Fernando Pessoa: Imagination and the Self

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is the quintessential philosophical outsider. Affiliated to no institution, and associated with no traditional school, in his prose fiction and poetry, Pessoa invented a new philosophy of the human subject, arguing that imagination is key to human flourishing and human self-enrichment. Each of us, he claimed, can use our powers of imagination to ＂pluralise ourselves;＂ that is to say, to live, simultaneously and in sequence, as a plurality of distinct subjects. Calling these artefact minds ＂heteronyms＂, Pessoan synthetic selves are new ways poetically to experience the world.

In this study of the philosophical thought of Pessoa, philosopher Jonardon Ganeri highlights connections between Pessoa with earlier philosophical poets, from Keats to Shakespeare and from Coleridge to Whitman. Ganeri emphasises Pessoa’s originality in his theory of the human subject as a radical departure from the history of Christian or Islamic thought, highlighting affinities with ideas from works of philosophical fiction in classical India through an examination of Pessoa’s own engagement with Indian poetry and philosophy. Ganeri convincingly argues for the need to consider Pessoa’s writings as a philosopher, both on their own terms and as in deep conversation with the tradition of Indian thought.

Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person Stance (2010); Attention, Not Self (2017); The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), and Inwardness: An Outsider’s Guide (2021). He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015 and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year.