{"title":"Uncentred Minds","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"In this chapter I explore the relationship between Fernando Pessoa and Buddhism. I first introduce the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43), a contemporary of Pessoa but someone of whom he certainly had never heard. One way to read her remarks is as directed against the positional use of ‘I’, against the deployment in thought and speech of a positional conception of self. One should abandon forms of self-consciousness that are grounded in one’s thinking of oneself as the one at the centre of a landscape of sensation. For Weil, it is precisely such contact with reality as attention makes possible which holds the uncentred mind together, preventing its content being ‘a phantasmagoric fluttering with no centre or sense’. The uncentred mind would thus be a sort of conformal and aperspectival map of reality, standing in correspondence with the world without any privileged perspectival point. With these distinctions in mind, we say more of the mind of Alberto Caeiro, and address the question whether he is a Buddhist heteronym.","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124819386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analytical Attention","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The second element in Pessoa’s philosophical method is that of impartial analysis. Pessoa’s technique of deliberately guiding the attention to one’s own experience, and, specifically, to the outputs of ‘dreaming’ or enactive imagination, has a modern echo in the psychological technique of descriptive experience sampling. Pessoan analysis is a sort of ongoing and self-cued application of descriptive experience sampling, directed less at the intentional content of one’s thoughts as at the phenomenal character of one’s experience. His description of an analytical attention to one’s own mental state might be held to constitute a theory of introspection. It is one which while claiming that introspection is based on attention also emphasizes the idea that introspection transforms the state of which one becomes aware, for example by intensifying, enriching, and sharpening it. I consider, and refute, two sorts of challenge to Pessoa’s analytical phenomenology, from choking and from transformative experience.","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"175 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124318700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postscript","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Among the many fragmentary texts that remain as Pessoa’s literary bequest are notes for what may have been intended as a philosophical novel. Dating from 1914, the following sketch is of particular interest:\u0000 I do not know who I am, what soul I have. When I speak with sincerity, I do not know with what sincerity I speak. I am variously other than a self that I do not know exists (if it is those others) … I feel multifaceted. I am like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that distort false reflections, a single previous reality that is not in any and is in all. As the pantheist feels as if a wave, star, and flower, I feel as if various beings. I feel myself living other lives, in myself, incompletely, as if my being participated in all men, incompletely in each, individuated by a sum of non-selves synthesized into a dummy self....","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133262749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Simulating Subjectivity","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Pessoa’s technique of lucid analytical self-simulation comprises a new methodology in the philosophy of mind, one which I will call—in deliberate contrast to the empirical and transcendental phenomenology of his contemporary Edmund Husserl, of whose work he appears to have been unaware—an ‘analytical phenomenology’. The method of an analytical phenomenology has two components. The first element is to simulate, in a guided or directed manner, a sensorium. Pessoa has a technical term for such acts of simulation, ‘dreaming’, his use of the term not confined to actual dreaming but to the controlled and lucid simulation in wakeful consciousness of a sensorium. The Pessoan concept of ‘dreaming’ is closely related to what has more recently been called ‘enactive imagination’.","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122062651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intersecting Horizons","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"How are we to imagine a situation in which I am simultaneously yet severally multiple subjects? Many contemporary writers on personal identity have said that one can imagine a scenario involving the fission of a person, a situation where as a result of division what was up to that moment a single person subsequently continues as two distinct people. One solution to the challenge of multiple embodiment is to defend the view that persons are individuals of a special sort, higher-order individuals somewhat akin to kinds. And yet the deeper issue is not metaphysical but phenomenological, and it isn’t a puzzle about the multiple embodiment of a single person but about a person’s simultaneous embrace of multiple first-person positions. Pessoa introduces the term ‘intersection’ as a philosophical term of art to denote the unified phenomenology of a doubled, interwoven experiential state. In one place he gives, as an example, the hypnagogic state. While the hypnagogic state occurs spontaneously, Pessoa claims that states of ‘intersecting sensation’ can also be brought about through the conscious exercise of guided attention. Yet Pessoa abandoned his experiments in intersectionist poetry, and his view seems to have undergone a shift. I wonder if he recognized that the force of the idea behind simultaneous subject plurality, that is, the experiential possibility to be in multiple subject positions simultaneously yet severally, is not fully realized in the concept of an emulsified experience.","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129063684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Virtual Subjects","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Our task now is to talk about the types of entity which occupy the central position. What occupies that position? Given that it is evidently a self or subject which does so, the task is to say more about the nature of selves. What makes Pessoa’s heteronymic philosophy of self so fascinating is, precisely, that it stands as much opposed to both the Cartesian and the animalist pictures as it does, evidently, to the Humean account of selfhood. Heteronyms are virtual subjects. A virtual subject is an abstract entity, and there is a standard way to introduce and define abstract entities of any type. This is the method of definition by abstraction, first proposed by Gottlob Frege.","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132473973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building Subjects","authors":"J. Ganeri","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864684.003.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Panpsychists do not, nowadays, claim that everything exhibits psychological features but, more modestly, that psychological features are among the most fundamental features there are. A version of panpsychism is to be seen at work in one of the principal schools of Buddhism, the Abhidhamma of Theravāda philosophers writing in Pāli, and especially in the writings of the fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa. Pessoa was, surprisingly, well acquainted with Buddhaghosa’s philosophy, even if he didn’t know it under that description. There are hints of the sort of psychological constructivism that we find so elaborately worked out in panpsychist Abhidhamma in some of Pessoa’s remarks. Yet within his heteronymic philosophy of self a quite different approach to the topic of ‘building subjects’ is available. In the pages of this book I have described in some detail one Ego Machine, one system capable of generating a conscious self: Fernando Pessoa. Any system with the capacity to create and simulate heteronyms is an Ego Machine. Evidently enough, only a self-conscious being which already is an I can be ‘an other I’. The question, then, is not how to construct subjects ex nihilo out of impersonal sensations, but rather how, as a subject, to make oneself into another subject.","PeriodicalId":366272,"journal":{"name":"Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115279299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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