Great Expectations

(Written in response to my students’ reports at the end of the semester.)

Is it possible to enter into an experience without any expectations or objectives? I constantly asked myself this question when I was listening to all your reports over the past week. Where did this question come from?

In a lot of the reports, I heard a common comment—“there was no chance to talk with my co-workers.” I have to admit, I have no idea what the context for this comment is, or what were the underlying assumptions that led to this comment about your JEEP experience. The only educated guess I could make was that this comes from a certain expectation or assumed objective—something that you were supposed to have gotten or supposed to have done—from the experience of working, wherever it was that you worked. Thus I came to my own burning question, which I can’t help but repeat:

Is it possible to enter into an experience without any expectations or objectives?

For Edmund Husserl—the father of the philosophical movement called phenomenology—the answer is simple: No. Regardless of place, context, or what-have-you, Husserl tells us that we approach everything with an expectation, objective, or general category. Thus, he says it is necessary to “go back to the things themselves”—to catch ourselves having expectations, and trying to suspend these expectations (even if only for a little while) in order for us to truly get a glimpse of what it is that we are experiencing.

This whole year, I had to constantly catch myself having expectations—mostly unfounded—about teaching in the Ateneo. I have to admit, I have a tendency to be cynical, especially about Ateneans. Being an Atenean myself, and having so many good friends from Ateneo (and having graduated fairly recently) I had expectations about how the ordinary undergraduate would view the two required philosophy classes in junior year. He or she would see philosophy as merely a chore, something to survive and get the hell over with, in the same way that I grudgingly plodded through my math, psychology, economics, sociology-anthropology (and, truth to tell, two out of four from theology) core courses. I concluded, even before the first semester began, that philosophy wouldn’t matter to my students.

And, operating from that expectation, I was hell-bent on proving myself wrong. I literally worked myself to the ground the first few weeks of teaching, so intent on making philosophy “meaningful” and “relevant.” Sometime in the middle of the first semester, the thought of waking up in the morning to go to work—to go and teach—upset me so much, I would feel physically sick. I would dread having to make the commute to Ateneo, knowing that I would spend yet another day giving a lecture that didn’t really matter to the people listening to it.

It was only after the midterms had ended that it struck me that I had been operating on the basis of my expectations, and I hadn’t really been immersed in the actual experience of teaching my own class for the first time. Here I was, going through the motions of “teaching,” as if I knew it all already. Instead of really just experiencing teaching for what it was, I was just getting caught up in all my expectations and objectives.

Of course, it was not easy to suspend all my expectations all the time—many times I would catch myself reverting to the “default” way of looking at students. On other occasions, however, it would recede completely into the background, and I all I could do was marvel at the gift of the experience of teaching. On those days, it was no longer about “making philosophy matter to these students who don’t see the point,” it was just about the experience of being there—standing in front of the classroom, listening to your ideas, learning something new from you.

(Come to think of it, my expectations would still kick in even as recently as the JEEP reports. I would occasionally catch myself thinking: “Hay naku, they’re just paying lip-service to the whole ‘holistic Ateneo education’ deal; I know that they probably don’t care and will never care about this whole exercise.” A few moments later, I shake my head and chastise myself—who am I to make assumptions about you? It’s a humbling realization: No report will ever tell me whether or not the experience mattered to you, or if it will matter to you in the future.)

At the end of this exploration of the question “Is it possible to enter into an experience without any expectations or objectives?” I am still no closer to a definite answer, but something has certainly become clearer for me: although there is no other way for us to enter into an experience except with expectations, it is possible to let go of them—and letting go of expectations helps you experience fully whatever it is that you’re experiencing.

            And, in a roundabout way, this brings me back to your JEEP reports—despite the comments that “I couldn’t talk to my co-workers,” I’m hoping that most (if not all) of you found a way to let go of your expectations and just experience whatever it was that you were experiencing in those 12 hours.