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He was one of the most prominent thinkers and one of the figures of Portuguese culture in recent decades. He was born on May 23, 1923 in Almeida, Beira Alta.
Professor, philosopher, writer, literary critic, essayist and civic auditor, he was awarded and distinguished several times.
One of his last most visible works was a film about himself, the “Labirinto da Saudade”, from 2018, based on one of the last books he published.
Today he left the scene, but leaves the mark of the “great originality” of his thought -according to the page that he dedicates, of the National Center of Culture-, and the image of the essayist who allowed “the only intelligent reflection on national politics” . “, as defined by the poet Herberto Helder, in a 1978 letter.
Passionate about literature, he referred to books as “children” and said that “to be without books is to have already died.” But it was mainly in poetry, more than in prose, that his essays focused, from Luís de Camões to Miguel Torga, passing through Fernando Pessoa.
A man of the left, but with a critical vision of this current, the essayist never allowed himself to be embarrassed in any school of thought.
In 1949 he left for France, invited by the rector of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bordeaux, with an internship scholarship from the Fulbright Foundation.
In 1953 he began his academic career, having taught at various European and American universities, specifically in Hamburg and Heidelberg, in Germany, Montpellier, Grenoble and Nice, in France, and in Bahia, in Brazil, among others.
He married Annie Salamon, in Dinard, in 1954 and, since 1960, he lived in France. Five years later, in 1965, he settled in Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes region, in southeastern France, but he always maintained a connection with his home country, reflecting on Portuguese society.
“How can a man born in S. Pedro do Rio Seco be anything other than Portuguese?” Said the essayist, in 1986, to the Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias.
The theme of Europe, and the place of Portugal in Europe, is recurrent in the author’s work, and “O Labirinto da Saudade”, 1978, his most celebrated work, is the example of “a critical discourse on images that we ourselves we have forged ”, in the words of the author himself.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa laments the death of “friend” and “wise man”
The President of the Republic already regretted the death of Eduardo Lourenço and thanked this “wise man” and “friend”.
“Eduardo Lourenço was, from the beginning of the second half of the last century, our most important essayist and critic, our most prominent public intellectual,” reads a note published in site The presidency.
“Having lived for decades in France, and being structurally Francophile, few ‘foreigners’ were so obsessive in their relationship with Portuguese issues, with Portuguese culture, identity and mythologies, with all their blockages, changes and alleys.”
“For this reason, he never ignored the debates of our time, nor the vicissitudes of politics. We owe him some of the most decisive readings of Pessoa, which mark a before and after, and an involvement, often heterodox, in contemporary religious, philosophical and ideological issues, from existentialism to conciliar Christianity and the Revolution.
“Winner of several awards, among them Pessoa and Camões, distinguished four times with national orders and also recognized abroad, Prof. Eduardo Lourenço gave me the honor of being a member of the Council of State,” wrote Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
“To my family, I offer my condolences for the loss of this friend, this wise man, this essential figure of Portugal in which we live.”
This morning, in statements to journalists, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that it was a “symbolic coincidence” that the “greatest thinker of Portugal left us on the day of the Restoration of Independence.”
The eldest of seven siblings, and the son of an army soldier, he attended primary school in the town where he was born and later enrolled at the Colégio Militar, in Lisbon, where he completed his course in 1940.
He enrolled in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Coimbra, which he left, to later test in Historical-Philosophical Sciences, in the Faculty of Letters of the same institution.
He was “one of the best in Philosophy, not because he repeated his lessons like a parrot, but because he revealed a keen critical spirit and an already autonomous idea”, according to the description, to the magazine Prelo, which made him the writer and pedagogue Mário Braga, former editor of Vértice.
Eduardo Lourenço completed his degree in 1946, with a thesis on “The sense of dialectics in absolute idealism”.
The following year he began to teach as an assistant and collaborator of Professor Joaquim de Carvalho and, in 1949, at only 26 years old, he collected part of his graduate thesis in the first volume of a work entitled “Heterodoxia”, “one of the the most noble and disturbing essay discourses in our entire literary history ”, as the professor and essayist Eugénio Lisboa described it.
Before, in 1944, Eduardo Lourenço had begun to collaborate with the magazine Vértice, a publication in which he debuted with the poem “Acceptance”, a prelude to “Heterodoxia”.
And it was with “Crónicas de Heterodoxas” that he also collaborated with the Diário de Coimbra, a historical publication of the city where he lived with the writer Vergílio Ferreira and where he came to be associated with a certain form of existentialism, influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche , Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Sartre, and reading writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Camus.
(in update)
