This work of mine is the product of a series of thirty lectures at the Goulandris-Horn Foundation during the academic year 1997-1998 and correspondingly at the Vasilis and Marina Theocharakis Foundation from January 2012 to January 2013, with a break during the summer period. This is not a simple repetition.
The first series of lectures provided the context and spirit of the approach; in the second, I aimed for deeper insights that were conceived during the fifteen-year interval that intervened. I saw them from the beginning becoming formulated and decided to wait. The theme of my interpretative reading this time is Plato's Republic.
It is understood that I do not have any intention of returning to the past. However, as material progress is not necessarily moral, since it is not demanded by the imperatives of effectiveness, a baptism in the sources of origin and their timeless efficacy may constitute a sufficient measure for monitoring the deviation between the material and the spiritual.
We constantly reread the classics to assess more maturely the gains and losses of our choices from a historical perspective. We proceed with our evaluation under the lens of the logic of origins and how we approach them each time. We syllabicate the texts to grapple with their meanings and questioning we introduce our time into their intellectual duration in order to give it form and recognize its value elements.
The analytical work with its information helps to a certain extent the reflective processing of the texts in the interpretative endeavor. The texts of the past still speak to us today, primarily because we share their deeper anxieties and secondarily because we know the biographical details of their authors and the historical context of their societies.
A landmark work of culture like the Republic would not tell us much beyond what is written if we did not face timelessly, with due proportions, common or similar problems with Plato. On the contrary, the classicist, let me put it this way, perspective compels us to insist on excavations and restorations of ruins or meticulous measurements of monuments and together in a retrospective time, undoubtedly laden with knowledge, but a time that neither mobilizes nor, much more, empowers.
And how can it empower when with the flood of information the world of the text becomes objective, closed in the infinitesimal of meaning? The spirit is mobilized by the liberated energy of the text that strides through time poetically as a starting point for a new beginning.
[Excerpt from the text of the preface]
