Postscript

Among the many fragmentary texts that remain as Pessoa’s literary bequest are notes for what may have been intended as a philosophical novel. Dating from 1914, the following sketch is of particular interest: I do not know who I am, what soul I have. When I speak with sincerity, I do not know with what sincerity I speak. I am variously other than a self that I do not know exists (if it is those others) … I feel multifaceted. I am like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that distort false reflections, a single previous reality that is not in any and is in all. As the pantheist feels as if a wave, star, and flower, I feel as if various beings. I feel myself living other lives, in myself, incompletely, as if my being participated in all men, incompletely in each, individuated by a sum of non-selves synthesized into a dummy self....

The Cosmos and I

Could it be the case that all of us as individual human subjects stand to one another as Caeiro stands to Reis and Reis to Campos: just as they are the multiple heteronyms of one and the same subject, Fernando Pessoa, so too we are all heteronyms of one and the same subject, a single cosmic subject? There is a famous line in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad which might be interpreted as saying something of the sort—tat tvam asi: you are that, that single cosmic subject, brahman. For the eighth-century Vedāntic philosopher Śaṅkara, whose reading of the Upaniṣads would much later establish itself in the popular imagination, the similarity is further reinforced because he provides a context of phenomenological simulation similar to dreaming and imagining, namely, māyā, ‘cosmic illusion’. Let me call the view that individual human subjects are heteronyms of a single cosmic self ‘heteronymic cosmopsychism’. Heteronymic cosmopsychism is different from the comparatively more common variety of cosmopsychism according to which the grounding relation between the single cosmic self and the multiplicity of individual selves is mereological, not heteronymic. Heteronymic cosmopsychism agrees with priority monism in rejecting a monistic existence thesis, differing from it only as to the nature of the grounding relation, sidestepping the problems that bedevil priority cosmopsychism because its grounding relation is not one of decomposition.

Centres without Sensibility

A fundamental claim in Pessoa’s philosophy is that selves are grounded in fields of experience. What, though, if there are no sensations? This very possibility, which seems at first sight to be wholly unavailable to Pessoa, is exactly what is countenanced by the eleventh-century Central Asian philosopher Avicenna. Avicenna says that one can imagine a human being who is created out of nothing flying through the air but having no sensory perceptions. However, there is a phenomenological field, and so a type of centrality, available even to the flying man. A positional conception of self can be grounded in the centrality of a purely cognitive phenomenology. If a purely cognitive landscape of presence is a possibility, then so too is a virtual subject, a heteronym, whose manner of experiencing is purely cognitive.

Uncentred Minds

In this chapter I explore the relationship between Fernando Pessoa and Buddhism. I first introduce the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43), a contemporary of Pessoa but someone of whom he certainly had never heard. One way to read her remarks is as directed against the positional use of ‘I’, against the deployment in thought and speech of a positional conception of self. One should abandon forms of self-consciousness that are grounded in one’s thinking of oneself as the one at the centre of a landscape of sensation. For Weil, it is precisely such contact with reality as attention makes possible which holds the uncentred mind together, preventing its content being ‘a phantasmagoric fluttering with no centre or sense’. The uncentred mind would thus be a sort of conformal and aperspectival map of reality, standing in correspondence with the world without any privileged perspectival point. With these distinctions in mind, we say more of the mind of Alberto Caeiro, and address the question whether he is a Buddhist heteronym.

Orthonyms as Shadow Selves

Fernando Pessoa has introduced the term ‘heteronym’ for the coterie of virtual subjects whose identity he variously assumes. Within this group there is one whose name is ‘Fernando Pessoa’. When Pessoa writes about someone called ‘Fernando Pessoa’ he is employing an orthonym, and doing so precisely because within the imagined scenario he is not Fernando Pessoa. An orthonym, like a heteronym, is a virtual subject, but it is one which stands in a distinguished relationship with a simulating subject. The concept of an orthonym explains that of a literary doppelgänger.

The Fugitive and the Forum

I, the one that is me, am the one who is at the centre of all this. In his discussions of the multiplicity of I, Pessoa has shown, though, that this state is not a stable one, that the one that I am is not static and single but, with each new heteronym assumed, another I becomes me. Pessoa describes the phenomenology in one of his most famous, and most autobiographical, poems—the poem he calls his ‘Autopsychography’. The phenomenology is that of the fugitive. The fugitive is the one who, in sustaining a multiplicity of heteronymic identities, feels nothing but estrangement, an emptiness of personality. Estrangement consists not in disidentification with any of the heteronyms but rather in merely contingent identification with each and every one. Jorge Luis Borges provides a fine depiction of fugitive phenomenology in his story Everything and Nothing. The phenomenology of the fugitive is that of introspective attention, an impartial analysis of the multiplicity of the inner lives which are one’s own. The subject position as such is rightly conceptualized as a meeting place, a forum, for them all.

Being at the Centre

We can begin to unravel the enigma of heteronymy if we note that a rather similar puzzle arises in the context of dreaming. I may certainly figure within my own dream, and there is therefore a conceptual distinction between the dreaming subject and the subject-within-a-dream. But is it possible for me to have a dream such that, within the dream, I am a subject other than the subject I am? The puzzle is to know what makes it the case that in the dream I am X and not JG: on what grounds should we answer the question ‘Which one is me?’ J. J. Valberg’s proposal is to call attention to what he calls a ‘positional use’ of the first person, distinct from its mundane use as an indexical, and a corresponding positional conception of self. Using ‘I’ positionally, I am the one to whom all this is presented, the one to whom every phenomenal property is directed, or, as Valberg puts it, the one who is ‘at the centre’ of the manifold of presentation which he calls the experiential horizon. The positional conception of self is one which Pessoa quite explicitly puts at the heart of his philosophy. With the positional conception of self to hand, a solution to the enigma of heteronymy is available.

The Grammar of Subjectivity

There is a commonly agreed way to articulate the logical form of a conscious state: it a state such that there is something it is like for a subject to be in it. This formula has the important virtue that it enables us to separate out two distinct aspects in the phenomenology of an experience: what is experienced, the ‘quality’ of the experience; and how it is experienced, that it is experienced as being for-a-subject. A careful examination of the syntax of the ‘what it’s like …’ construction reveals that the colloquial phrase ‘subject of experience’ is polysemic. On the one hand it might mean the subject in whom the experience is occurring. Let me call this the ‘locative of manifestation’. This host self, an inhabited self, is more commonly identified with the physical human being, or the human being’s brain or neuropsychological state, but Pessoa gives instead a phenomenological interpretation of the notion. The phrase might also mean the subject affected by the experience. The affected subject is the one to whom the experience is addressed, so I will call this the ‘accusative of manifestation’. The accusative of manifestation is, evidently, conceptually distinct from the locative of manifestation. Finally, the phrase might mean the subject who is undergoing the experience, the one who lives through the experience, the ‘dative of manifestation.’

Simulating Subjectivity

Pessoa’s technique of lucid analytical self-simulation comprises a new methodology in the philosophy of mind, one which I will call—in deliberate contrast to the empirical and transcendental phenomenology of his contemporary Edmund Husserl, of whose work he appears to have been unaware—an ‘analytical phenomenology’. The method of an analytical phenomenology has two components. The first element is to simulate, in a guided or directed manner, a sensorium. Pessoa has a technical term for such acts of simulation, ‘dreaming’, his use of the term not confined to actual dreaming but to the controlled and lucid simulation in wakeful consciousness of a sensorium. The Pessoan concept of ‘dreaming’ is closely related to what has more recently been called ‘enactive imagination’.

The Reality of Subjects

Pessoa often expresses hesitation in his ability to tell what is more real and what is less, the actual or the virtual, veridical experience or dream, fact or fiction. At other times Pessoa offers something like a criterion to distinguish the imaginary from the empirical. Imagined entities are ‘one-sided’ in a manner actual entities are not. Pessoa’s view seems to be that subjects of experience are grounded (and therefore are not Cartesian souls), and that the grounding of both actual and virtual subjects is the same. The intuitive view that unsimulated subjects ground simulated ones, that Shakespeare is ‘more real’ than Hamlet, is regarded as deeply suspicious if not rejected outright. What we need is a way to make sense of the idea that subjects of experience which are simulated in imagination are no ‘less real’ than the subjects of experience in everyday life. There have, indeed, been studies which suggest that there is a functional equivalence in the two cases, such as Tamar Gendler’s studies of imaginative contagion.