Bonding with a dog philosopher

My place in the greater scheme of things dawned on me when I brought home a Basset Hound with Narnian looks. He was creamy white, mapped with tan-colored cow spots, heavy-boned with million-dollar flabs, bearing draping ears, a plump, succulent nose and holy pauper’s eyes.

At that time, I was a young teacher of 25, had given two classes for starters, with a promise of more classes the following semester if the results of my evaluation turned out fine. The course I taught was Philosophical Analysis: a fusion of logic, epistemology and philosophy of language. My students were freshies of a notorious breed. They came to class carrying laptops, sucking lollipops, their fingernails painted in metallic rainbow colors, with shaven and pencil-lined eyebrows that arch as if saying "C’mon Bugs Bunny, teach me something!"

A guidance counselor patted my shoulder saying, "It’s a special class – for a very special teacher!" I bowed monastically before her.

I became a philosophy teacher because I wanted to make a change in the world. That historical turn appeared in a hocus-pocus deductive reasoning.

Students are dogs. Dogs are students.

I can make world-class philosophers out of students

Ergo! I can make world-class philosophers out of dogs, too.

The name spells out one’s destiny. I juggled between the names "Dr. Reyes" and "Heidegger." Dr. Reyes was my favorite professor in Philosophy who was a graduate of the University of Louvain. Martin Heidegger was my favorite philosopher who was a German existentialist. I didn’t mind if my dog inherits the Belgian chocolate manners of Dr. Reyes but I just decided that my dog be named Heidegger instead – to honor the dead, and pay respects to the still-living.

Que sera sera. The formal philosophical education of Heideg began when I taught him the basic Heideggerian concepts such as aletheia and Being-in-the-World.

I got a kiddy slate and wrote the word aletheia on it. I told Heideg that aletheia is a Greek word that refers to Being or Truth. Truth shows and hides in and through the being of things. I associated aletheia with the game of hide and seek.

Heideg was an excellent cockroach hunter. After chewing the crumpy insect between his teeth, he liked to spit it in my cup of tea.

To get even with Heideg for serving me pots of cockroach tea, I climbed a bayabas tree to hide and thought of giving him a hard time at it. At the foot of the tree was a compost pit where I deposited daily Heideg’s shit. Suddenly, a fairy cockroach sprang and scuttled onto the pit. Heideg barked excitedly. I didn’t want to bathe a stinking dog philosopher so I had to get down. I lost my balance and descended onto the dead and on the third breath, I rose again, in a murky quicksand of shit in a fairy cockroach kingdom.

But, success! Heideg learned the concept of aletheia. When I put my socks in my rubber shoes, he took them out. When I undressed to take a bath, he covered his eyes with his paws. When I ordered him to pooh outside, he poohed inside. When I banished him, he apparated. Best of all, he outgrew spitting cockroaches into my tea.

The dog fever broke into my teaching when I used dogs as examples for demonstrating logical principles. To distinguish between a proposition and a subjective statement, I explained that there is a difference between "Heideg is intelligent," from "How intelligent is Heideg!" It was all very interesting for me and I couldn’t care less about my students who kept whispering to each other that my amor fati with a dog made me look like one.

My success in teaching Heidegger gave me a hard-knock ego with which I demanded the highest academic performance from my students. I gave unannounced quizzes for very difficult philosophical readings. I assigned my freshies to read Suzanne Langer’s Logic of Signs and Symbols and gave them a 30-minute quiz instructing them to summarize it. After an hour, they were still scribbling. I became curious and patrolled the entire classroom. One student was drawing on her paper my face with large floppy ears.

That was not my problem. If they flunked, they flunked. My problems with students cannot delay the philosophical education of Degger.

The next canine philosopher’s lesson was the concept of Being-in-the-World. Being-in-the-World refers to the human’s essential at-homeness with the world and her relatedness to things. My example was the play of disc throw. I explained to Degger that he was essentially related to the plastic saucer, that they belonged to each other, like Romeo and Juliet. Every time I threw it, he was supposed to run and fetch his partner.

So I threw the disk in the air. At that time, Mark, the saucy boy next door, just came home and smiled at me. The dish landed on his feet and he picked it up. Degger growled. Before I could prevent it, to my horror and ecstasy, Mark’s pants were ripped down, exposing a pair of juicy bottoms.

Despite my frustrated date in my miserable, dateless life, Degger learned the concept of Being-in-the-World. Everything that I owned became his possession. My territory became his territory. He slept in my bed, sat on my chair, listened to my CD player, tried on my sunglasses and bathing suit. He didn’t want to eat his dog food because I didn’t eat it. He liked ice cream and cakes because I liked them. He stuck to me like a leech for the sake of the death of Socrates.

I thought I had made waves in the honoris causa of breeding the world’s first dog philosopher when my department chair came to me with my evaluation at the end of the semester. It was Nagasaki.

"She gives quizzes without explaining the subject matter."

"She thinks we have dog brains."

"Could she give other examples apart from dogs? She’s boring."

I wallowed in self-pity and remorse. I spent my time watching sunsets with Degger and felt my world coming to an end.

I remembered Dr. Reyes, that enchanting summer when he taught us Heidegger so eloquently. He concluded the course by telling us this story about a man who, at 20 years old, wished he could change the world, at 30 years wished he could change his country, at 40 years wished he could change his parish, a 50 years wished he could change his family, and, finally, at 60 years, wished he could change himself.

I blinked out a tear from the corner of my eye. A lady who was strolling by stopped to admire my pet. She asked my dog’s name.

Life is a carnival. I failed to breed the world’s first dog philosopher but the dog taught me how to be authentically human. I also discovered the magical secret that Degger was indeed a creature from Narnia. He began to speak to me, in the mystical tongue of hypersaliva, the ancient art of wielding the philosopher’s stone.

"His name’s Dog," I replied to the lady.

Her eyes sparkled. "Oh, wonderful, Dog! He’s named after himself!"