The Concept of "Owning The Class"

What does it mean to be a classy person? Does origin or behavior determine whether one is going to be a classy person? Various semantic connotations of the concept of being a classy person are examined in this paper at the level of personality and definion and categorization in terms of basic moral-aesthetic and philosophical principles and concepts has been attempted. In conclusion, being a classy person is presented as a morally independent category, which is associated with an individual's inherent ability to be free from dependence on both material and spiritual stimuli. A classy person will walk away with the same indifference from both heaven and hell. Such a person is a pure emanation of self-overcoming regardless of the ultimate goal. Keywords: Class, Values, Philosophy of Self-Overcoming, Ethics

Virtual Subjects

Our task now is to talk about the types of entity which occupy the central position. What occupies that position? Given that it is evidently a self or subject which does so, the task is to say more about the nature of selves. What makes Pessoa’s heteronymic philosophy of self so fascinating is, precisely, that it stands as much opposed to both the Cartesian and the animalist pictures as it does, evidently, to the Humean account of selfhood. Heteronyms are virtual subjects. A virtual subject is an abstract entity, and there is a standard way to introduce and define abstract entities of any type. This is the method of definition by abstraction, first proposed by Gottlob Frege.

Building Subjects

Panpsychists do not, nowadays, claim that everything exhibits psychological features but, more modestly, that psychological features are among the most fundamental features there are. A version of panpsychism is to be seen at work in one of the principal schools of Buddhism, the Abhidhamma of Theravāda philosophers writing in Pāli, and especially in the writings of the fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa. Pessoa was, surprisingly, well acquainted with Buddhaghosa’s philosophy, even if he didn’t know it under that description. There are hints of the sort of psychological constructivism that we find so elaborately worked out in panpsychist Abhidhamma in some of Pessoa’s remarks. Yet within his heteronymic philosophy of self a quite different approach to the topic of ‘building subjects’ is available. In the pages of this book I have described in some detail one Ego Machine, one system capable of generating a conscious self: Fernando Pessoa. Any system with the capacity to create and simulate heteronyms is an Ego Machine. Evidently enough, only a self-conscious being which already is an I can be ‘an other I’. The question, then, is not how to construct subjects ex nihilo out of impersonal sensations, but rather how, as a subject, to make oneself into another subject.

Dreams inside Dreams

Nested dreams, together with their implications for the reality of subjects, are explicitly the theme of a remarkable passage in the third-century BCE Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, the story of the dreaming butterfly. With the apparatus of Pessoa’s philosophy of self to hand, we can understand this complicated story in a fresh light. Two distinct scenarios are now envisaged, each of which might constitute what it is to ‘emerge’ from the dream. One is that Zhou awakens and recalls that, in the dream, he was the butterfly. The alternative scenario is that, still in the dream, the butterfly falls asleep and dreams that it is Zhuang Zhou. Were all this to be put in terms of heteronymic simulation, Pessoan ‘dreaming’ rather than actual dreaming, it would be an illustration of nested heteronyms and of a rather particular sort. I suggest that we explain the situation by appealing to the idea of an orthonym. The correct thing to say is that the embedded ‘Zhou’ is an orthonym of the dreaming Zhou. This embedded Zhou is the double of the dreaming Zhou and is his shadow self.

The Enigma of Heteronymy

The two poles around which Pessoa’s entire philosophy of self revolves are commitments to two extremely enigmatic propositions: [simulation] I am a subject other than the subject I am; and [depersonalization] I am merely a forum for the subject I am. What I am calling the ‘enigma of heteronymy’ is the challenge to provide an analysis of the functions of the first person, that is to say, the use or uses of the pronoun ‘I’ and so of the phenomenology of self-consciousness, according to which this pair of propositions is not trivially false but, on the contrary, interestingly and importantly true. I set aside a solution to the enigma which some interpreters of Pessoa have found tempting. The enticing solution is to deny that Pessoa is rational. To put it another way: has Pessoa made a fundamental discovery about the nature of subjectivity, or is he in the grip of a psychosis? It is clear though, first of all, that the depersonalization Pessoa is talking about does not satisfy the diagnostic criteria of the eponymous mental disorder. Contemporary philosophers of psychiatry agree that a characteristic of a genuine mental disorder is that it is something over which the sufferer has little or no control. Pessoa refers to Henri-Frédéric Amiel several times, and his experiences too are ‘philosophical experiences’, under the direction of his guided imagination.