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Dinesh club

Posted: 04 Mar 2021

Taken: 21 Aug 2019

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The Poetry of Thought •
Author •
George Steiner •
Fernando Pessoa •
Poet •
Portuguese •

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Infinite Anxiety

Infinite Anxiety
www.redalyc.org/jatsRepo/3074/307446626006/html/index.html


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
At which point “language grows confused and philosophy starts speaking” -- a particular irony and illusion. In the final analysis -- the Master’s secretary is called Lust -- thought of a philosophic order is nothing other than “solitude itself and its echo,” a finding which takes us back to Valery’s ‘Monsieur Teste’ and meditations of Narcissus.

This bleak conclusion could serve as a motto of Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Faust,’ (Fausto) www.redalyc.org/jatsRepo/3074/307446626006/html/index.html a voluminous torso on which he worked intermittently from 1908 to the very end of his guarded life in 1935. Despite its characteristic polyphony Pessoa’s dramatic poem is a soliloquy in metaphysical dread both of solitude and commitment. Abstention in folly but so is action which served human gesture and passions from the sanctuary of the private self. In passages profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer, Pessoa equated salvation to sleep, with a sleep so deep that it reaches beyond the unconscious and the vanity of dreams so as to silence the vain tumult of thought. An aching, insoluble contradiction torments Pessoa’s magus. (Priestly caste of Persia). Persuaded of the world’s irreality he would nonetheless decipher its phenomena (Schopenhauer’s “Will” and “representation”). Metaphysical nihilism cannot negate the impulse toward understanding. Repeatedly Pessoa’s dramatic monologue reverts to a nightmare horrors: possessed by vain but imperative reflection. Faust “suffocates within his own soul.” Metaphysical inquiry induces live burial. Pessoa was a close reader of Poe just as Valery was.

More than philosophy itself, it is the language of literature or, more precisely of philosophy become literature, as in Kierkegaard or in Nietzsche, which articulates the pathological extremity, the compulsive vainglory of the philosopher vocation and enterprise. The Faust-theme encapsulates this insight. Going a step beyond Hegel, Pessoa defined metaphysical speculation as nothing by “infinite anxiety.” ~ Page 138
4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Excerpt from

THE POETRY OF THOUGHT
4 years ago. Edited 10 months ago.

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