The Toki Philosophy
Cowritten with Van Bryan Bergado
“San ang sakay mo?”
“Toki ako.”
“Ah? San yun?”
‘Toki’ is a jeepney route that takes place within U.P., a word only familiar with people associated with the university. It was derived from the word ‘ikot’ which was the original jeepney route in the campus.
As I was thinking on how to make my journal a little better than my first two papers, I was looking for something where human condition is very common yet unnoticed. And while riding a ‘toki ‘ jeepney, I found it. The ‘toki’ scene is just a slice of what life is. From simple things, events, and people that we meet they can represent a part of our life. Human condition is something that we encounter everyday. We could easily see it in the most complex situations such as politics and many more; or simply, riding a jeepney. So how do I relate this jeep thing with Hannah Ahrendt’s Human Condition?
“Manong, bayad nga po.. Paabot po.”
“Pausog po nang unti..”
These are words that we hear almost everyday. And everytime we hear this words we get to choose to live our life to be active or not. The way I see it, we can consider the jeepney environment as a public realm. Why? Because in the jeepney there is no system, no hierarchy. (although we can consider the driver as the leader, being the jeepney driver is his purpose).
From here we could see an example of socialization. People who take the jeepney are people who are strangers to one another. There is no connection between them. We could observe that in such environment, an example of a public realm, the people inside doesn’t involve themselves with one another. They lack the ability to connect maybe because of their nature not to communicate with a stranger.
Yet, one may see any public realm shows multiple people– plurality. There is strength in number, in population. Comparing the situation in the jeepney to the usual society, we could compare the unconnectedness of people. Filipinos, for example, are generally snob. That’s why they miss the potential in number. No action is made because people are separated from one another. There is no progress because, as in the definition of a public place, there is no system, no leader, which may correspond to lack of order.
During the times when the driver asks the passengers to compress, he imposes a certain type of authoritarian nature. See that in that moment, the jeepney attains improvement (by having a space for someone that was not visible a while ago: a goal is achieved). Enforcing a rule or law is technically under the private realm. We could now conclude that only when we apply the characteristic of the private realm could we achieve an objective.
“Para po sa tabi.”
Furthermore, what the common people don’t realize is that it is a condition for us not to be immortal. We won’t live long to make a difference in history, as discussed in the class as the characteristics of eternity. Like in the jeepney, somewhere along the route, we would god own and continue our life again, forgetting about the ride. We do not see that life (or the time that we spend in the jeepney) is limited. That in order to achieve something, we must consider our true nature: that we live short.
Leave a Reply