Tasos Leivaditis’s blind man with the lamp as anti-philosopher

Philosophy has historically identified wisdom and liberation with insight and illumination, as famously illustrated by Plato’s analogy of the Cave. But there has also been, from the very beginning, a counter-current to the controlling metaphors of light and sight as a way of articulating the journey towards truth and understanding, a case in point being the myth of Tiresias and the internal relation it established between the
loss of (physical) sight and a deeper level of perception. Continuing this anti-platonic tradition developed by his forebears, the modern Greek poet Tasos Leivaditis provides
the resources for what might be dubbed an ‘anti-philosophy’ that calls into question what has become a standard, if not stultifying, model of philosophical practice. On this model, as exemplified in the dialectical inquiries of the Platonic dialogues, the philosopher is conceived as someone who ideally advances from ignorance to enlightenment, arriving after systematic rational inquiry to a knowledge of the eternal and unchanging entities grounding the material world, and giving it whatever reality and intelligibility it has – these, in Plato’s view, being the Forms. The trajectory found in Leivaditis’s work is the exact opposite: in the spirit of the ancient tragedians,
Leivaditis’s anti-heroes typically proceed from daylight to twilight, becoming in the end enveloped in the darkness of nothingness. If there is a way of thinking and living that is
upheld here as a model or standard, it is not one underwritten by faith in progress and reason but one pervaded by a sense of desolation and disenchantment that can only be adequately expressed allusively through artistic creation, in the kinds of activities that Plato (in Book X of the Republic) dismissed as deceptive and dangerous.

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