- Dimitris Liantinis
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Dimitris Liantinis (born 23 July 1942, in Greek: Δημήτρης Λιαντίνης, also transliterated as Dimitris Liadinis) was a Greek philosopher, writer and Deputy professor of Philosophy in the areas of Education of Ancient and New Greek Literature at the University of Athens. He has written 8 books with the last being Gemma (book) (Γκέμμα).
A great lover of Ancient Greek culture, he devoted his life in studying and reinterpreting their cultural heritage. He wrote about various subjects like morality and death. He emphasised the need of incorporating the Ancient Greek ideas and morals into the modern Greek education system and also held explicit views on the decline of western culture.
He has achieved popularity in Greece because of his strange and unexplained disappearance in the morning of 1.6. 1998 at the age of 56 years. It is thought that he committed suicide in 1998 on the mountains of Taigetos. His last university lecture was delivered on 27 May 1998. In his letter to his family he wrote "I go away by my own will. I disappear standing, strong, and proud."[1]
An online resource www.liantinis.gr written and managed by his wife Professor Nikolitsa Georgopoulou contains letters to her, manuscripts, un-edited texts and critical comments for his books.
Contents
Life and work
Liantinis was born in the Spartan village of Liantini as Demetrios Nikolakakos. He later changed his name to Liantinis to honour his village. He graduated in 1966 from the University of Athens curriculum of Philosophy and worked as a teacher. He moved to Munich in 1970 to study the German language, where he remained until 1972.
Core philosophical views
Liantinis' beliefs where strongly influenced by ancient Greek philosophy while being infused with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Romantics. Much of his writings focus on what he saw as the moral and intellectual decline of modern Greeks, especially as contrasted with their ancestors. To establish his position further, he devotes a part of his work in defining exactly what the value of ancient Greece was for western culture. He argues against the notion that ancient Greece, although ahead of its time for most of antiquity and perhaps the middle ages, was eventually superseded by the advancements in Renaissance Europe. In contrast, he believed that the Greeks possessed a complete culture, a kind of superset of all Western cultures, past and present. "The Greeks" he argued as an example in his book Gemma, "did not need psychoanalysis because they had Tragedy". In contrast, today, Greeks are completely unknown since "...for the Europeans [...] we, the 'New-Greeks', are but a faceless bunch, something of a Balko-Turkish Arab. We are the Ortodox [intentionally misspelled] with the Russian-like writing [...] and the domes on our village houses" [Gemma 1997] .
He often touched upon the highly controversial issue of the alleged superiority of Greek to Jewish culture, the former being expressed through the ancient philosophers and folk mythology and the latter through the great Judaic religions of Judaism, Islam and most importantly Christianity.
Death was also central to his work. He adhered and emphasised the Ancient Greek notion of death as a final end with no defined moral rewards in an afterlife, contrasted again to Judaic religions.
Classicism and Romatnisism
Liantinis believed that Romanticism and Classicism are the only world views that constitute both an artistic style and a way of life. He expressed the idea that the two are antithetical in nature, since the former is an expression of emotions while the latter of logic. Goethe, Liantinis believed, tried to marry the two but his failed experiment is illustrated in the second part of Faust, appropriately called "The Quest for Helen", where Faust representing the romantic hero lies in bed with Helen (of Troy), only to produce a still born child. Although the story symbolises the impossibility of a task, it is deemed so important that many others, like Greece's national poet Solomos, have taken upon themselves to complete.
Views on education
Education was central to what he saw as the long struggle of humanity to rise from the animal level into something so elaborate that could in turn explain the Universe. This view is related to his view of man as man's consciousness or cognitive knowledge as a bold cosmic experiment the goal of which is to produce a conscious being that can explain it. This experiment is initially the cause of great misery as most creation myths, including the Bible's Fall from Heaven, will testify but can lead to a higher form of being if carried in its fullness. Education is the carrier of this momental effort and contains the living memories of the people in the form of their language and poetry. These views are expressed mainly in "Homo Educantis" [1984]. In his book "Τα Ελληνικά" [1992], roughly translated as 'Greek' (as in the language), he emphasised on the need to distinguish between the different value levels of the various Greek intellectuals instead of presenting them as the single entity of "the Greats of Greek letters". He also spoke about the great difficulty in understanding and teaching poetry within the rigid frame of the modern education system where formal explanations are valued over deep understanding.
He advocates for a total separation of Church and State, especially in matters of education since he considers Christianity to be antithetical to Greek thought and one must chose one or the other. Following this stance, he warned against the influence of Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens [2] for his involvement in Greek politics.
Greek vs Jewish culture
This is a vast and highly controversial issue. Liantinis thought of Christianity as the main vessel of Jewish culture in the West and to understand his position better, we might want to look at medieval Greek history and the Byzantine Empire, when the church, aligned with the Emperors destroyed what remained of Ancient Greek along side other Pagan religion, often through brutal means.
Liantinis' argument, however, is not historical. He claims that the Greeks were morally superior, as they did not conceive of morality as imposed by a higher power but stemming from human nature and refined by the intellect. In Gemma [1997] he writes that "the Jews cultivated the land of faith. The Greeks cultivated the land of knowledge [...] the Jews were executioners, the Greeks were judges ... that is why the Jews won". This alleged defeat of Greek culture is featured frequently in his work and is illustrated with a thought experiment found in the same book, where contemporary Europeans where asked about Empedocles, Anaximander, Leucippus and other somewhat lesser known yet important philosophers, compared to Plato and Aristotle. He presumes that few if any will answer with conviction, yet if the same sample was asked about Moses, Abraham and Noah, they would immediately recognize them. He extends these views to thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, the "giant Jews of science", as he called them [Gemma 1997], while modern Greece is totally unable to offer anyone of equivalent importance.
Views on death
The Ancient Greeks did not seem to associate the afterlife with a moral rewards / punishment system like the one found in the great Judaic religions. There existed individual myths, like the one of Sisyphus, who was condemned to eternal punishment in the realms of Hades (God of the Underworld), but they did not form a complete system about life after death. Liantinis is not alone in this observation, the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, in his seminars from 1982–1983 [3] touches upon the same issue using the myth of Pandora and her famous box. There, the race of men opened the box and released the evils held there upon their world. When, in despair, they tried to close it again, they managed to trap only one thing: Hope. Castoriadis interprets this as the concept of a world "Full of Evils and absent of Hope". According to him, the Greeks knew exactly what we can hope for in this world: absolutely nothing.
Similarly, in one of his lectures,[4] Liantinis reminds us that Homer describes a scene where a hero says to his opponent, before engaging him in battle: "οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν" (the race of men is related to that of leaves) as we momentarily stand fresh on the tree branch and then surrender to the wind and rain. The lyric poet Pindar also questions in his works: "What are we [men] but dreams of shadows..." not even shadows as Liantinis points out.
These views can shed new light on his alleged suicide, by potentially infusing it with great moral courage.
The only form of immortality that Liantinis (and the Greeks according to him) believed in was what he called "intra-world immortality" (ενδοκοσμική αθανασία), which comes from the memories a man leaves behind him, through his deeds and life example. This is indeed in accordance to the immense value the ancient Greeks placed on post-thymus reputation (υστεροφυμία).
On the same subject he also emphasised the Greek hero's individualism (opposite to the Eastern dissolution of the self inside the Great Universe) even to the point of choosing his own death. In Gemma he writes poetically: "I will die, Death, when I want and not when you want. In this last act, your desire is not going to be realised, it is my desire which will be realised. I fight against your will. I fight your power. I fight all of your entity. I will enter into the earth when I decide, not when you decide." [Gemma 1997].
He has also written that eros and death are the related, something known to the Greeks before Sigmund Freud. The view is best expressed in Plato's book Phaedrus where the human soul is described as a chariot with two horses. In this, Liantinis identifies the two structures of the id as described by Freud.
Disappearance and death
Liantinis disappeared on 1 June 1998. A taxi driver in Sparta claims that he drove the professor on the same day near Sparti (near Taigetos) and that he was wearing a blue shirt and white footwear.
In 2005 some human bones were found in the area of the mountain Taigetos. Some people believe that Liantinis took his own life as a protest against what he saw as the lack of values in modern Greek society. In his last letter to his daughter he wrote: "My last act has the meaning of protest for the evil that we, the adults, prepare for the innocent new generations that are coming. We live our life eating their flesh. A very bad evil. My unhappiness for this crime kills me."[1]
References
Liantini D. (1997) Gemma Pub: Vivliogonia ISBN 9789607088239 (German Translation by Nikolaos Karatsioras as Gemma. How to become a man Pub. Frank & Time)
Liantini D. (1992) Τα Ελληνικά Pub: Vivliogonia
Liantini D. (1984) Homo Educantis Pub: Vivliogonia
- ^ a b The Last letter http://www.liantinis.org/content.php?category=35
- ^ Liantinis (n.d.) h dhlwsh gia ton xristodoulo kai ta dikaiwmata pou apolambanei. Available from: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8814846739056856500# [Accessed: 13 Jan 2011]
- ^ Castoriadis C. (2007) What Constitutes Greece, From Homer to Heracletus, Seminars 1982-1983 ISBN 9789602185155
- ^ Liantinis D. (n.d.) Is There Life after Death? [online-video] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRftd7Px_ho [Accessed on: 2 Jan 2011]
External links
Categories:- Greek philosophers
- Missing people
- Possibly living people
- 1942 births
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