Arvi Särkelä

ETH Zürich

Life behind a Glass: Alienation and Disclosure in Wittgenstein and Pessoa

4 June 2023, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Wittgenstein once quipped that philosophy should be written like poetry. Does he himself follow this imperative? Given that he describes his aim in philosophy as “show[ing] the fly a way out of the fly-bottle” (PI, §309), that is, as a method of “showing” rather than “saying” (TLP, 4.1212), one may hypothesize that he perhaps did. When Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations recounts the experience of captivity in the fly-bottle, he sometimes dissociates by writing about “the author of the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.” Now, the author of TLP is obviously the same empirical and juridical person as the author of PI, Ludwig Wittgenstein, born on 26 April 1889, in Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire. But if we, at least for the sake of experiment, take this person’s quip about writing philosophy like poetry seriously, then the author writing the PI and “the author of the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus” can be read as different characters. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who was born only one year before Wittgenstein, explored intensely this poetic method of self-othering. During his brief life, he produced more than seventy such poetic characters. To emphasize the authorial status of these characters, their independent intellectual life and unique perspective, he did not call them pseudonyms but heteronyms. One of the most famous of these heteronyms is Álvaro de Campos. He was born one year after Wittgenstein. Like Wittgenstein, he studied engineering in Great Britain and wanted to become a philosopher. Unlike Wittgenstein he failed, and instead, mirroring Wittgenstein’s quip, tried to write poetry like philosophy.

In the poem “Tabacaria” (The Tobacconist’s Shop, 1928), Pessoa stages Campos behind a window looking across a Lisbon street at the Tobacconist’s on the opposite side. Like “the author of the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus,” Campos experiences an existential captivity behind a glass: a state of seeing everything with “absolute clarity” yet unable to get at life, to touch, smell, manipulate the things. Towards the end of the poem, he says to himself, in a language reminiscent of the turn Wittgenstein would take one year after Tabacaria, that “metaphysics is a consequence of feeling sick.” This talk will be devoted to a comparative reading of the poetic method of heteronym and the poetic topos of a life behind a glass in Pessoa’s Tabacaria and Wittgenstein’s PI. The hypothesis is that Wittgenstein and Pessoa use similar yet different poetic methods that, however, appear as philosophically significant. And they do this in an attempt to alienate themselves in order to alienate the reader from an alienating form of life.