Philosophical Essays, Fernando Pessoa,
Edition, Notes & Introduction Nuno Ribeiro, 2012

INTRODUCTION

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1888. As a result of his stepfathers position, Pessoa grew up in South Africa and had an English education. In an autobiographical English text concerning his poetical production, Pessoa writes: I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.
Pessoas PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS date from, or were at least begun during the 1906-1907 Lisbon period. On the whole, the texts were attributed to two English literary personalities that Pessoa had invented in South Africa: Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search.

I ESSAY ON THE NATURE AND MEANING OF RATIONALISM

p.2: Rationalism holds that the only things that can be affirmed as facts are those which reduce experience by reason to the coordination called science.

p.10: Kants great distinction between pure and practical reason. He was the greatest rationalist the world has ever had thinking upon it. He worked out his own salvation of all reason in that quiet Konigsberg, alone with moral law and the stars. He had that little Konigsberg where to stand and thence he could move the earth.

p.17: The Christian ethics may be, as Nietzsche puts it, the ethics of slaves. It is, however our ethics. We have not to say that we do not want that ethics; we can but say we are slaves. (We may accept Nietzsches assertion, but we must accept the ethics. It is possible that that ethics is indeed the ethics of slaves; if it be so, then we are slaves and that is our ethics.)

II ESSAY ON FREE-WILL

p.28: The will does not exist. It exists within the sphere of Feeling, for it is the necessary adjunct of that psychological faculty.

p.31: Argument against the testimony of consciousness in Free-Will. In post-hypnotic suggestions the patient thinks, that in committing these unmoral actions he is following his own impulse.

p.39: We having admitted the existence of faculties in the human soul, one concept of free-will is alone left us: the notion of liberty of contradicting. It is this: that suppose I have an impulse to steal I can give it my assent or not. According to this theory, the most logical in defence of Free-Will, we have really faculties which when excited predispose us to action, but above them we have the power to act as they bid or not to act.

p.40: The old, characterless theory of Free-Will can be held no longer. We must allow faculties, and these in different degrees, to make a mans character. But, it is held, behind these faculties there is the will, which gives the assent or not. A man, for instance, with a strong temper has a desire to hit someone, as the violence of his temper would drive him to do: this is part of the character of the man. Now for the supposed part of the will: the man has the impulse to hit, but he may hit or he may not hit, this, it is asserted, depends on his will, which is free.

p.47: If the soul be simple, free-will is unthinkable. If the soul be composed, free-will is impossible.

p.51: To say the will (infinite) acts on matter, which is finite, is to talk nonsense. The infinite cannot work or act upon the finite. An infinite will does not act at all; it is very simple, a will-in-power, more simply still, it is a POWER. The moment there is an act, this will-in-power becomes will-in-act, becomes determined as will-in-act, is finite no longer.

p.59: If it can be proved that free-will cannot exist it is not only Free-Will that is touched but likewise the immortality of the soul.

p.62: The idea of free-will, in my opinion, has its rise in the application to the moral world of the primitive and natural idea of PHYSICAL LIBERTY. This application, this analogy is unconscious; and it is also false. ..
Thus we see that the idea of free-will is not a primitive idea at all; that responsibility, founded on a legitimate yet ignorant application of the principle of causality, is the really primitive idea.

p.66: Indeterminists urge commonly that it is impossible to predetermine, to prophesize the actions of any man. Far from impossible, when the character and the environment are well known, the action is known. How could it not be, since it is a product of both? Seven and five known, who cannot say they make twelve?

p.69: I do not comprehend how predestination can be conciliated with free-will.

III ON THE IDEA OF RESPONSIBILITY

p.80: In the middle of the human brain, in those wonderful organs in which is centralized the nervous system, which form therefore human consciousness. In these and nowhere else is the idea of Myself. We are bound to admit that this idea is allied to the activity of these organs, because they are the most central in the human brain.

p.81: CONSCIOUSNESS OF MY SELF AS CAUSE, this is the first element of the pseudo-idea of responsibility. But notice especially, notice well how misleading, how false this conception is.

p.82: If my emotions be decentralized, as happens in instinctive acts, in customary acts, in sleep, in a state of hypnosis, still they can act. But a centralization, in itself, is an abstraction, is nothing. The centralization of nothing is nothing.

p.86: Responsibility is an illusion anterior to that of free-will. Responsibility is merely knowing ourselves as Cause.

VI ON SENSATION

p.104: A priori it is clear that in sensation there must be a thing which feels and a thing felt.
p.105: A posteriori, by science, we ascertain that sensation is always conditioned by a nervous system & by a brain.

p.106: Every consciousness is in a subject and of an object. This is the famous relation subject-object, which is denied by M. Binet, because, as he says, le sujet ne serait que un objet deguise. But I see no reason to deny it.

VII ESSAY ON HERACLITUS

p.116: Suppose a thought which should think itself. It cannot think itself as itself, for that would not be thought. It thinks as consciousness; it thinks itself as a primitive matter, as a kind of aether, as the fire always living of Heraclitus. Indeed the expression fire always living is good; it gives the idea of an appearance which thinks.

p.118: The external universe cannot be infinite. For the infinite is indetermined, & therefore unreal. An infinite world is an indetermined determination.

p.123: Death comes. What is death? A failing of correspondence with an environment.
Is the man completely dead? Science says that he is. He has then fallen out of the correspondence with all environments? He has then passed entirely to nothing? How can this be? When the body is decomposed, the matter of which it is formed does not die materially. The organism loses correspondence with its environment.

AvdW, July 2019