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Tasos Leivaditis’s blind man with the lamp as anti-philosopher
Trakakis, Nick
Trakakis, Nick
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Abstract
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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Date
2024
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Book chapter
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Book
Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction - Redefining the Philosopher in Multi-cultural Contexts
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33
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ACU Department
School of Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
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All rights reserved
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Copyright © Anway Mukhopadhyay, Saptarshi Mallick, Debashree Dattaray, 2024. Each chapter © of Contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.