Into the Nothing with Kierkegaard and Pessoa

Bartholomew Ryan
UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA
bartholomew.ryan1@gmail.com

They say miracles are past; and we have our / philosophical persons,
to make modern and familiar, / things supernatural and causeless.
Hence is it that we / make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into
/ seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves / to an
unknown fear.
Shakespeare1
[] as soon as we enter into ourselves fully by directing our
knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we find
ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which a
voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the
globe, and since we want to comprehend ourselves, we grasp with a
shudder nothing but a wavering and unstable phantom.
Schopenhauer2

I welcome Portugals remarkable twentieth century poet Fernando Pessoa to a

Kierkegaard debate in Lisbon. It is highly unlikely that Pessoa ever read a single line
from Kierkegaard,3 but linking them together can be extremely fruitful.4 Here, the aim
is to juxtapose by way of introduction their abiding interest in the nothing as the
space between, the interval, that which corresponds to anxiety and that feeds anxiety,
1

See William Shakespeare, Alls Well That Ends Well, II, iii, 1-6.
See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I, trans. by E.F.J. Payne, New York:
Dover Publications, 1969, p. 278.
3
What is very interesting is that Adolfo Casais Monteiro, an editor of the magazine Presena (which
published some of Pessoas most celebrated work such as Campos Tabacaria and Apontamento,
and sections from Notas para a Recordao do Meu Mestre, Caeiros eight and longest poem from
Guardador de Rabanhos about Jesus Christ, various odes by Ricardo Reis, and under his own name
such as Autopsicografia, Isto, Eros e Psique) was in correspondence with Pessoa in his last few
years before Pessoa died. Pessoa wrote what is probably his most famous letter (13th January 1935) to
Monteiro explaining the heteronymy. Remarkably, this same Monteiro translated The Concept of
Anxiety in 1936, a year after the death of Pessoa, but there is still no proof that Pessoa read any
Kierkegaard. See Antonio M. Feij and Elisabete M. de Sousas article Fernando Pessoa: Poets and
Philosophers for more on Pessoas possible connections to Kierkegaard in John Stewart (ed.),
Kierkegaard's Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art, Tome 5, v. 12: The Romance Languages and
Central and Eastern Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources Reception and Resources), Surrey:
Ashgate, forthcoming 2013.
4
There has been some linking of Kierkegaard and Pessoa in the past in Portugal such as for example:
Ana Hatherly, Fernando Pessoaretrato encontrado em Sren Kierkegaard, inActas do II Congresso
Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos, Porto: Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, 1985, pp. 263-77; Eduardo
Loureno, Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou a Comunicao Indirecta, in Fernando Rei da Nossa Baviera,
Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, 1986, pp. 121-44 and Kierkegaard e Pessoa ou as
Mscaras do Absoluto, in Fernando Rei da Nossa Baviera, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da
Moeda, 1986, pp.97-109; and Lus Oliveira Silva, Esttica e tica em Kierkegaard e Pessoa, in
Revista da Faculdade de Cincias Sociais e Humanas da UNL, Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa,
1988, pp. 261-72.
2

(CA 41) and the attempt to confront this nothing and thereby conquer temporality
through the various voices of Kierkegaard and Pessoa. Although there are a multitude
of texts to choose from, I use here Lisbon Revisited (1926) by Fernando Pessoas
most vociferous heteronym lvaro de Campos and reread it through Kierkegaards
Concept of Anxiety to unveil the issue of the nothing leading to multiplicity.
Surprising images of magic mirrors and the witchs letter (Hexebrev) are
appropriated by the authors in question. Constantin, the aesthete(s) of Either/Or and
lvaro de Campos are burdened by the nausea of the past and future, while the
watchman Vigilius Haufniensis the pseudonym of The Concept of Anxiety
attempts to reconcile these two sides of temporality. But as the repetitive multiplicity
ensues, Kierkegaard can only strive for an impossible faith as he constantly falters;
Campos only for an impossible resignation as he constantly strives to the end.
Fernando Pessoa is another remarkable figure obsessed with infinity, 5
repetition, the nothing, and moves freely between literature and philosophy. He is also
forever attached to his city, hardly ever leaving it once he returns again for good at
seventeen years of age (after nine years in South Africa during his boyhood), but just
like Kierkegaard, he was always on the move, relentlessly walking his beloved streets
and changing lodgings frequently. Both are also the quintessential internal travellers
of the imagination. Pessoa would also die in his forties alone, misunderstood, and
with an immense body of work relatively undiscovered. There are so many striking
parallels to the interests and strategies of Pessoa and Kierkegaard such as their
lifelong fascination with the elusive Faust, the obsession with the interval and
borders/margins, the conversation with and reverence for Shakespeare, the strategic
othering of oneself for plurality and multiplicity, the creation of different voices and
masks for different modes of life, their obsessive exploration of tedium and boredom,
their abiding love and appropriation of fairy tales, their (artificial) brief experience
with romance, their assimilation of theatre, and their vast unpublished workshop of
fragments and notes. Here are two writers who dont write proper books per se,
who are paradoxically pretending and deceiving in an attempt to be honest, and who
leave to posterity some of the most penetrating excavations of the self ever
undertaken by a writer. Of course, there are differences Pessoa is expressively
pagan; Kierkegaard a neurotic Christian. Kierkegaard appropriates forms of literature
towards his religious faith; Pessoa uses philosophy for his aesthetic endeavour.
From Pessoas vast body of work, although Pessoa (writing under his own
name) and the heteronym Ricardo Reis speak of the idea of the nothing as the space
5

At eighteen years of age, Pessoa is already focusing seriously on the idea of infinity and weaving it
into his workshop in preparation for his multiple voices in literature. He writes (in English) in 1906:
How does the infinite realise itself? Infinitely, for we can conceive no limit to number. But if,
realising itself, it realises itself by itself, the infinite, in becoming other than itself, does not pass from
itself, is itself in the other. Is not the finite the idea of number? Idea of number = idea of plurality. Idea
is one, plurality is many. In the idea of plurality, one = many. See Fernando Pessoa, Teoria da
Heteronmia, ed by Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith, Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2012, p.
115.

where anxiety enters (which I am exploring here) as well as the concept of nothing as
philosophical nonexistence, the poem Lisbon Revisited (1926) is useful because it
encapsulates much of the issues at stake here in this book and the themes that
Kierkegaard was embroiled in during 1843-44. And with The Concept of Anxiety,
published on the same day as Prefaces on 17th June 1844 and without any reviews, it
is sometimes overlooked through what at first glance might be viewed as a scholarly
and pedantic work is in fact abundantly rich with sudden unexpected changes in style
and mood, and riddled with various ciphers, masks and images from fairy tale and
poetry to get to the heart of anxiety, repetition and the nothing. Just as the later
pseudonym Anti-Climacus had said in the first sentence of The Sickness unto Death,
The Concept of Anxiety is between things, an intermezzo, being too rigorous to be
upbuilding; and too upbuilding or edifying to be a rigorously scholarly work. (SUD 5)
1. Re-reading Lisbon Revisited (1926) at a Kierkegaard Conference
The poem Lisbon Revisited (1926) was written by lvaro de Campos, one of
Pessoas most important heteronyms. Campos stayed with Pessoa all his life, and
wrote by far the most poetry of all the heteronyms. Pessoa calls his fictional authors
heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, as he argues that they are outside the person that
creates them.6 These heteronyms are meant to have far more life than being simply
pseudo. The most important heteronyms have a date of birth, astrology charts, a
personality, a physical appearance, individual style, emotions and ideas. Significantly,
Campos shares the same birthday as Friedrich Nietzsche (15th October) which Pessoa
was well aware of (Campos does refer to Nietzsche in his satirical Futurist manifesto
Ultimatum),7 and like a kind of Portuguese Tyler Durden, Campos is the super-ego
of Pessoa doing everything that Pessoa wouldnt dare: smoking opium, travelling
around the world to far off places, speaking out impulsively, interfering in other
peoples romances, and sexually experimenting with both men and women. Lisbon
Revisited (1926) has the date 26th April 1926 exactly ten years to the day since the
suicide of Pessoas best friend Mrio de S-Carneiro fellow poet and co-founder
of the modernist magazine Orpheu back in 1915.8 Campos is sometimes yelping in
ecstatic elation, at other times descending into deep despair, and in his constant
movement, always coming back to the same place and the same judgment of the
world as a dynamic void (do vcuo dinmico do mundo) a description which
comes at the end of another poem with the same date as Lisbon Revisited (1926)
and which begins with: If you want to kill yourself, why dont you kill yourself?
6

See his own report to history in Tbua Bibliogrfica, originally published in Presena 17 in
December 1928, in Fernando Pessoa, Teoria da Heteronmia, ed by Fernando Cabral Martins and
Richard Zenith, Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2012, p. 226.
7
See Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith, New
York: Grove Press, 2001, p. 74.
8
Campos made his first public appearance in this magazine Orpheu which ran through two issues (and
there is a third issue that was not published). The year Pessoa met S-Carneiro was a busy and exciting
time for Pessoa: three of Pessoas greatest heteronyms were born (Alberto Caeiro, lvaro de Campos,
and Ricardo Reis).

(Se te queres matar, porque no te queres matar?).9 This latter poem is an even
more direct nod to Mrio de S-Carneiro.
Campos has the Libra star-sign, and this is important as Pessoa was obsessed
with drawing up astrology charts for his heteronyms in helping him draw out their
characters and motivations. Librans are all about finding that still point of balance,
and if there is any anxiety in this process, it is related to how delicate and
introspective it is to find and maintain stillness within the swirling chaos. In the case
of Campos, one thinks of balance as rather the lack of balance, as the swinging from
elation to despair, as not being able to find the balance, but forever hovering in the
interval before splurging into the epic and remarkably energetic poem Ode
Martima or resigning on the shores of a forgotten island in the two poems of
Lisbon Revisited. Libra here is restlessness, as always needing to move, and as the
desire to be heard, noticed, loved, without being able to promise that in return. And
that is why I think Pessoa gave Campos the Libra sign whose guiding star is the
gleaming Venus which represents love and creativity, and which looks over the city
of Lisbon.
In Lisbon Revisited (1926) we experience the nothing as the space which
begets anxiety, the absence of something, like a consciousness that has no essence,
and how this disturbs temporality. All tenses are presented in this poem, as well as
repetition, anxiety, and the evocation of a fairy tale which are central to Haufniensis
issues and observations. In regard to repetition, the title itself expresses this already
on two counts. Another poem was published three years earlier with the same title
except for the date Lisbon Revisited (1923). In this poem we also have the word
revisited a case of repetition again. Another oddity is that the title is in English
and one can only guess at this some have ventured to say that it is a nod to the
English poet Wordsworths Tintern Abbey of the repetition of the once again,10
or perhaps it is another way of distancing both Campos and Pessoa from the city and
the text they embody, as strangers from afar returning once again to their homeland.
Let us read the poem. The opening sentence is: Nada me prende a nada (Nothing
holds me to nothing).11 The first word of the poem is Nada. What keeps him afloat
is this nothing. Here we have the Libran Campos balancing between nothing and
nothing. As a human being, he is epitomising this anxiety of the nothing, as the past
and the future do not exist except by anticipation and memory which is always
9

See lvaro de Campos, Poesia, Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2002, Se te queres matar, porque no te
queres matar, pp. 304-7.
10
This argument of the repetition of the once again in Tintern Abbey was presented by Mariana
Gray Castro in a paper called Sobre rios, romantismos e revistaes at a conference at the Casa
Fernando Pessoa on 11-12th October 2012 in Lisbon, Portugal.
11
This reminds one of a line from the earlier unfinished masterpiece Passagem das Horas:Nada me
prende, a nada me ligo, a nada perteno (I am held by nothing, I hold on to nothing, I belong to
nothing). See lvaro de Campos, Poesia,Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2002, p. 273; Fernando Pessoa,
Fernando Pessoa & Co, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Grove Press, p. 162.

changing. Here Campos is close to the aesthete A. of Either/Or, the massive text
which begins the chapter Diapsalmata with the epigraph from the 17h century
Baroque Calvinist Paul Pelisson (who converted to Catholicism) where it is stated that
All is nothing (tout nest rien). (EOI 18) Even though A of Diapsalmata will
say that he only has one mood, one colour, (EOI 28) as we read through Either/Or,
there are many colours to be found, and Campos continues to strive for this variety of
colours, stating in the second sentence: I want fifty things at the same time. The
second line presents the anxiety and desire to have a multitude of things at the same
time the insatiable quest for all possibility which anxiety, as the nothing, is but
not actually holding onto these things. The only thing that Campos is sure of is to
definitely keep going towards the indefinite as he says in the fifth line to keep
open the uncertainty, the fog of the future.
In the next three verses (let us cautiously call them verses), Campos goes
through the past, present and future tenses bringing us right through temporality. In
the verse of the past tense, encompassing four lines of the poem, the first sentence
refers to philosophy all abstract and necessary doors were closed in my face.
Hegel is no salvation for him, everything he has done in the past has been a failure,
even in his dreams he has failed. Next, the present tense is remarkable here, when we
think of Kierkegaard in 1844, as these three aspects are experienced in the present
tense: first, he understands at intermittent intervals; second, he is dedicated to writing
in lapses of fatigue; and third, a double boredom throws him ashore. The verse that
follows turns to the future which conjures up the uncertainty and a second direct
reference to anxiety in his anxiety adrift on the waves (No sei que destino ou
future compete minha angstia sem leme), as well as what location awaits him in
his next shipwreck, always adrift and lost, and finally what posterity has in store for
him in the realm of literature.12 By the sixth verse, Campos obliquely refers to his
own name in his soul Nos campos ltimos da alma in my souls far-flung fields,
and not unlike the aesthete of Either/Or, his past is a natural fog of false tears
(uma nvoa natural de lgrimas falsas), and the only place his being dwelled was
on roads and pathways of distant forests (Nas estradas e atalhos das florestas
longnquas / Onde supus o meu ser). The Seducer of Either/Or too has lived in a
kingdom of fog (EO I 310) and he calls out at one point: Enchanting troll woman,
fairy or witch, dispel your fog, show yourself, (EO I 320) so he can then complete
the seduction before returning to the fog.
The last five verses begin with the refrain: Outra vez te revejo literally
meaning once more I see you again re-vejo here being I re-see. And many
of the images that are conjured up here are visited again and again by Kierkegaards
urban aesthete such as the horrifyingly lost childhood and the lost I. Pessoa
creates one of his most poetic lines here as the Is being a series of bead-beings
12

Haufniensis likes to use the image of the shipwreck also: both aesthetics and ethics will get
shipwrecked: the first on the required ideality of ethics, (CA, 17) and the second on the sinfulness
of the single individual. (CA, 20)

joined together by a string of memory (uma srie de contas-entes ligadas por um

fio-memria). There is a vision of his beloved city, but still also feeling as a stranger
and a foreigner here as well as elsewhere, in recollection as a ghost walking through
halls of remembrances greeted by ones own echo to call out something like the first
two words of the Hamlet play: Whos there?. Again, like Kierkegaards aesthete of
the Diapsalmata, Campos is condemned to live in an accursed castle, and finding
himself once again like a vampire figure alone in the night in a city that is still so
unheimlich, combining familiarity with strangeness, weaving tapestries in to the walls
of his castle and speaking with a child who already knows what he is about to say.13
In the poem, there is another image conjured up for the city as it fades away like a
ships wake swallowed in water, that fades out of hearing (como um rastro de barco
se perde / Na gua que deixa de se ouvir).
Campos saves the most evocative image for the last verse: the magic mirror
(o espelho mgico). This mirror has shattered to leave not just a fragment, but a
fateful fragment of me and you you being Campos, Pessoa, a god, and/or Lisbon
itself. With these last lines of the poem, we move on to the second part of this little
juxtaposition, dealing with The Concept of Anxiety most specifically introducing
fairy tale, faith, the nothing, and the Hexebrev from the last chapter of the 1844 text.
Let us start with taking up this magic mirror from the last lines from Lisbon
Revisited (1926) alongside the Hexebrev.
2. Witchs Letters, Fairy Tales, and Watchmen
An Irish farmer once said, I dont believe in fairies, but theyre there anyway.14 A
vital mood permeating The Concept of Anxiety is that of the fairy tale that is so often
overlooked in Kierkegaards work.15 The first chapter begins with a retelling of the
fantastic beginning via the story of Adam and Eve and the last chapter which begins
13

My sorrow is my knights castle, which lies like an eagles nest high up on the mountain peak
among the clouds. No one can take it be storm. From it I swoop down into actuality and snatch my
prey, but I do not stay down there. I bring my booty home, and this booty is a picture I weave into the
tapestries at my castle. Then I live as one already dead. Everything I have experienced I immerse in a
baptism of oblivion unto an eternity of recollection. Everything temporal and fortuitous is forgotten
and blotted out. Then I sit like a old gray-haired man, pensive, and explain the pictures in a soft voice,
almost whispering, and beside me sits a child, listening, although he remembers everything before I tell
it. (EOI 42)
14
See Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, London: Faber & Faber, 2009, p.
335.
15
Here are some examples of the presence of the fairy tale in The Concept of Anxiety: pixies and
goblins in Hegels logic (CA 12); Adam and Eves fantastic beginning (CA 25); witches and
speculators (CA 39); the desire for the forbidden (CA 40); children seeking the adventurous,
monstrous, enigmatic (CA 42); Grimms fairy tale of Clever Elsie (CA 50); burning in his own hand
(CA 51); F. Schlegels use of Merlin (CA 69); ghosts (CA 94); genius like a fairy tale (CA 99);
reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann (CA 122); the sorcerys enchantment is broken when the word is
spoken; also spirits of the to a magic ring (CA 127); Mephisto and the power for the word (CA 131);
the demonic as the negative and a nothing (CA 134); the elf maid who is hollow when seen from the
back (CA 136); the ogre (CA 136); Medusa and the spell (CA 140); imagination and the moon (CA
152); Grimms tale of The Young Man who went out in search of Fear (CA 155); and the Hexebrev
(CA 159).

with a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm, and throughout the text the author equates
pixies and goblins with Hegels logic, (CA 12) combines witches (Hexe) with
speculators (Projektmagere), and weaves figures in and out such as Merlin, Medusa,
the Brothers Grimms Clever Elsie and The Young Man who went out in search of
Fear, Mephistopheles, ogres, ghosts and an elf maid who is hollow when seen from
the back. Here is one of his supposedly most serious philosophical works, one in
which Martin Heidegger himself declared in a footnote in Being and Time16as the
most philosophical of Kierkegaards pseudonymous works, and yet it is riddled with
images from fairy tales. The final pages of The Concept of Anxiety introduce another
motif to describe anxiety the Hexebrev literally the witchs letter, or magic
picture as translated by Reidar Thomte into English. This motif of the mythological
fairy tale allows Vigilius Haufniensis to both continue discussing the nothing as well
as maintaining its mercurial essence. Throughout The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis
states repeatedly that anxiety and correspond to each other (see, for example,
especially, CA 62, 65, 103), in that the nothing begets or feeds anxiety (Det fder
Angest, CA 41). It is the space, the interlude, the between, something that hovers and
that creates the anxiety that which is the between for the desire for what one fears
and the fear of what one desires. I will explore this further in the final section of this
essay.
Here is the passage at the end of The Concept of Anxiety that mentions the
Hexebrev:
So when the individual through anxiety is educated unto faith, anxiety will eradicate
precisely what it brings forth itself. Anxiety discovers fate, but just when the
individual wants to put his trust in fate, anxiety turns around and takes fate away,
because fate is like anxiety, and anxiety, like possibility, is a Hexebrev. (CA 159)

Here we see the labyrinth of the nothing that corresponds to anxiety before our eyes in
the language itself. It is something we can never fully pin down, and the use of the
Hexebrev is yet another image from fairy tale to point towards the deeper meaning of
anxiety and nothing. All these words are slipping into each other. Of course, this is
the point such that anxiety is never fully grasped, and language is both our way of
communication and also of deception. Pessoa and Kierkegaard are drawing from
different sources but they both transform, as all poets do, these motifs into something
else for their own imagination and purposes. Both Kierkegaard and Pessoas writings
are riddled with the Hexebrev and magic mirror because it is exactly this motif that
points to infinite multiplicity. The mirror and picture are constantly unfolding and
changing to the point where the mirror is always distorting and always distorts the
reflection of the self. This Hexebrev is a magic-like set of picture segments of people
and animals that recombine when unfolded and turned. It is a sort of picture book
16

See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1962, p. 494 / H. 235: Thus, there is more to be learned philosophically from his edifying
writings than from his theoretical ones with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety.

with a number of cut parts from which you are able to produce new figures of humans
or animals. The modern word in Danish might be forvandlingsbilleder or pictures of
transformation.
Very significantly, it is Judge William who could be speaking directly to
lvaro de Campos when he also refers to the Hexebrev in Either/Or published one
year before The Concept of Anxiety:
The person who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, penetrates his whole
concretion with his consciousness, does not allow vague thoughts to rustle around
inside him, or let tempting possibilities distract him with their juggling; he is not like
a magic picture that shifts from one thing to another, depending on how one turns it.
(EO II 248)

And again the Hexebrev shows up for the third time, a year after The Concept of
Anxiety, in Stages on Lifes Way, when the melancholic Quidam admits that he had
transformed the love affair into a Hexebrev and that the poor girl must be utterly
confused (SLW 246) which sounds a little bit familiar with the Campos-PessoaOphelia love letter triangle. Even the motto from Lichtenberg at the beginning of In
Vino Veritas, the first part of Stages on Lifes Way, issues the warning and the
mercurial quality of a text abound with the figure of the nothing: Such works are
mirrors: when a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out. (SLW 8) And these warnings
contained in the Hexebrev are not only to the reader, but to the likes of Kierkegaard
and his various selves as well.
With Campos, the shattered magic mirror has a similar function. In it he
sees pieces of him and of you maintaining the enigma. Although it is a direct
reference to Lisbon, it can also serve as the poetic motif that indicates another piece
of Campos, a piece of the dead S-Carneiro on the anniversary of his death, and
Campos maker Pessoa himself. Pessoa is one who still lives, writing two
unfinished suicidal works side by side at this time his prose masterpiece The Book
of Disquiet by the denier of life Bernardo Soares, and The Education of a Stoic by
Baron of Teive who does kill himself, so that perhaps Pessoa can live on. The
fragment of the mirror is significantly fateful. The anxiety of Campos, in light of
Haufniensis diagnosis (or simple psychological orienting deliberation 17 ), is
connected with fate also, and the character of a self is the cause of fate. Walter
Benjamin might be useful here when in his little essay on Fate and Character, he
states: Like character, fate, too, can be apprehended only through signs, not in
itself.18 Nothing and fate are ever present, but expressed only through signs. There is
17

The word psychological is in the subtitle to Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Guilty/Not
Guilty from Stages on Lifes Way, and The Sickness unto Death respectively.
18
Fate and Character, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael
W. Jennings, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1996, p. 201. Pertinent and coincidental, this
essay was originally published in Die Argonauten, The word Argonaut is central to Pessoa and to the
mythology surrounding the Portuguese explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries. The word goes back to

the constant movement from anxiety to fate to possibility to the witchs picture. In
the Hexebrev and the magic mirror, we never see our real faces in them, everything is
always unfolding. This is why lvaro de Campos and this poem are chosen as prime
examples of the nothing, anxiety and the Hexebrev. The Hexebrev of anxiety and the
nothing remain like the endlessly mutating sea-god Proteus forever changing and
shifting.
The Concept of Anxiety itself is attempt to confront the nothing that is the
space between, the interval or Mellemspil. This heroic task is undertaken by the
supposedly very serious pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. Kierkegaard practically
gives his identity away however in his over-extravagant dedication to his favourite
teacher Professor Poul Martin Mller. Here is a pseudonym with a second name of
Haufniensis, which means harbour town thus signifying Copenhagen. Both
Haufniensis and Campos are both back to their respective harbours, and neither seems
to be able to ever really get out of them. Vigilius, as the watcher, is the vigilant the
miradouro (of which Lisbon has a surfeit of), the looking glass in the very meaning of
his nameself-reflecting and reflecting on his own harbour city. The watcher is central
and connects well with the interval of both Campos and other pseudonyms of
Kierkegaard such as Johannes Climacus and Inter et Inter. The watcher also is the one
at the interval the gap in time, a temporary interruption, a space between two points.
The pseudonym Inter et Inter emerges to publish The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life
of an Actress in 1848, the symbolic year of revolution in Europe, between the two
major texts Christian Discourses and The Sickness unto Death. Inter et Inters essay is
central to understanding the link between the aesthetic and the religious and a study of
the mechanics behind a great artists creative work, while in Philosophical Fragments
Johannes Climacus provides a section with the title of Interlude (Mellemspil)
between two chapters where he goes through ancient philosophys view of the
necessity of the past in ten pages. Here we have Kierkegaard the watcher that is both
comic and deadly serious in the interlude, where he informs the reader at the
beginning of this section that an interval of time can elapse between chapters and that
there may be an interval of several years between two acts. (PF 72) This is, on the
one hand, comical because philosophers and theologians have filled this gap with
chatter or clever ideas; and on the other hand, it is deadly serious because it is in this
gap where the watcher makes his observations and highlights the problem of time,
anxiety and the nothing. Later, Freud will introduce this metaphorical watchman into
psychoanalysis where he writes: [] on the threshold between these two rooms a
watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a
censor []19 Wilhelm Stekel, an early follower of Freud, calls the watchman an
ancient Greece with Jason and the Argonauts, and the phrase that Pessoa was so fond of Navegar
preciso; viver no preciso (Sailing is necessary, life is not necessary) was supposedly declared by
Pompey the Great, according to Petrarch, when he ordered his men to set sail despite the powerful
storm that awaited them. Of course there is also an ambiguity in this statement, which could also be
thought of as sailing is precise; life is not precise.
19
See Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Standard Edition, ed. and trans. by
James Strachey et al., London: Hogarth Press, 1963, vol. 16, p. 295.

interego as he explains: Consciousness prevents the breaking through of dangerous

wishes and immoral actions. This is the sense in which the watchmen, police officials
and officers in dreams are in general to be interpreted.20 Both lvaro de Campos and
Vigilius Haufniensis enter this interlude. On the threshold, Campos creates a masterly
poem to articulate this situation; Vigilius attempts to shed light on the nothing - which
is anxiety with the help of image and metaphor within the interlude.
3. Into the Nothing (Again) with Faith or Resignation
After re-reading Campos poem and shedding light on the Hexebrev, when we say
into the nothing, what are we implying? Let us look a little closer at this and how it
may point towards faith in repetition that is its motor and that is so vital in
Kierkegaards work in 1843-1844. The word nothing here is obviously something
central to Pessoa and Kierkegaard, but something in its very essence makes it difficult
to speak about. The last word in Pessoas last poem in Portuguese is nothing (Give
me more wine, because life is nothing [D-me mais vinho, porque a vida nada,
19.11.1221). And the last word by Quidam in Guilty/Not Guilty from Stages on
Lifes Way (which was in fact mostly all written through 1843 and 1844 and even
before), is also fittingly the word nothing: sometimes it is the hardest life that deals
with nothing. (SLW 397) Quidams diary after all deals with nothing, a text
which for Kierkegaard was the richest of all that he had written so far.22 Throughout
The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis states repeatedly that anxiety and nothing
correspond to each other (see, for example, especially: CA 62, 65, 103). And here we
get to the crux of the matter because faith is possible from this nothing/anxiety
correspondence but so is complete despair and petrification, such that there is a
closeness here for Campos and Kierkegaard between salvation and despair.
The demonic figure from The Concept of Anxiety is explored even further later
on in The Sickness unto Death, whose talent makes him so close to faith, but still in
The Concept of Anxiety and the early 1840s, he represents the boring or tedium which
is a continuity in nothingness. (CA 133, 134) This is encapsulated in the late phase
of Campos poetry, and need not be wholly destructive but rather, in its very infinite
resignation, transforms this state into a creative power in the artist who is not unlike
the neurotic. Thinking of Kierkegaard, Campos resignation is not of the defeatist
resignation of Ricardo Reis or Fernando Pessoa in his last years, but as closer to
infinite resignation that Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling tries to

20

See Wilhelm Stekel, Fortschirtte und Technik der Traudeutung, Wien-Leipzig-Bern: Verlag fr
Medizin, Weidmann und Cie., 1935, pp. 37-8.
21
See Fernando Pessoa, Poesia 1931-1935, Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2006, p. 438; A Little Larger
than the Entire Universe, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith, London: Penguin, 2006, p. 367.
22
See Sren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. and ed. by Alastair Hannay,
London: Penguin, 1996, p. 247, Pap. VII I B 84: The experiment is the richest of all I have written,
but it is difficult to understand because it is natural egoism matched with keeping such a strong hold on
sympathy.

10

articulate,23 as the last stage before faith, or on the frontier between believing and not
quite believing but preserving nonetheless. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank (who was a
great influence on Rollo May who wrote a dissertation on Kierkegaards Concept of
Anxiety) explains the process of creation and destruction that the productive artist, as
neurotic, works on:
[] that re-recreation of himself which results in a [] constructed ego, this ego is
then in a position to shift the creative will-power from his own person [][but] this
process is in a measure limited to within the individual himself, and that not only in
its constructive, but also in its destructive aspects. This explains why hardly any
productive work gets through without morbid crises of a neurotic nature.24

The critical theorist Theodor Adorno has spotted the continuity of nothing in The
Concept of Anxiety and applied it to his aesthetics such as describing Beethovens
music as such25. And we can think of this image when listening to Opus 111 (written
by a completely deaf and isolated Beethoven) where repetition ensues and
Beethovens earlier melodies can be heard and weave their way into this final piano
sonata, transforming the performance into something new through the repetition.
Though Campos and Beethoven make their way out into the desert of nothing, they
are creating their greatest works. And they turn this nothingness in on itself. Even the
bored figure of Crop-Rotation (Vexel-Driften in EOI 281-300) is intensely
passionate and who mirrors the religious figure here is a finite being thirsting for the
infinite, who longs for so much, but he is also the artist that creates a perfect piece of
prose.
Both Campos and Kierkegaard - in the guise of the various masks such as
Haufniensis, Constantin, and the aesthete of Either/Or and Quidam - are not afraid of
the nothing and constantly attempt to find its location which is nowhere unfolding
as the witchs picture between space and time. But for them not to reach a dead-end
again and again, repetition must contain within it some kind of faith. Faith is defined
at the end of The Concept of Anxiety as the inner certainty that anticipates infinity.
(CA 157) The repetitive multiplicity ensues, Kierkegaard (pursuing the impossible
faith) continues to write books after this intensive period on the problem of the
nothing, the demonic and infinite in deeper ways; and Campos (pursuing the
impossible resignation) never desiring to chase after the Kierkegaardian faith but
preferring to head towards being the petrified sailor, and yet he cannot help himself as
he is always searching and striving and writing hence the impossible resignation.
23

FT 46: Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this
movement does not have faith, for only in finite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal
validity and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.
24
See Otto Rank, Art and Artist, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
1943, pp. 40-41.
25
See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Rovert Hullot-Kentor, New York: Continuum,
2004, p. 243: If one hears or reads his [Beethovens] extremely articulated music close enough, it
resembles a continuum of nothing [] the totality of nothing determines itself as a totality of being,
though it does so only as semblance and not with the claim of absolute truth.

11

The one in faith, faces this interlude and is the bridge between finitude and infinite,
and eternity and temporality, where there is an absurd reconciliation,26 while the one
in the sphere of the nothing is forever dangling in the interval, not dancing, as
Johannes de silentio imagines the knights of faith to be doing.27 Campos writes in
Lisbon Revisited (1926) that he understands this interval, as a knight of infinite
resignation should, to the point where later he will admit in a moment of realisation
that he in fact is an interval and does not even exist.28 Both Campos and Kierkegaard
have the passion of infinity and they both maintain the creative urge through delving
into this nothing, but they both have to do it through creating a multitude of masks
the countless heteronyms and pseudonyms in conversation with each other but always
coming to the same place as a hero with a thousand faces.29 Picking up what one
previous commentator wrote, in many ways Kierkegaard and Pessoa are rewriting the
same book or poem in different ways and not writing different books at all.30 Once
more I see you again Campos will cry out again and again, and once more
Kierkegaard through yet another mask will create dizzying texts of the nothing
aspiring towards the image of infinity which might ultimately be experienced through
this polyphonic multitude.
Conclusion
Finally perhaps the orthonym Fernando Pessoa at the end knew that the key was
indeed faith to bridge the gap of the nothing that Campos finds himself hovering
between. For despite the impossible, infinite resignation that is pursued, Pessoa, one
year before his own death, writes a surprising and remarkable poem on Kierkegaards
birthday no less on the 5th May 1934:
This great wavering between
Believing and not quite dis26

Johannes de silentio says it in another way: If I am thrown out into the water, I presumably do swim
(for I do not belong to the waders), but I make different movements, the movements of infinity,
whereas faith makes the opposite movements: after having made the movements of infinity, it makes
the movements of finitude. (FT 38)
27
The most memorable example being Johannes de silentios description of the knight of faith as a
ballet dancer. (FT 41) Of course, dancing can also be a dance of death and/or dance with death. This is
hinted at by Johannes Climacus in the preface of Philosophical Fragments: All I have is my life,
which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears. Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of
death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner. (FT 8) An analysis of the flipside of the dance
will have to wait for another day.
28
See the untitled poem by lvaro de Campos which was most probably written in the early 1930s a
few years after Lisbon Revisited (1926) in Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected
Poems, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith, New York: Grove Press, 1998, p. 200; lvaro de Campos,
Poesia, edio Teresa Rita Lopes, Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2002, p. 433. The poem begins with these
first two lines: Im beginning to know myself. I dont exist. / Im the gap between what Id like to be
and what others have made me(Comeo a conhecer-me. No existo. / Sou o intervalo entre o que
desejo ser e os outros me fizeram).
29
This expression is taken from Joseph Campbells magnificent work The Hero with a Thousand
Faces, 3rd edition, Novato: New World Library, 2008.
30
See Josiah Thompson, The Lonely Labyrinth: Kierkegaards Pseudonymous Works, Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967, p. 164.

12

Believing troubles the heart

Weary of knowing nothing.
Estranged from what it knows
For not knowing what it is,
The heart only has one vital
Moment, the finding of faith
The faith that all the stars
Know, for it is the spider
Whose web they weave, and it is
The life before everything.
05.05.193431
Coincidence? Lucidity? We might not ever know, except perhaps through the inner
certainty that anticipates infinity. Into the nothing we go again.

ABBREVIATIONS
CA
The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. by Reidar Thomte, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980.
EOI Either/Or I, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983.
EOI Either/Or II, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983.
FT
Fear and Trembling. Repetition, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
PF
Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
ABSTRACT
It is highly unlikely that Pessoa ever read a single line from Kierkegaard, but linking
them together can be extremely fruitful. Here, the aim is to juxtapose by way of
31

See Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co., ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith, p. 265; Poesia
1931-1935, Lisboa: Assrio & Alvim, 2006, p. 438.The poem in the original: Nesta grande oscilao /
Entre crer e mal descrer / Transtorna-se o corao / Cheio de nada saber; / E, alheado do que sabe /
Por no saber o que , / S um instante lhe cabe, / Que o reconhecer a f / A f, que os astros
conhecem / Porque a aranha que est / Na teia, que todos tecem, / E a vida que antes h.

13

introduction their abiding interest in the nothing as the space between, the interval
and which corresponds to anxiety, and the attempt to confront this and thereby
conquer temporality through their various creations. Although there are a multitude of
texts to choose from, I use here Lisbon Revisited (1926) by Fernando Pessoas most
vociferous heteronym lvaro de Campos and reread it through Kierkegaards
Concept of Anxiety to unveil the issue of the nothing leading to multiplicity.
Surprising images of magic mirrors and the witchs letter (Hexebrev) are
appropriated by the authors in question. Constantin, the aesthete(s) of Either/Orand
lvaro de Campos are burdened by the nausea of the past and future, while the
watchman Vigilius Haufniensis - the pseudonym of The Concept of Anxietyattempts to reconcile these two sides of temporality. But as the repetitive multiplicity
ensues, Kierkegaard can only strive for an impossible faith as he constantly falters;
Campos only for an impossible resignation as he constantly strives to the end.
KEYWORDS
Concepts/Categories:
Nothing, Hexebrev, infinite resignation, fate, faith, temporality, infinity, multiplicity
Authors/Figures:
Pessoa, Mrio de S-Carneiro, Paul Pelisson, Hamlet, Grimm Brothers, Hegel,
Mephistopheles, Reidar Thomte, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Poul Martin Mller,
Theodor Adorno, Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto Rank, Ludwig Beethoven, Sigmund
Freund, Wilhelm Stekel.

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