I have had in me thousands of philosophies, not any two of which — as if they were real — agreed.
(Alexander Search)
Fernando Pessoa’s “philosophical texts,” as they are often labeled, have been making their way into print since the 1960s. They show us how widely his philosophical interests ranged—mainly within the Western tradition, from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, but with forays into Indian and Islamic thought—and in them we can find some striking observations and clever reformulations. Pessoa was an energetic, potentially pugnacious reader who often raised objections. If, on the other hand, he agreed with a certain proposition, he might offer alternative or complementary arguments to support it. Pessoa’s writings on philosophy are never dull, but they largely consist of reading notes, or reflections on his readings, with very little in the way of original philosophy.
If there’s philosophy in Pessoa, it’s woven into his literature—his poetry, his system of heteronyms, and The Book of Disquiet. It is from these sources that contemporary philosophers and students of philosophy have identified some remarkable lines of thinking, ways of knowing and perceiving, and modes of being.
I’m a little out of my depth here, but the “renegade phenomenology” that Agnes Callard sees in Bernardo Soares’s extreme sensitivity to each mundane encounter and occurrence of his outwardly uneventful life seems to me a felicitous designation. It reminds me of José Gil’s marvelous essays on Pessoa’s sensationism, which he views through a Deleuzian prism, showing how Pessoa-Soares and Pessoa-Campos are forever converting their minutest sensations into aesthetic objects, namely their diary writings and poems.[1] Alberto Caeiro, the master poet because he was a master at “unlearning,” establishes the plane of immanence, a kind of sensorial blank slate, unfettered by preconceptions, that makes direct perception and sensation possible. Inspired by the empirical sensationism of Condillac, Pessoa wrote at length about sensationism soon after the emergence of his main heteronyms, calling it “a new species of Weltanschauung.”
Callard also remarks on Pessoa’s “proliferation of identities,” a characteristic that has merited a lot of philosophical attention, including, of course, from Deleuzians, for whom multiplicity replaces the notion of a singular subject and even that of substance itself. Nietzsche—a philosopher whose thinking Pessoa partially mimicked, especially in the writings of Álvaro de Campos—is also frequently associated with Pessoa’s poetic project. That project is a rich, natural gold mine for Nietzschean, Deleuzian, and other “lively” philosophies, concerned not so much with the why and how of this world but with being in the world. But does that make Pessoa qualify as a philosopher?
Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, who were both adepts, in different ways, of Pessoa’s quasi-religious movement known as Neopaganism,[2] declared that Alberto Caeiro, the master poet and avatar of the movement, was not himself a pagan: he was paganism. I’m tempted to use the same sort of formula and propose that Fernando Pessoa was not a philosopher: he was philosophy, or various philosophies, which scholars have teased out of his writings. Unaccompanied by discourse or any attempt to convince anyone, philosophy spontaneously happened in Pessoa’s literature, and there it persists. We can see it, for instance, in Caeiro’s poetry, which, despite the pseudoshepherd’s claims to the contrary, was full of philosophy, but with no system to it, as if it were an accidental by-product. On the rare occasions when Pessoa, as a young man, actually set out to write philosophy, he never got very far or produced anything very interesting. And, finally, he didn’t care. He wanted to be a poet.
José Gil has demonstrated with admirable flair how a good deal of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical system (including some of the parts developed in collaboration with Félix Guatarri) mirrors what Pessoa had already exhibited in his heteronymous, sensationist poetics, but if the forerunner had lived to be a centenarian and this similarity were pointed out to him, he would probably have just shrugged. About Gorgias, the pre-Socratic sophist and rhetorician whose arguments on the non-existence of Being he deemed particularly ingenious, Pessoa wrote that he was either a “very deep philosopher” or else “a happy blunderer.” Pessoa himself, I believe, was a felicitous blunderer.
Intensely emotional, Pessoa was also acutely rational, and one thing his reason concluded rather early on was that it would never be able to answer the philosophical questions that plagued him most: why and how does anything exist? Philosophy, and rational thought more generally, were for Pessoa a mental playground. He loved to toss around and debate ideas; he did not believe that logically concatenated words would ever arrive at truth. Modern philosophers, no doubt wisely, have given up on the search for truth, but it obsessed Pessoa. Convinced that reason could never apprehend truth, he bet instead on symbols. And words, for him, were symbols—not words arranged into premises, propositions and arguments but the words of poetry and words infused with spiritual significance.
Pessoa’s spiritual investigations, which intensified as he aged, becoming especially fervent in the 1930s, are a kind of corollary to his disbelief in the power of reason. The poet had no interest in observing rituals of devotion or leading a holy life; what he sought in the spiritual sphere, especially through esoteric traditions such as Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah, was gnosis—the knowledge, that is, that he despaired of ever discovering through philosophy. Related to gnosis was alchemy, which he understood as a transformation of personality not for its own sake but as a preparatory step to achieve gnosis. Pessoa’s ardent stream of writing on spiritual matters dried up, curiously, in the last year of his life, leading us to suspect that this was yet another form of literature, one he eventually got tired of.
I chose the epigraph to these sundry reflections because of the telltale words “as if they were real,” used to qualify the thousands of mutually incompatible philosophies supposedly conceived by the speaker of those words. The philosophies are unreal, of course, because they belong to a heteronym or a fictional personality and were never actually formulated. But there’s a mocking suggestion, too, that all philosophies are in some sense unreal, a dime a dozen, transitory, infinitely conceivable and infinitely dispensable, with one canceling out another.[3]
The family of heteronyms began to fall apart around 1930, but Pessoa kept on writing—his way of traveling—until the day before he died, producing some splendorous works and others that are less memorable. He was an incorrigible writer, addicted to literature. He was also, no doubt about it, a trenchant thinker, but philosophy was not, even secondarily, a métier. When philosophers claim Pessoa as one of their own, even if only as a “half philosopher,” we may wonder if they’re suffering from poetry envy. To be fair, a number of great philosophers have humbly bowed to great poets.
In the incisive pages on Pessoa published in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou convincingly demonstrates that the philosophical division between Platonists and anti-Platonists is irrelevant to the case of Pessoa, who manages to be both things simultaneously. This is the basis for Badiou’s contention that contemporary philosophy is not yet “up to the level of Pessoa” (“à hauteur de Pessoa”), which seems to mean that it lacks the conceptual tools for engaging with the system of thought encased in his literary oeuvre. That oeuvre, however, does not harbor a system of thought as such. The world of Pessoa, though it contains many crisscrossing lines of thought, from which it’s possible to construe not thousands of but perhaps a dozen different philosophies, is structured according to an inscrutable, poetic logic.
I can see the usefulness of Pessoa & Co. for illuminating certain philosophical ideas and models. I’m skeptical that philosophy can help us understand Pessoa.
