The Anti-Whitehead: Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

This paper opposes the thought of a real person, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), to the thought embodied by a fictional person, poet Alberto Caeiro. Caeiro emerged in the writings of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). However, 'Caeiro' is not simply a pseudonym of Pessoa, another name for the same poet, but a 'heteronym,' a name for one of the different poetic personae who at times took possession of Pessoa. Caeiro embodied a form of life with which Pessoa could never completely identify, not even while conceiving it as a poetic ideal.

In this paper Caeiro is presented as the anti-Whitehead. Caeiro poetically embodies a form of sensationism that is quite close to the philosophical sensationism that Whitehead vigorously opposed. In fact, by reading Caeiro's poetry from Whitehead's point of view, I can list the many undesirable implications that Whitehead highlighted with respect to Humean sensationism, and show that ultimately, like Caeiro for Pessoa, sensationism is not viable but rather inhuman.