Dimitris Liantinis

Liantinis' system of ideas was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Ancient Greece as well as the ideals of the Romantic movement and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. He made numerous references to the scientific achievements of his time, especially in the realm of cosmology, and he attempted to formulate a connection between it and questions concerning the existence and nature of God. He wrote extensively about education (παιδεία paideia) which was his own field of work, and some of his writings focus on what he saw as the moral and intellectual decline of modern Greeks as contrasted with their ancestors. To establish his position further, he devotes a part of his work in an effort to define exactly what the real value of Ancient Greece was as well as the true world-view that they proposed. 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that Ancient Greece, although ahead of its time for most of antiquity and perhaps the Middle Ages, was eventually superseded by the advancements in Renaissance Europe.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 super-set for all Western cultures, past and present. As an example, in his book Gemma he argued that "The Greeks did not need psychoanalysis because they had Tragedy". This period of intellectual brilliance was to be short lived and Liantinis wrote that "it would be a sign of honesty if the Greeks were to stop philosophizing right after Aristotle" [Πολυχρόνιο 2005]. In contrast, today, Greeks are completely unknown as "...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].

Liantinis had instructed his cousin to reveal to his daughter, after seven years, the location of the crypt where his remains could be found. His cousin did so. In July 2005 human bones were found in the area of the mountain Taygetos; forensic examinations verified that it was the body of Liantinis. No lethal substances were found to determine the cause of death.

He has achieved popularity in Greece because of his strange and unexplained disappearance in the morning of 1 June 1998 at the age of 55 years. It is thought that he committed suicide in 1998 on the mountains of Taygetos. 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."

Liantinis disappeared on 1 June 1998. A taxi driver claimed that he drove the professor on the same day near Sparti (near Taygetos) and that he was wearing a blue shirt and white footwear.

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 realized, 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].

Death was also central to his work and (as he claimed) that of the Ancient Greeks. He denied the notion of Greece as a culture of playful joyfulness and argued that the Greeks had instead presented us with a world of infinite melancholy, an idea that is consistent with that of Nietzsche's whom he greatly admired. Their philosophy was a study of death and their conclusions were absolute and hard to accept since they saw death as a final end, with no afterlife or moral rewards for the life lived on earth. Liadinis adhered to that notion and once again contrasted it to the less heroic view held in the Judaic religions. This could shed new light on his alleged suicide, by potentially infusing it with great moral courage as he ponders on the distance that separates the man who "honours the natural knowledge that once dead he will vanish [...] and the one who is taught to believe that once dead, he will migrate in some heavenly America" [Τα Ελληνικά 1992, p. 126].

Liantinis' argument, however, is not historical. He claims that the Greeks were morally superior, as they had the courage to create a morality that reflected the finite nature of existence rather than imposing it as the divine law of an imaginary God who guarantees eternal life in the heavens. "The sorrowful longing of death, for the Greeks, gave birth to art. Where the fear of death for other people gave birth to religions" [Τα Ελληνικά 1992, p. 127]. This harshly realistic view proved hard to maintain and 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 are asked about Empedocles, Anaximander, Leucippus and other somewhat lesser known yet important philosophers. He presumes that few if any will answer with conviction, yet the same sample would immediately recognise the biblical figures of Moses, Abraham and Noah. He extends these thoughts to seminal thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, the "giant Jews of science" as he called them [Gemma 1997], while contemporary Greeks are totally unable to offer anyone of equivalent importance.

Education was central to what he saw as the long struggle of humanity to rise above the animal level and into something so elaborate that it could in turn explain the Universe that created it, a view that is consistent with the Anthropic Principle to which he has made reference. Education is the carrier of this monumental effort and contains the living memories of its People in the forms of language and poetry. These views are expressed mainly in Homo educandus [1984] and Τα Ελληνικά [1992] (roughly translated as 'The Greek Language'), where he blamed a part of the moral decline of his contemporaries on the shallowness and rigidity with which modern day teachers transmit knowledge, focusing on form rather than content. Instead he argued for a qualitative understanding of literature and poetry as for example in the need to distinguish between the different value levels of various Greek intellectuals, rather than presenting them as the single entity of "the Great Men of Greek letters". He also spoke about the great difficulty in understanding and teaching poetry within this rigid framework in which formal explanations are valued over deep understanding of meaning.

In 1973 he married philosophy professor Nicolitsa Georgopoulou, with whom he had a daughter, Diotima, who is currently a professor at the faculty of Social Theology of the Theological School of the University of Athens.

Liantinis was born in the Laconian village of Liantina (Λιαντίνα) as Demetrios Nikolakakos (Νικολακάκος). He later changed his surname 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 while at the same time teaching at the Greek school of Otto Gesellschaft. In 1977 he completed his PhD thesis (titled "The Presence of the Greek Spirit in Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke") under the supervision of Evangelos Moutsopoulos. From 1975 to 1988 he was a lecturer and later professor in the National and Kapodestrian University of Athens.

Dimitris Liantinis (/ˌliːənˈtiːnɪs/; Greek: Δημήτρης Λιαντίνης [ʎa(n)ˈdinis]; born 23 July 1942, disappeared 1 June 1998) was a Greek philosopher. He was associate professor at the Department of Pedagogy of the Faculty of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the University of Athens, teaching the course "Philosophy of Education and Teaching of Greek Language and Literature". He has written nine books. His last and most seminal work Gemma (Γκέμμα) has been translated into several languages.