This column celebrates the vibrant literary culture and heritage of Dumaguete City, in anticipation of its bid to be designated as UNESCO City of Literature under the Creative Cities Network. It is produced by the Buglas Writers Guild, a network of literary artists from Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and Siquijor. Each week, we will focus on the work of one local writer.
Can a philosopher be a poet? One Dumaguete luminary exemplified that possibility.
Claro Rafols Ceniza is considered as one of the Philippines’ foremost philosophers—maintaining a fascination for metaphysics, the philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, symbolic logic, and the philosophy of language.
Born on 10 May 1927 in Oroquieta, Misamis Occidental, he was the third of six children of Judge Patricio C. Ceniza and Vivencia Rafols. He finished high school at Silliman University in in 1947 and, because no school in Dumaguete at that time offered a major in philosophy, he decided to take up Law instead.
He made a reputation as a brilliant orator in school, winning first prize for an oratorical contest in 1950 for a piece titled “Big Man.” He would become President of the Student Government at Silliman in 1951-1952. He obtained his LL.B. degree in 1953 and passed the bar examination in 1954, placing 17th among 3,000 bar candidates.
His mind was divided between the practice of law and his interest in philosophy, so he decided to bring together his ideas in 1954, and published, in mimeographed form, The Rational Basis of the Problems of Philosophy—and sent copies to various schools and persons. [He would ultimately receive an acknowledgements from the University of Paris, which stated that the faculty of the school thought highly of his work]. The Review of Metaphysics listed his work as having appeared in 1954 (or 1955).
In 1958, he wrote a brief summary of his major thesis on existence and had it published in pamphlet form under the title, The Relation of Man’s Concept of Space to Metaphysics. This became the first part of a longer work, which he published in 1965 entitled, simply, Metaphysics.
He would eventually quit the practice of law in 1965, and joined the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at Silliman University, serving as its acting chairman of its. In 1968, Silliman Journal would publish Metaphysics in full. By this time, he had already been happily married to Riorita Espina Ceniza, with whom he had six children: Manuel, Susana, Cecille, Ana, Vivian, and Gary.
In 1969, Prof. Ceniza and his family would move to Syracuse, New York where the he and his wife would pursue their graduate studies at Syracuse University. He would earn his MA in 1970, with his thesis on “The Argument of Parmenides,” and his Ph.D. in 1972, completing a dissertation titled Some Basic Presuppositions of Classical Philosophy. That year, the family would come back home to the Philippines, stayed briefly in Dumaguete, and then he began teaching in Manila.
By his own admission, he spent some of his happiest years of teaching at the University of Sto. Tomas, where he began teaching in 1975. He also taught in various schools, including the Philippine Dominican Center for Institutional Studies and the Philippine Christian University. He also became visiting professor at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, and had also been an exchange professor in Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan.
After his teaching stint at the UST, he would come home to Dumaguete to teach once more at Silliman University until 1977. That year, De La Salle University would hire him as a full-time philosophy professor, where he was the first holder of the Lucian Athanasius Professorial Chair, and and daught at DLSU until his retirement in 1993. As a tribute to him, DLSU would institute the Claro R. Ceniza Lecture Series, which have produced works and philosophical discussions that honor his analytic spirit.
Among his books and monographs include The Relation of Man’s Concept of Space to the Problems of Philosophy (1960), Metaphysics: A Study of the Structure of Metaphysical Inquiry (1984), Elementary Logic (1987), What is Philosophy? (1990), Introduction to Philosophy: Selected Readings (2001), and Filipino Cultural Traits (2005).
But he was also a poet. As a student in Silliman University, he would be published regularly in The Sillimanian Magazine and Sands and Coral, and his poems were cited in Manuel A. Viray’s selected bibliography of the best poetry in the 1950s by Filipino writers. In the spirit of his philosophical inclinations, here is a poem he wrote titled Philosophy is Learning to Live with Others: A Definition for Our Times:
Philosophy is a conversation
Between two honest people.
It is being myself to the other,
and letting the other be himself to me.
Philosophy is not an intellectual exchange
(although an intellectual exchange
may take place in philosophy).
Philosophy is, in a deeper sense, a sharing
of selves.
A philosopher knows no foes,
for he who has known Being
has discovered the bridge to all other
beings.
And a philosopher should never forget
that he is a man.
Philosophy is life,
and life is philosophy.
Philosophy was important to him. In an essay titled The Problems of Philosophy, published in 1952 on The Sillimanian Magazine, he explained why this was so: “… The question ‘why’ is asked whenever the fact presented to the mind does to conform with the mind’s preconceived idea of what the fact should be. And the mind continues to feel the disturbance—the unbalance—as long as it does not find the explanation, the cause which would explain satisfactorily the extraordinary phenomenon. Philosophy seeks the reconciliation of the mind’s preconceived idea of what the fact should be and the fact itself as it is given to the mind.”
