Pass by, you milksops who need to be ists of one or another ism!
Pass by, radicals of the Piddly, yokels of Progress, whose ignorance stands on the pillar of audacity and whose impotence is propped up by neotheories!
Pass by, anthill giants, drunk on your bourgeois brat personalities, smug in the good life you filched from your parents’ pantry, and your nerves all tied up by heredity!
Pass by, half-breeds, pass by, weaklings who proclaim only weakness; pass by, ultraweaklings who proclaim only might, bourgeois boys who shrink before the he-man at the fair and yet hope to create something out of your feverish indecision!
Pass by, epileptic dung-heap without grandeur, hysterical trash heap of plays and shows, social senility of the individual concept of youth!
Pass by, mildew of the New, merchandise that’s shabby before it leaves its inventor’s head!
Pass to the left of my Disdain as it turns right, all you creators of “philosophical systems,” you Bergsons, Boutroux, and Euckens, hospitals for the incurably religious, pragmatists of metaphysical journalism, charlatans of ponderous fabrications!
Pass by and don’t come back, you Paris provincials, Pan-European bourgeois, pariahs whose ambition is to look important!
Pass by, decigrams of Ambition, great only in an age that counts greatness by the milligram!
Pass by, you tawdry throwaways, lightning-lunch artists and politicians, high-riding servants of the Moment, postillions of Opportunity!
Pass by, “refined sensibilities” whose refinement is to have no backbone; pass by, constructors who frequent cafes and conferences, passing off piles of bricks as houses!
Pass by, you suburban intellects and street-corner emotionalists!
Pass by, finery that’s just tinsel, grandeur of the mediocre, triumphant megalomania of the villagers of Europeville! You who confuse the masses with humanity and grandees with nobility! You who confuse everything and who, when you’re thinking of nothing, always say something else! Chatterboxes, half-wits, dregs and scraps, pass by!
Pass by, would-be half-kings, sawdust rulers, feudal lords of the Castle of Cards!
Pass by, posthumous Romanticism of liberalists far and wide, Classicism of Racine’s fetuses in alcohol, dynamism of rinky-dink Whitmans, of beggars begging for a few cents of inspiration, of empty heads that make noise by banging against the walls!
Pass by, after-dinner hypnotists, masters of the woman next door, commanders who can’t command more than a few men in a barracks!
Pass by, self-satisfied traditionalists, truly sincere anarchists, socialists who invoke your worker status to get out of working! Habitues of revolution, pass by!
Pass by, eugenicists, organizers of a pinchbeck life, Prussians of applied biology, neo-Mendelians of our sociological ignorance.
Pass by, vegetarians, teetotalers, Calvinists who won’t bug off, killjoys of our dilapidated imperialism!
Pass by, scriveners of vivre sa vie at the grungiest corner bar, you Bernstein-Bataille Ibsenoids who play the strong man on stage.
Tango of savages, if at least you were a minuet!
Pass by definitively, pass by!
Come before my utter Loathing, you grand finale of fools, come grovel under the soles of my Disdain, you joke of a fire, a flickering flame crowning a tiny dunghill, dynamic synthesis of Today’s congenital inertia!
Grovel and crawl on your knees, you impotence that makes noise!
Grovel, you cannons that boom a total lack of any ambition beyond bullets, of any intelligence beyond bombs!
For this is the sordid equation of shotgun internationalism:
Proclaim loud and clear that nobody’s fighting for Freedom or Justice! They’re fighting in fear of everyone else! And their leaders are all of a few millimeters tall!
Warmongering gobbledygook! Hindenburg-Joffrean crap! European toilet of All The Same in puffed-up disagreement!
Who believes in them?
Who believes in their counterparts?
Make those poilus shave!
Take away the herd’s helmets!
Send everyone home to peel symbolic potatoes!
Give this mindless pandemonium a bath!
Couple this war to a locomotive!
Tie it to a leash and go show it in Australia!
Men, nations, objectives: all a huge zero!
All are to blame for the failure of everything!
The failure of everything is to blame for all them!
Completely, utterly, and unequivocally:
SHIT!
Europe is thirsty for Creativity! She’s hungry for the Future!
Europe longs for great Poets, great Statesmen, great Generals!
She wants the Politician who will consciously forge the unconscious destiny of her People!
She wants the Poet who ardently seeks Immortality and couldn’t care less about fame, which is for actresses and pharmaceuticals!
She wants the General who will fight for the Constructive Triumph, not for the victory that merely defeats others!
Europe wants many such Politicians, many such Poets, many such Generals!
Europe wants these Able Men to embody the Great Idea, the idea that’s the Name of her anonymous wealth!
Europe wants a New Intelligence to be the Form of her chaotic Matter!
She wants a New Will to raise an Edifice out of the random stones of contemporary Life!
She wants a New Sensibility to rally the self-serving egos of today’s lackeys!
Europe wants Masters! The World wants Europe!
Europe is sick of not existing! She’s sick of being the outskirts of herself! The Machine Age is searching, groping, for the advent of Glorious Humanity!
Europe yearns, at least, for Theoreticians of What-Will-Be, for Singer-Seers of her Future!
O scientific Destiny, give us Homers for the Machine Age! O Gods of Matter, give us Miltons for the Electrical Era!
Give us Self-Possessed Souls, Whole and Strong, Subtle and Harmonious!
Europe wants to go from being a geographical designation to a civilized person!
What we have now, eating away at Life, is just manure for the Future!
What we have now cannot endure, because it’s nothing!
I, from the Race of the Navigators, declare that it cannot endure!
I, from the Race of the Discoverers, disdain whatever’s less than the discovery of a New World!
Who in Europe has the slightest clue where the next New World will be discovered? Who knows how to set out from a modern-day Sagres?
I, at least, am a tremendous Yearning, the very same size as what’s Possible!
I, at least, stand as tall as Imperfect Ambition—imperfect but lordly, not the ambition of slaves!
I stand before the setting sun, and the shadow of my Contempt falls over you as night!
I, at least, am man enough to point the Way!
And I will point the Way!
ATTENTION!
I proclaim, in the first place,
The Malthusian Law of Sensibility
The stimuli to sensibility increase in a geometric progression; sensibility itself increases only in an arithmetic progression.
The importance of this law is obvious. Sensibility—used here in its widest sense—is the source of all civilized creativity. But creativity can fully flourish only when that sensibility is adapted to the milieu in which it operates. Creative output is great and strong to the extent that this adaptation occurs.
Sensibility, though it varies somewhat due to the pressures of its current milieu, is basically constant, being determined in a given individual from birth, in function of heredity and temperament. Sensibility, therefore, progresses by generations.
Civilization’s creations, which are what constitute our sensibility’s “milieu,” include culture, scientific progress, and changes in political conditions (in the broadest sense of the term). Now these creations—and most especially cultural and scientific progress, once i
t gets under way—do not result from the work of generations but from the combined and interactive work of individuals, and although this progress is slow at first, it soon reaches a point at which, from one generation to the next, there are hundreds of changes in these new stimuli to our sensibility. But sensibility itself, in the same period, takes only one small generational step, since the father passes on to the son only a fraction of his acquired qualities.
Hence civilization is bound to reach a point when the reigning sensibility is no longer adapted to the milieu that stimulates it, and so there’s a breakdown. This is what has happened in our present age, whose maladaptation is responsible for our incapacity to create anything great.
Our civilization was only slightly maladapted in the early phase of its history, from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, when our sensibility’s stimuli, largely cultural, progressed slowly and initially affected only the upper strata of society. The maladaptation increased during the second phase, from the French Revolution into the nineteenth century, when the stimuli, now largely political, progressed much more quickly and reached a far broader spectrum. In the phase running from the mid-nineteenth century to our own day, the maladaptation has increased vertiginously, for the major stimuli—the creations of science—have developed so rapidly that they far outstrip our modest gains in sensibility, and science’s practical applications reach every level of society. And so a huge gap has opened between our sensibility’s stimuli, whose progression has been geometric, and sensibility itself, which has obeyed an arithmetic progression.
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,
The Need for Artificial Adaptation
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,
Anti-Christian Surgical Intervention
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.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 11
