Why, while Darwin made the greatest scientific discovery of the 19th century, is it still nowadays not covered in the schools of Greece and other countries? What are the twenty timeless truths about the fenaki of domestic populism? Why do we owe our identity as New Greeks to the Germans? What are the 11 philosophical questions for which we will probably never have an answer? Who were the unknown heroes of peace, who built the country after the Revolution? How difficult is it to turn the miracle of love into literature? How does a reasonable person react to the deafening silence of God? Is the concept of “free will” meaningless? Does Greece essentially belong to the West? What is the relationship between music and poetry and how does it justify life itself? Why does the author complain about his difficult life as a doctor’s wife? How two “Greek Buddhas” met after decades with godfather Nietzsche? Are the soul and the body two aspects of the same reality?
The above complex questions are formulated by Nikos Dimos in the 14 texts of his new book with Title “The Resistance to Darwin and 13 Other Heterodox Texts»
published by “Pataki” publications.
The philologist Olga Augustatou notes about this new work of the important author: “Sixty years of continuous and persistent presence in the public intellectual sphere, in all kinds of written words, but also in photography and advertising, have made the solitary multitasker Nikos Dimos is a familiar face, even to those who have not even read “Misery to be Greek”. With his new book, “Resistance to Darwin and 13 other heterodox texts”, Nikos Dimos returns in his well-known contemplative way to the themes that have preoccupied him throughout his intellectual career.
“Populism is the end of all thought. That’s why rationality is not just necessary in our time – it’s literally lifesaving” he said in an interview with Presspublica, on the occasion of the Little Manual of Rationality. Rationalism, therefore, the constant questioning that protects us from dogmas and metaphysical truths is a foundation of his thought and runs through all the texts of the recent collection. By calling his rationality a heterodoxy, Dimos winks at those of his readers who feel that their rationality is constantly being called into question in Greek reality, if not openly at least covertly. For the distrust and skepticism towards evolutionary theory as well as for its marginalization from basic education he gives a very humane and perceptive phrase: “the reaction to orphanhood (meaning the deprivation of metaphysical meaning) was existential – the reaction to our ranking between of primates was almost racist’. With this phrase, Dimos shows us another foundation of his thinking and his attitude, which is humanism, the deep understanding of people’s need to search for meaning in life. Dimos understands human things and, despite his insistence on a rational attitude towards life, he realizes how much people today and always need ideas-supports.
With humanism as a guiding thread, he brings his reader in front of another difficult subject, which is urban life and its values, the entrepreneurship and creativity that drives it. Dimos illuminates entrepreneurship, beyond the obvious and from another perspective, that of love for the “other”, of approaching and getting to know the other or the other, even if he or she is considered hostile, to say that “trade unites more than proclamations.” He calls businessmen “heroes of peace, not only because their works are peaceful, but because […] contribute to the maintenance of peace and the rapprochement of peoples”. Dimos is not naive and does not ignore the negative sides or the dark paths of money, but emphasizes that side of entrepreneurship that builds connections with the “other” of the economy, that brings together cultures and ideas and above all people, without racist or nationalist prejudices.
In the same spirit of rationality, he expresses for the umpteenth time his reflection on whether we are a Western society, to decide that “we are probably not the West yet” and to support his opinion with the argument that in every conflict of the West with external adversaries the Greeks took the side of the “enemy”. This is perhaps the only point where we can say that Dimos, in order to emphasize the values of rationality, tolerance, individuality and democracy, simplifies his interpretative scheme by seeing a pure opposition of East and West using “the concept of identity as an interpretative key and indeed of identity as something solidly formed and frontally juxtaposed to an equally solid otherness”, as Yiannis Voulgaris puts it in the book that attempts to explore Greece’s relationship with modernity.
A bold intellectual who does not hesitate to ask difficult questions, such as the question he asks in his text entitled “The Ninth”, if “in dark, difficult, wild times we are allowed to talk about art and which brings to mind the well-known saying of T. Adorno, that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. To give himself at the end of the text, the affirmative answer “that the Ninth justified (for a while) life”.
Dimos never forgets that humor and irony are a key element in the art of communication, an art he knows very well, long before we all find ourselves networked and in constant communication with acquaintances and strangers. Although he does not dominate the specific texts of the book, Dimos uses it when he has to deal with difficult philosophical questions, where his solid education is also visible. In the text about the freedom of the will and the difficulty of proving its existence, he gives us the story of the donkey of the medieval philosopher Buridan who “starved to death between two identical bales of grass, which were exactly equal motivations for decision”. Far from Dimos’s writings, the seriousness and deliberately difficult language that alienate the less initiated from reading “serious” texts, Nikos Dimos has always and now makes the difficult easy without popularizing it so much that it becomes simplistic. Multi-faceted, multi-faceted, multi-tasking but above all deeply humanitarian. A persistent teacher without didacticism.
In closing, I quote a phrase from the recently and prematurely lost solitary intellectual, Dimitris Fyssas, about Dimos and his work: “A work of reflection, and self-mockery at the same time, by a free spirit that seeks to find and/or shape other free spirits” .
