The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (15 page)

The end result is our present age’s maladaptation and creative incapacity. We must, at this point, either accept the death of our civilization or else opt for artificial adaptation, since natural, instinctive adaptation has failed.

To prevent the death of our civilization, I proclaim, in the second place,

What is artificial adaptation?

Answer: an act of sociological surgery, a violent transformation of the sensibility so that it can keep pace (at least for a while) with the progress of its stimuli.

Our sensibility, because it’s maladapted, has become chronically sick. It’s useless to try curing it; there are no social cures. The only way to save its life is by operating. The naturally sick state resulting from its maladaptation must be replaced, through surgery, by an artificial vitality, even though this will require mutilation.

What must be eliminated from the contemporary psyche?

Answer: the human spirit’s latest
structural acquisition—i.e
. the last general acquisition made by the civilized human spirit before the inception of our current civilization. And why the
last
such acquisition? For three reasons:

a) since it’s the last structural change in our psyche, it’s the easiest to eliminate;

b) since each civilization is formed in reaction to the previous one, the principles of the previous civilization are the ones most antagonistic to the present civilization and hence most liable to hinder its adaptation to the special conditions that have arisen since its formation;

c) being the latest structural acquisition, its elimination won’t wound the general sensibility as severely as the elimination—or attempted elimination—of an element more deeply rooted in the psyche.

What is the last
structural acquisition
of the general human spirit?

Answer: the dogmas of Christianity, since their fullest expression occurred in the Middle Ages, which preceded immediately and for some centuries the dawning of our own civilization, and since Christian doctrines are contradicted by the sound teachings of modern science.

Artificial adaptation will occur spontaneously, once we eliminate from the human spirit those structural acquisitions that derive from its immersion in Christianity.

I proclaim, therefore, in the third place,

What this amounts to, as we shall see, is the elimination of the three preconceptions, dogmas, or attitudes that Christianity has infused into the very substance of the human psyche.

What this means concretely:

1. Abolition of the Dogma of Personality—
of the notion, in other words, that our Personality is separate from other people’s. This is a theological fiction. Our personality results (as we know from modern psychology, especially since greater attention has been paid to sociology) from interaction with other people’s “personalities,” from immersion in social movements and trends, and from the affirmation of hereditary characteristics, which derive for the most part from collective experience. In the present, the future, and the past, therefore, we are part of
others, and they are part of us. For Christian self-centeredness, the greatest man is the one who can most honestly say, “I am I”; for science, the greatest man is the one who can most sincerely say, “I am everyone else.”

We must operate on the soul, opening it up to an awareness of its interpenetration with other souls, in order to arrive at a concrete approximation of the Whole Man, the Synthesis-of-Humanity Man.

The results of this operation:

a)
In politics:
Abolition of democracy as conceived by the French Revolution, whereby two men run farther than one man, which is false, since
only the man who’s worth two men runs farther than one man!
One plus one does not equal more than one, unless this “one plus one” forms the
One
that’s called
Two
. Democracy will be replaced by the Dictatorship of the Total Man, of the Man who in himself is the greatest number of Others, and hence The Majority. We will thus arrive at the True Meaning of Democracy, absolutely contrary to its current meaning, or rather, lack of meaning.

b)
In art:
Abolition of the notion that every individual has the right or duty to express what he feels. The right or duty to express what one feels, in art, belongs only to the individual who feels as various individuals. This has nothing to do with “the expression of an Age,” touted by those who don’t know how to feel for themselves. What we need is the artist who feels through and for a certain number of Others: some from the past, some from the present, some from the future, and all of them different. We need the artist whose art is a Synthesis-Summation of others rather than a Synthesis-Subtraction of others from himself, which is what the work of today’s artists is.

c)
In philosophy:
Abolition of the notion of absolute truth. Creation of the Superphilosophy. The philosopher will become the interpreter of crisscrossing subjectivities, with the greatest philosopher being the one who can contain the greatest number of other people’s personal philosophies. Since everything is subjective, every man’s opinion is true for him, and so the greatest truth will be the inner-synthesis-summation of the greatest number of these true opinions that contradict one another.

2. Abolition of the Preconception of Individuality.
The notion that each man’s soul is one and indivisible is another theological fiction. Science, on the contrary, teaches that each of us is an ensemble of subsidiary psychologies, a clumsy synthesis of cellular souls. For Christian self-centeredness, the greatest man is the one who in himself is most coherent; for science, the greatest man is the one who is most incoherent.

Results:

a)
In politics:
The abolition of every conviction that lasts longer than a mood, the death of firm opinions and points of view, and the consequent collapse of all institutions that rely on “public opinion” being able to last more than half an hour. The solution of a problem in a given historical moment will depend on the dictatorial coordination (see previous section) of the current impulses of that problem’s human components—a purely subjective method, to be sure. The past and future will cease to exist as factors that matter for the solution of political problems. All continuities will be broken.

b)
In art:
Abolition of the dogma of artistic individuality. The greatest artist will be the one who least defines himself, and who writes in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies. No artist should have just one personality. He should have many, each one being formed by joining together similar states of mind, thereby shattering the crude fiction that the artist is one and indivisible.

c)
In philosophy:
Abolition of Truth as a philosophical concept, even if the concept be only relative or subjective. Reduction of philosophy to the art of having interesting theories about the “Universe.” The greatest philosopher will be the artist of thought (which will no longer be called philosophy but “abstract art”) who has the greatest number of systematized, unrelated theories on “Existence.”

3. Abolition of the dogma of personal objectivity.
Objectivity is a rough average of partial subjectivities. If a society is made up, say, of
five men—
a, b, c, d
, and
e
—then the “truth” or “objectivity” of that society may be represented as

In the future each man will, increasingly, realize this average in himself. And so each man, or at least each superior man, will tend to be a harmony in the midst of many subjectivities (one of which will be his) to arrive as close as possible at the Infinite Truth to which the numerical series of partial truths ideally tends.

Results:

a)
In politics:
Sovereignty of the person or persons who are the best Realizers of Averages, eliminating the notion that anybody at all can proffer opinions on politics (or on anything else), since only those who embody the Average will be entitled to opinions.

b)
In art:
Abolition of the concept of Expression, to be replaced by that of Interexpression, which will be possible only for those who are fully aware that they express the opinions of nobody (those, in other words, who embody the Average).

c)
In philosophy:
Substitution of the concept of Philosophy by that of Science, since Science—given its “objective character,” its adaptation to the “outer universe”—is the Average of subjectivities and, consequently, the concrete Average of philosophical opinions. Philosophy will disappear as Science advances.

a)
In politics:
A Scientific Monarchy that will be antitraditionalist, antihereditary, and absolutely spontaneous, since the Average-King may appear at any time. The People’s scientifically natural role will be merely to define current impulses.

b)
In art:
Instead of thirty or forty poets to give expression to an age, it will take, say, just two poets endowed with fifteen or twenty
personalities, each of these being an Average of current social trends.

c)
In philosophy:
Philosophy’s integration into art and science. Philosophy as a metaphysical science will disappear, along with all forms of religious sentiment (from Christianity to revolutionary humanitari-anism), for not representing an Average.

But what is the Method, the collective operation, that will bring about these results in the society of tomorrow? What practical Method will set the process in motion?

The Method is known only to the generation in whose name I shout and for whose cause Europe, in heat, rubs her body against the wall!

If I knew the Method, I myself would be that entire generation!

But I only know the Way; I don’t know where it will lead.

Be that as it may, I proclaim the inevitable coming of a Humanity of Engineers!

More than that,
I absolutely guarantee the coming of a Humanity of Engineers!

I proclaim the imminent, scientific creation of Supermen!

I proclaim the coming of a perfect, mathematical Humanity!

I shout out loud its Coming!

I shout out loud its high Work!

I shout It out loud, for its own sake!

And I shout out,
firstly:

The Superman will not be the strongest man but the most complete!

And I shout out,
secondly:

The Superman will not be the toughest man but the most complex!

And I shout out,
thirdly:

The Superman will not be the freest man but the most harmonious!

I shout this out at the top of my lungs, on the European coast where the Tagus meets the sea, with arms raised high as I gaze upon the Atlantic, abstractly saluting Infinity.

Álvaro de Campos.

The aesthetic and social theory expressed in my
Ultimatum
comes down to this: the irrationalization of activities that cannot (at least not yet) be rationalized. Since metaphysics and sociology are but virtual sciences, I propose that they be irrationalized—that metaphysics be made into a branch of art, which irrationahzes it by taking away its raison d’etre, and sociology into a branch of politics, which irrationahzes it by changing it from a theory into something practical. I do not propose that metaphysics be converted into religion, or sociology into social utopianism, since that would subrationalize rather than irrationalize those disciplines, giving them, not a different raison d’etre, but an inferior form of the one they already had.

This is the gist of what I advocated in my
Ultimatum
, whose utterly new and original political and aesthetic theories are logically, completely irrational, just like life.

See the introduction to S
ENSATJONJSM AND
O
THER
I
SMS
for some remarks about the work of Mário de Sá-Carneiro
(1890–1916),
one of Portugal’s most important Modernist poets as well as a notable writer of fiction. Although their relationship was eminently literary, Sá-Carneiro was probably the friend Pessoa felt closest to. They carried on an intense correspondence between
1912
and
1916,
when Sá-Carneiro was often abroad, but hardly any of Pessoa’s
letters have survived. He posted this one to Paris about one month before Sá-Carneiro, downing five vials of strychnine, committed suicide in his room at the Hôtel de Nice
.

Lisbon, 14 March 1916

My dear Sá-Carneiro,

I’m writing to you today out of an emotional necessity—an anguished longing to talk to you. I have, in other words, nothing special to say. Except this: that today I’m at the bottom of a bottomless depression. The absurdity of the sentence speaks for me.