A Modernist Break with Tradition: Fernando Pessoa's Malthusian Laws of Sensibility and the Improvement of Society

Description

This presentation explores the appropriation of the Malthusian principle of population in the “Ultimatum”, a manifesto published in 1917 by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Revered by Harold Bloom and George Steiner as one of the greatest writers of modern literature, Pessoa invented distinct heteronyms, or personalities with characteristic names, styles, influences and interests, on whose behalf he wrote about an impressive range of topics. One of them, Álvaro de Campos, was imagined as a poet with a scientific background in engineering. Originally influenced by Futurism, he praised velocity, energy and force typified in elements of modern societies, such as factories, trains or electricity. In 1917, at the height of the Great World War, Campos published a manifesto entitled “Ultimatum” in the literary magazine Portugal Futurista (Futurist Portugal). In this manifesto, he makes use of Thomas Malthus’s principle of population to explain the characteristic tensions of the modern mind. According to Campos, human intellect had become unable to cope with the plethora of stimuli produced in modern societies, due to the enormous scientific and technological advances of the nineteenth century, thus mirroring the shortage of resources necessary to sustain a geometrically-increasing population. Contrary to Malthus, who saw in Christian morality a reference for finding solutions to the political economy problems he was analyzing, Campos considered Christian ideas and mores the most important factors limiting human intellectual improvement, and defended their abolition. This Nietzschian solution was not an inconsequent provocation aimed at the Portuguese society and its predominantly Catholic culture. It was rather the first step of a wider project to build a Neopagan philosophy that would provide a sustained critique of tradition and hopefully transform society.

Period	8 Sept 2016
Event title	2nd International Conference on Science and Literature
Event type	Conference
Conference number	2nd
Location	Pöllau, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International