Editing Fernando Pessoa (section)

===Philosophical essays===
The philosophical notes of the young Pessoa, mostly written between 1905 and 1912, illustrate his debt to the history of [[philosophy]] more through commentators than through a first-hand protracted reading of the Classics, ancient or modern.<ref>{{citation | last = Zenith | first = Richard | year = 2021| title = Pessoa: A Biography | place = New York | publisher = Liveright Publishing Corporation | isbn =  9781324090779}}.</ref> The issues he engages with pertain to every philosophical discipline and concern a large profusion of concepts, creating a vast semantic spectrum in texts whose length varies between half a dozen lines and half a dozen pages and whose density of analysis is extremely variable; simple paraphrasis, expression of assumptions and original speculation.

Pessoa sorted the philosophical systems thus:
[[File:A Mensagem. Fernando Pessoa.jpg|thumb|300px|A passage from his famous poem "Mar Português" from ''Message'', in the city of [[Lagos, Portugal]].]]
# Relative Spiritualism and relative Materialism privilege "Spirit" or "Matter" as the main pole that organizes data around Experience.
# Absolute Spiritualist and Absolute Materialist "deny all objective reality to one of the elements of Experience".
# The materialistic [[Pantheism]] of [[Baruch Spinoza|Spinoza]] and the spiritualizing Pantheism of [[Nicolas Malebranche|Malebranche]], "admit that experience is a double manifestation of any thing that in its essence has no matter neither spirit".
# Considering both elements as an "illusory manifestation", of a transcendent and true and alone realities, there is [[Transcendentalism]], inclined into matter with [[Arthur Schopenhauer|Schopenhauer]], or into spirit, a position where [[Henri Bergson|Bergson]] could be emplaced.
# A terminal system "the limited and summit of metaphysics" would not radicalize – as poles of experience – one of the single categories: matter, relative, absolute, real, illusory, spirit. Instead, matching all categories, it takes contradiction as "the essence of the universe" and defends that "an affirmation is so more true insofar the more contradiction involves". The transcendent must be conceived beyond categories. There ''is one only and eternal example of it. It is that cathedral of thought -the philosophy of [[Hegel]].''
Such [[pantheist]] [[transcendentalism]] is used by Pessoa to define the project that "encompasses and exceeds all systems"; to characterize the new poetry of '''Saudosismo''' where the "typical contradiction of this system" occurs; to inquire of the particular social and political results of its adoption as the leading cultural paradigm; and, at last, he hints that metaphysics and religiosity strive "to find in everything a beyond".