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Eduardo Lourenço’s Heterodoxy in its cultural
and literary context
Eduardo Lourenço became a central figure
in Portuguese contemporary culture not exactly as a philosopher.
(It is often said that Portugal is not a country of big philosophers
but one with great poets.)
Although he studied philosophy at the
University of Coimbra, literature and specially poetry always were
the main subjects
of his work. His critical and theoretical work on poetry (namely
Camões and Fernando Pessoa) was not based in literary
theory in a strict sense but on his own philosophical education.
(He has been, I think we could say, a kind of Portuguese George
Steiner.)
In fact, having had, especially in a first period of his work,
poetry as his main subject, he later continued a persistently
thinking about the specificities of Portuguese culture identity
in relation to its European context.
This first book, which already includes a text called "Europe
and the dialogue that lacks us" is still his only exclusively
philosophical book, with texts about Hegel, in the 1st volume,
and Kierkegaard, existentialism and Camus in the second volume
published later (1967).
Nevertheless, my attention here will focus mainly in the more
personal, or even autobiographic, texts like the first and second
Prologue on the Spirit of Orthodoxy.
And this because I think those texts show us better the drama,
if not the tragedy, of an intellectual living in the Portuguese
cultural and political context of the mid 20th century and even
later on.
We can say that EDUARDO LOURENÇO will be one of those
people that in Portugal were called, at least since the 18th
century if not before, estrangeirados: people who had lived abroad
and have been influenced by those foreign cultures. They were
usually in conflict with main thinking movements inside the country.
(Cf. 1960 version of the second prologue) .
He still lives in southern France where he spend most of his
life as a professor at the University of Nice, having also spent
some years in Brazil (58-59 in Salvador). Like Eça de
Queiroz in the 19th century or even, more recently, Jorge de
Sena in Santa Barbara having also lived previously in Brazil
(Campinas) and Madison (Wisconsin). EDUARDO LOURENÇO may
live far from the fatherland but he is constantly obsessed by
its literature, its culture and, most of all, its identity.
His essays on literature have been quite influential, especially
those on the neo-realist poetry, F. Pessoa and, more recently,
after the return to democracy in 1974, those on Portuguese cultural
identity. (Namely in O Labirinto da Saudade. Psicanálise
mítica do destino Português).
In a way, all his future preoccupations are embedded, more or
less ostensibly, in this first book: Heterodoxy.
The book, published for the first time in Coimbra in 1949, was
far from being a bestseller.
It was one of those books whose cultural significance and lasting
influence is only perceived much later.
It's understandable why it wasn’t very popular then. It
is a book not only about heterodoxy but itself is an heterodox
book.
We should, first of all, clarify the contextual meaning of the
title. Why Heterodoxy, and what kind of heterodoxy?
As we all know there are two parts in this word: hetero and doxa.
Doxa is usually translated by opinion and hetero, being the contrary
of orthos, meaning un-correct or non corrected. Hence, orthodoxy
meaning correct opinion (or corrected opinion) and heterodoxy,
exactly the contrary of it: an opinion that is not correct and
so needs eventually to be corrected.
When we say corrected opinion, it means that there must be some
instance or entity that has the power to correct the opinion
and does it according to previously defined criteria that this
instance imposes.
For instance, in a communist party there used to be some kind
of authority that defined the criteria to separate correct from
incorrect opinions and had the power to enforce those criteria.
The same happened with another highly hierarchical institution,
the Catholic Church, whose dogmas were, and still are, defined
and enforced by the proper authorities within the church.
(As you will see later, these examples are not by accident).
Usually the question of ortho and hetero doxy is relevant in
institutions and it always implies some form of power to define
and enforce it.
We must remember that this book was written in an epoch when
censorship was pervasive and each word should be carefully measured.
The art of deceiving the censors was a difficult task even if
they were not very learned. Anyway we must bare in mind that
the author can not speak of certain subjects and authors openly.
He must use allusive expressions and sometimes the interpretation
of the text is not evident. It specially requires certain knowledge
of the context.
We will see that the expressions Heterodoxy and Orthodoxy are
a means of referring to other very precise cultural realities
that he cannot name directly.
Hence, he stresses the point that he doesn’t oppose heterodoxy
to orthodoxy, that the contrary of orthodoxy is nihilism and
not heterodoxy. He pretends that his heterodoxy is a third way
between orthodoxy and nihilism.
Using the metaphor of the path he writes, "the certitude
that there is only one way may be called orthodoxy, as the conviction
that there is no way whatsoever can be called nihilism."
So, his heterodoxy is none of them. He believes there is a way
but not only one way. His question: "is it possible for
a human situation to be really heterodox?"
We must interpret this question. By human situation, I think,
he means what the existentialists, and Heidegger in particular,
meant by Dasein (being there) or, as some early French translators
of Heidegger in the 30’s translated it "human reality".
And also, I presume, we can understand this expression as referring
to his particular situation in an hostile cultural environment.
And also in the most difficult situation which is that o heterodoxy
in human existence and cultural attitude. Indeed, as he says, "the
most profound human desire is peace. But peace is what orthodoxies
offer you. The most secret desire each being holds is to persist
in his being, as Spinoza would say. And continuity is what orthodoxies
pledge, promise." (By the way, Borges wrote a beautiful
poem about this Spinoza’s idea where he speaks of a tiger
persisting in being a tiger, and a stone persists in being a
stone).
Orthodoxies are about what is evident. They are about certitudes.
And that’s why the orthodox accuses the heterodox, the
one who doesn’t recognize his certitude, of nihilism, that
is of having no truth.
But to be a heterodox is not the same thing as not having a truth.
At least it certainly doesn’t mean that he does not search
truth. EL finds some backing in two authorities: the philosopher
Aristotle who wrote, "Nobody can adequately attain truth,
nor completely fail it." (Metaphysics), and St. John who
wrote that "nobody has ever seen God".
The heterodox attitude doesn’t think that truth is something
we can possess. We only can lean on a failing human reason to
search for it, never being completely certain of attaining it.
Two things we must clarify now: whom precisely is he opposing
to in his historical and cultural context, or even literary,
and which kind of philosophical attitude his heterodoxy configures.
Politically, during the 40’s in Portugal, there were two
opposite hegemonic institutions: the Catholic Church in the government
and the Communist Party in the opposition.
These are the two orthodoxies EL fights from his philosophical
point of view.
Historically, the Salazar regime can be understood as a catholic
reaction against the anti-clericalism of the first democratic
republic that lasted from the end of the monarchy in 1910 to
1926 when it succumbed to a military coup that opened the path
to Salazar the representative of the catholic party and an admirer
of Italian fascism.
It is in a way historically ironic that the two countries in
Europe, Portugal and Spain, more culturally marked by Catholicism
were also those who harboured the fiercest anti-clericalism.
It was in the Iberian countries that anarchism was stronger in
labour movement and unions. In Portugal, anarchists were largely
hegemonic in labour unions at least until 1934, and the communist
party was bourn not from a socialist dissidence, as elsewhere
in Europe, but from anarchist dissidence.
Only after 1934 the communist party became hegemonic not only
in the labour movement but in the opposition movement at large
and that was true until 1974.
So those were the two orthodoxies EL thinks of when he explains
is own heterodoxy.
You can see it when he writes: "Lets refuse … the
temptation of unity at any cost. (…) At all levels, in
knowledge or in action, in philosophy or in politics, man is
a divided reality. The respect of this division is heterodoxy."
Both orthodoxies had unity as their main political and ideological
concern. On the part of the government, the sole legal political
party was, paradoxically, being a party (which, by definition,
is only a part), called National Union and the communists had
always had unity as there main slogan and political objective
and still do.
Against the catholic orthodoxy Lourenço contends that "our
human reason" is the "only measure of truth that
life concedes us."
I will now elaborate on the philosophical meaning and genealogy
of this statement. He quotes Leibniz saying that "all doctrines
are true by what they assert and false by what they deny." But
the real Lourenço’s philosophical genealogy is clearly
much more remote and goes as far as the Greek sophists. To someone
like Protagoras who famously stated, "Man is the measure
of all things" meaning that there is no absolute truth
and every opinion is relative to each one who asserts it.
EL in fact, in his book Heterodoxy, is a sceptic. Someone who
refuses humankind the capacity of asserting and attaining absolute
truth and certitudes based on it.
Lourenço’s scepticism, as, I think, we should interpret
his heterodoxy, has its roots certainly in the Greek sophists
and sceptics, has also a closer source of his thinking and that
his the 16th century author Michel de Montaigne about whom he
published a book in France (Montaigne ou la vie écrite.
Bordeaux, L’Escampette, 1992).
S. Toulmin traces this modern scepticism to its origins and historical
importance in European modern culture in his book Cosmopolis:
the hidden agenda of modernity (Chicago, 198?).
[Protagoras who asserted that "nothing exists save what
each of us perceives and knows" and he continues by saying "some
appearances are better than others, though none is truer" expressed
ancient scepticism, among others.]
Relativism, which was also believed by Montaigne, refuses the
notion of an absolute certainty of truth.
These authors don’t stress the value of universality in
knowledge but the one of singularity.
As Toulmin writes on Montaigne, paralleling him to the ancient
sceptics, «faced with abstract, universal, timeless theoretical
propositions, they saw no sufficient basis in experience, either
for asserting or denying them.»
E. Lourenço, in his heterodox stance, faced two ideologies,
official Catholicism and orthodox Marxism, intransigent in their
certainties expressed in «abstract, universal, timeless
theoretical propositions».
For instance, in a speech delivered by Salazar in Braga in 1936
known as the «new era speech» he stated: «to
the souls dilacerated by secular doubt and negativism, we gave
back the comfort of great certitudes. We don’t discuss
God and virtue; we don’t discuss the fatherland and its
history; we don’t discuss authority and its prestige; we
don’t discuss the family and its morals; we don’t
discuss the glory of work and its duty.»
God, fatherland, authority. This was the essence, in short, of
the officially enforced ideology.
On the Marxist side, certainties were as universal and absolute,
although in a different sense, but with the same comfort that
only certainties can give.
The assertion of orthodox certainties is also the affirmation
of a comfortable manicheism. Whereas heterodoxy is always uncomfortable
in its doubting attitude.
Although E. Lourenço's heterodoxy pretends to be a rational
attitude and takes reason as a guide in thought, it doesn’t
identify itself to vulgar ideological rationalism as a form of "spiritual
comfort".
His heterodoxy brings him near to this "tragic sense of
life" so characteristic of some contemporary existential
philosophies (cf. Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento tragico
de la vida. At least in the sense that Unamuno himself has been
appointed as a precursor of existentialism).
Summarizing the country’s situation in the 40's, EL writes "the
Portuguese spiritual situation in the 40's would allow those
who lived it thinking it, to participate only in spiritual forms
or weltanshaungen (world visions) in which the meaning of history
and life was total, and practically totalitarian, at least in
certain conditions."
A Religion and an Ideology - Catholicism and Marxism - defined
the horizon in cultural and political life during the 40's and
well beyond.
Literarily, the first half of the 20th century ad been marked
by two movements that took the names of the literary reviews/magazines
they founded.
The first, called Orpheu, was predominant and innovative in the
first decades (1915) of the 20th century and gave voice to young
modernist writers, the most prominent of whom was Fernando Pessoa.
Although, as his colleagues, influenced by the Italian modernists
(namely Marinetti), he became, with his heteronyms, one of the
most important literary figures of the 20th century.
As we all know, Harold Bloom included him in his Western Canon
and Roman Jakobsen wrote: "F. Pessoa must be included in
the list of the great world artists borne during the 1980’s:
Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, Braque, Le Corbousier. All the typical
traits of this great epoch are condensed in the Portuguese poet." (AJS,
143)
I must remember that these words were written, as those of Bloom,
after the 60’s. Before that, Pessoa was a kind of secretive
cult poet with a small but passionate group of followers.
He was not in any way very visible in the forefront of the Portuguese
literary landscape before that, or even further until The book
of restlessness, Livro do desassossego, published in the 89’s.
(Cf. Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness).
He certainly was not very popular in the 40’s when E. Lourenço
published his book.
Later, E. Lourenço became central in Pessoa’s rediscovery
with his book Pessoa Revisited (1973).
The second literary movement of some importance took place in
Coimbra around the journal Presença during the 30’s
(1927-1940). The predominant literary personalities of this group
were José Régio and Miguel Torga (though he broke
up very early in the history of the movement. Cf. O desespero
humanista na obra de Miguel Torga. Coimbra Editora, 1955). A.J.Saraiva
describes their ideology as being close to Kierkegaard’s
philosophy.
When Lourenço published Heterodoxy in 1949 (incidentally,
in Coimbra, the city of Presença) the two previous movements
had faded away and a new movement with an assertive new ideology,
the neo-realists, largely dominated the literary world.
The neo-realist authors were, for the most part, members of the
Communist Party. One of the founders, Soeiro Pereira Gomes, the
author Esteiros, a story among the poor boys who work for the
brick factories in the northern outskirts of Lisbon, a classical
of neo-realism, was himself a professional member of the clandestine
apparatus of the CP. The other one was Alves Redol. Influence
of Jorge Amado.
But the one who has perhaps been the best writer in this movement,
both novelist and poet, was Carlos de Oliveira, whose poetry
EL studied in one of the chapters in his book about neo-realist
poetry: "Sense and form of neo-realist poetry." This
is a book where he makes an existential reading of Oliveira’s
poetry, finding in it certain accents of this "tragic sense
of life" so typical of existential philosophy.
In my own view, the most typical neo-realist novel is one called
Calamento, by Romeu Correia. It’s a story that takes place
in a fisherman’s community south of Lisbon (Caparica).
It certainly is not the best novel the neo-realist movement produced
but is, in my opinion, the most typical. Although we can doubt
if it even is a novel. Sometimes it seems to be more of an ethnographic
monograph. Like an ethnographer, the author lived among those
real working class fishermen and his novel makes long ethnographic
descriptions of their way of living but also the way of speaking.
And, of course, as in any neo-realist novel, the progressive
sense of History as well as class struggle is always present.
As it is in the best author of this movement: Carlos de Oliveira
(born in Belém do Pará). He is perhaps the only
one to surpass the limitations of the movement creating very
good literature far beyond the limitations of the ideology that
inspired it. Although another great novelist, Vergílio
Ferreira, began as a neo-realist, he soon breaks out and became
the most prominent representative of existentialism in Portuguese
literature especially with his best book Aparição.
He also is the one to whom EL had always had more affinities
[for instance, they both wrote a preface to the Portuguese edition
of "Words and Things", by Michel Foucault, which, by
the way, was translated by a great poet: Antonio Ramos Rosa].
The last book published in 1978, Finisterra, by Carlos de Oliveira,
probably his masterpiece, and one of the finest ever written
in Portugal, was already distant from the ideological concerns
of his early novels – Casa na Duna and Abelha na Chuva – (who,
incidentally, has been adapted into a movie by Fernando Lopes).
This later novel, if we may call it so, is an abstract meditation
on the land that is at the end of the world (Finisterra).
[This theme of Finistarrae, the end of the earth, you can find
also, in a messianic way, in F. Pessoa’s Mensagem. Europa, "o
rosto com que fita é Portugal". "Lá onde
a terra acaba e o mar começa"].
So, even if EL is quite distant from the ideology inspiring the
neo- realists, he nevertheless will give all his attention to
their best poets, namely Carlos de Oliveira.
Meanwhile, in the 40’s, he was struggling against the «manicheist
situation» that characterized his cultural environment.
For Catholics, Marxism was atheist hence a perversion; to Marxists,
Catholicism was the «ideological cover» of the regime.
The official church was in a permanent crusade against atheism
but, as backlash, «the political religious collusion could
only favour the fascination that Marxist ideas began then to
acquire among the intellectuals.»
This dilemma between two powerful ideologies is quite uncomfortable
to sustain by someone like E. Lourenço. Both sides will accuse him and his heterodoxy
(or should we say his scepticism) of «spiritual nihilism» or, even
worse, of having a «pathological taste for contradiction.»
Although Marxism had only in those times an «initiatic, cryptic, covert
expression» it had nevertheless an «active and extended» influence.
Namely through the neo-realist movement and some of its publications like the
weekly O Diabo.
Without a possible political translation in Portugal’s social reality
of the 40’s, the ideological struggle is condemned to transfer into literature
and cultural debates.
«
An entire generation whose political awakening had its roots in the echoes
of a close experience in the Spanish civil war, found in the Marxist reference
the most evident sign of its political and intellectual calling.» p.94
Although these movements were the heirs of the old liberalism (since 1832 and
during the 1st Republic), this heritage was paradoxical because of its democratic
parliamentarism derided as «bourgeois» by marxists.
On this point the marxists had the same position as the regime.
In a certain way Marxism was lived as a kind of sufferance from the same «nostalgia
of the absolute» as religions do. With the same temptation to «change
nostalgia in an effective possession.» p.95
It was a «purely terrestrial orthodoxy» where there is no place
to those who don’t accept its integral truth except in the silence of
non-existence or the martyrdom without a faith.» p. 94
So, both options were, in a certain way, religious with an atheist Marxism
that became a religion and a catholic church that became the «armour
of a politic (policy)».
In a way all this is the re-enacting of a situation that existed in the 19th
century with the liberal wars and the 1832 revolution.
Without what Habermas called a Public Sphere , meaning "a group of private
persons making public use of reason", there was no possible dialogue
which was replaced, instead, by dogmas, slogans, intransigence and anathema.
In a process like this one, enemies tend to resemble each other, as Borges
notes in one of his short stories called Deutsches Requiem if I remember well.
But E. Lourenço doesn’t see his heterodoxy as a purely negative
response to both orthodoxies. His scepticism doesn’t intend to be nihilistic.
Against the official and institutionalised Catholicism as the religion of political
power, we could even say a state religion, EL thinks that another kind of religious
experience is possible. The way he describes it seems to be, at least to me,
inspired by the reading of Kierkegaard to whose philosophy he dedicates one
of the chapters in his book.
As he states there, «the great Kierkegaard’s contribution to the
universal understanding of man, he himself asserted it as being the discovery
of the individual as category» (p.154). Or, as Kierkegaard would put
it, in a expression later used by Sartre, the individual as a universal-singular(ity).
Lourenço’s heterodoxy tries to reverse the orthodoxy’s possession
of truth based in a conception of universal truth, by asserting the irreducible
singular existence as a «unhappy passion for truth». Meaning by
that a pursuit without end, just like the sceptics said.
As for Marxism, being a «revolutionary doctrine that became a triumphant
ideology» the attitude must be, according to Lourenço, the same.
He stresses the help he had from a existentialist writer like Kierkegaard but
also Chestov and Camus about whom he writes one of the essays in the book.
Most of all, he prizes a poet, Fernando Pessoa, about whom he does not write
yet in this book but that will be central in his future work.
Heterooxy, the author pretends, was «prepared by love of poetry and in
particular the enthusiasm and the almost unhealthy fascination that Pessoa’s
vision exerted upon some minds of our generation.» And he concludes,
and so do I, «He who loved Pessoa died to all form of idolatry, even
that of poetry.»
Tito Cardoso e Cunha
Berkeley, 21.02.03
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