FERNANDO Pessoa’s rejection of certain human values reveals his great tendency towards amoralism, something we also find in Nietzsche. In fact the Portuguese even believes that our ‘superior’ animal intellect leads us to transform basic sensations into glorified idealisations in the sense that things like physical love are somehow transmogrified into ‘marital affection’ or self-defence reinterpreted as ‘courage’ and ‘valour’. The question of whether these processes really take place outside the terminological emphasis that we apply to them leads Pessoa to ask whether

“the mutation of the point of view [is] correspondent to a legitimate change in the thing?”

Pessoa also echoes Nietzsche’s rejection of morality when he talks about the double-standards that our species adopts towards the human and animal realms. Describing man as a ‘selfish’ creature, not unlike the beastly counterparts that he and his civilisation has confined to the wild, Pessoa tells us that

“when postulating his own moral rules [man] never sincerely builds them upon egotism but upon altruism, and thus, in an advanced ethics, we are unnatural, we are in opposition to nature. Whence do we draw this idea of altruism which is not nature?”

I would counter this statement by suggesting that whilst altruism implies a total absence of self-interest, something that is certainly seen to be at odds with the basic urge to survive, we may divide selfishness into positive and negative forms. If we consider the nature of capitalism, for example, with its dog-eat-dog mentality and lust for self-enrichment at the expense of others, it is easy to see how this amounts to a more negative form of selfishness. On the other hand, the co-operation that takes place within the natural world for mutual self-interest is something altogether different and according to the Russian Anarchist, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921),

“in the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations.”

This idea is not based on notions of morality, or achieved by way of linguistic nomenclature, but centred around the kind of ‘selfishness’ that transcends the modern dichotomy of competitive self-destruction on the one hand and rejection of our true place in nature on the other.