INTRODUCTION:

When one speaks of "Filipino philosophy'" in this sense, he

must be able to name Filipino thinkers. And we have to start with our

reformers and revolutionists, such as Jose Rizal, Andres

BonifaciEmilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini et al., for it was during the

propaganda and revolutionary periods that we accumulated a lot of

writings with philosophical themes. In this traditional approach,

philosophy is considered as the individual activity of philosophizing

(see Khalid 1999, Guevara 1999, and Lomongo 1999). It is no longer

the collective, but the individual, worldview or one's personal view

on philosophical themes of space-time, freedom, meaning of one's

life, truth, and

suchlike. Essentially the personal perspective is also the standard

view of most individual philosophers. In short, philosophy results from

one's activity of thinking about universal philosophical themes. I have

sometimes called this the "philosophical approach to Filipino

philosophy" in virtue of the fact that it is the dominant approach used

in the discipline of philosophy. Again, although everyone will accept

this as genuine philosophizing in the traditional sense, not everyone

will accept that there existed philosophers among Filipino reformers

and revolutionists.
 The traditional categories or philosophical divisions are

aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, logic, metaphysics, natural

philosophy, and politics. Additions later evolved: from aesthetics

comes the philosophy of art; from ethics metaethics, philosophy of

freedom and determinism, and philosophy of action; from

epistemology the philosophy of perception, logical positivism,

structuralism (and from this poststructuralism), pragmatism,

philosophy of mind (philosophical

psychology), philosophy of artificial intelligence; from natural

philosophy the philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy

of chemistry, philosophy of medicine, and philosophy of science (both

social and natural); from logic logical theory (philosophical logic),

with mathematics the philosophy of mathematics, and with language

linguistic philosophy, ordinary language philosophy, and the philosophy

of language; from metaphysics the philosophy of religion, mysticism,

philosophy of time, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics,

modernism (and from this postmodernism), and philosophy of man

(philosophical anthropology); finally from politics social philosophy,

philosophy of education, philosophy of history, philosophy of

economics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

As an artist-philosopher (he is a painter), Embuscado (1975) rejected

the view that authentic art is simply a continuation of past experience

or learning to the present. He held that the task of an authentic artist

is to cut the umbilical cord of the past, to make use of the present,

and to project that present to the open future. He called his philosophy

of art dissectionism.

True art must not be past-present oriented, but present-future

oriented. The contents of dissectionism are the depressive social

scenarios that we experience at present: outcast figures, monotonous

life, old age, war and intrigues, poverty, social causes, discontents,

and the like. According to Embuscado, they are intuited [as Henri

Bergson (2011) maintained in his philosophy] from the unifold of

undifferentiated hidden reality by human consciousness and creatively

expressed in manifold dissectional ways into the future, through

swirling motions, which later become available to the senses. The

unifold is in perpetual motion or becoming, and this motion of the

present is creatively projected into the future. The artist, in other

words, perceives beyond the sense appearances and projects the

intuited scenarios of hidden reality into the region of the unknown

that crisscross the canvass from all directions in beautiful movements.

Ontologically, it is a rebellion against artistic permanency, that is to

say, against stagnation and imitation (as in realism), mutilation of

reality (as in cubism), fantasy (as in surrealism), uncreativity (as in

repetitive commercial art), and the like. The true artist must rid art, if

possible, of human or any semblance to objective reality. His task is

not to capture a moment of reality and make it permanent in his or her

work of art. Traditional styles dwell in the past and are perpetuated in

the present by imitation or improvisation. Permanence in art depicts

reality as stagnant, negates the freedom of movement, and stifles

human possibilities to explore the unknown future. The new artist

must start something authentic; must create a novel mode of artistic

expression in the present which must essentially be dynamically

projective. It is important for the artist to create, not to imitate or

repeat the past styles, but to explore the possibilities of the future. For

Embuscado, the infinite variations of two opposing forcesbeauty and

miseryexcited him. This nervous excitement is not only the ultimate

form of art to him, but a continuous act of protest, the result of

rebellion, the truth, and the contradictions one finds in the objective

world. There is beauty in misery, beauty in melancholia. The artist

as rebel must constantly dissect this beauty projectively and

dynamically. The region of the unknownthe futureis the artists

aesthetic destiny; it gives him the mysterious delights to explore

dissectionally. Embuscados futurism in art is different from Alvin

future in that our image of the future, which is preconditioned by

present technological developments, determines the curricular

offerings at present in order to realize that futuristic image.

Embuscados theory has similarities with Italian futurism (Boccioni et

al. 1910; see also Futurism, n.d.), especially in painting, as in the

rejection of the past and of imitation,but Embuscado does not dwell on

glorifying the present but emphasizes the projection of the movements

of present hidden reality towards the open future.