer shaped by Judeo-Christian dogmas but forged by the humanization of man through freedom, love, concern for fellow beings and moral uprightness. In hindsight, this is not at all a novel, radical thought; Jesus of Nazareth, who lived on earth once, preached of a life of peace and love.
On the never-to-be-skirted issues of abortion (“The Moral Issue of Abortion”), birth control (“The Moral Issue of Love Making Without Baby Making”) and sexist gender preference (“Sex Selection, Any Takers?”) Timbreza breezes through analytically and critically but never pontificates or invites controversy. Although his assessments heavily rely on scientific data rendered in the jargon of biology and anatomy that morphs his texts into loose medical notes or a family planning counselor’s advocacy pamphlet, he is attitudinally on track. Like a good teacher, he lays everything on the table (proffering the proverbial ideological feast) and lets his students pick or reject whatever they like. His approach is recognizably calculating and cautious yet wise.
Dr. Timbreza qualifies as an ethicist, but surprisingly, he is not a moralist. He neither prescribes nor proscribes. He does not make value judgment. He is a firm believer in a free will that allows an individual freedom of choice in moral or ethical issues that are often contentious and divisive. However, the sovereignty of personal choice, according to him, must be tempered with responsibility. He reflects:
The nature of the moral issue of abortion reminds us that the standard of right and wrong is an open question. There is no ready-made moral norm, no ready-made answer to our moral problems. Moral decisions imply uncertainty and risk; they involve the exercise of freedom or choice of action. It would be intellectually superfluous to make moral decisions if we could absolutely certain of the end-result of our act. In fact, it would not be a decision anymore, for we would just be playing or acting out a prescribed or rehearsed role. In such a situation, however, any sense of personal responsibility would become meaningless and futile, for there can be no responsibility without freedom.
Arguably, the best selection in the volume are those that deal with the Filipino concepts of causality, life, death, and values whose explications are anchored on traditional maxims or what Dr. Timbreza calls “age-old adages, precepts, and common sayings” expressive of the Filipino experience of reality. In addition, the integration and use of these regional sayings (which some of us may regard as anachronistic at this time and age) make the exercise of philosophizing typically Filipino and reveal the Filipino’s innate philosophy. He opines:
We have seen that Filipinos have their own indigenous world-views – general perceptions of the meaning of human life – which constitute their philosophy of life. They also have values which serve as the desirable patterns and traits of good human behavior and the proper ways of doing things that are acceptable to the people. Filipinos conceived and formulated their philosophy of life and values for their own survival, sanity, and peace of mind.
More pronounced are the context-specific, language-based, and culture-derivative causes that underlie, illustrate or explain, and justify the phenomena of terrorism, evil, violence and non-violence, and coup d’état especially the Philippine-originated and copyrighted version of people power (EDSA 1,2 and 3, as well as the aborted Oakwood Premier Ayala Center mutiny). Probing human behavior and motivation, Timbreza says:
Thus, we come to know what and how an individual thinks by what he says or does. For whatever he says is what he thinks. His true personality, his beliefs and views, become manifest through his speech – the kind of words used and the manner in which they are said. We can discover a person’s world of meanings through his language because his values find expression in his choice of words. Indeed, man is his own language.
This volume contains no sophism, complex theorizing, syllogism and staple philosophical accoutrement that normally envelop the ordinary learners of Western logic in a haze of unintelligibility and disorientation. At best, it is a plain and an unencumbered Filipino philosophizing which Dr. Timbreza does so succinctly and convincingly.