The former President of the Republic and Honorary Professor of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Mr. Prokopios Pavlopoulos, spoke, on the topic of "The eternal radiation of Greek Culture", announcing, online, the opening of the 4th Panhellenic Conference on the Digitization of Cultural Heritage-EuroMed 2021. At the opening in this speech, Mr. Prokopios Pavlopoulos pointed out, among other things, the following:
"For the 4th time, the "Panhellenic Conference on the Digitization of Cultural Heritage - EuroMed", which was instituted in 2015 and is organized every two years, is being held, with the organizers of the University of Western Attica, the Cyprus University of Technology and the Cultural Organization "PERRAIVIA Network". This project has acquired national dimensions, in terms of importance, given the fact that it aims to, through the promotion of the timeless radiation, worldwide, of the Greek Cultural Heritage, at the service of Culture, Education, Research and Innovation. In this direction, Technology in general, and Digital Technologies in particular, plays a key role. My opening speech focuses on highlighting how and why the Digitization of our Cultural Heritage responds to the need to preserve and promote Greek Culture, as a "bed" and "cradle" especially of Spirit and Freedom, through which it influenced, decisively, the European but also the World, in general, Culture.
A. Through their victory in the Median Wars, the Greeks also defended the Culture they created - and which stands, even today, as the first pillar of our common European Culture - setting, at the same time, for the first time in World History, the since then stable boundary between East and West. This "opposition" between East and West pertains to every aspect of spiritual creation. For example, and staying first in the area of Art, before the "big-bang" Freedom of the Ancient Greek Spirit, this area was dominated by the "megalithic", with immobility as its main characteristic.
A representative sample of writing are the kouros, which even today inspire awe for their size but also for their stillness, through which they give the feeling that they are in constant communication with eternity. And then, after the aforementioned "big-bang" Eleftheria, the statues of the Greek sculptor, beyond the unparalleled importance in detail, took on the size of Man and, par excellence, took on movement. A movement, which amounts to a "plastic" expression of Freedom, which rejects the compromise with the "nirvana" of eternity and shows - even when the statue does not represent e.g. warrior or runner but the "thinker" - the anxiety about tomorrow and the attempt to face the unknown and ominous destiny. In contrast to the West, Art in the East remained the same and unchanged throughout the centuries. Egyptian, Chinese, Indian and other Cultures bequeathed us gigantic, usually, statues, with peace painted on their faces and a sense of constant reference to eternity. Agony is absent and, with it, every movement that symbolizes Freedom.
B. At the same time, through their victory in the Median Wars, the Greeks demonstrated the overwhelming superiority and, by logical sequence, categorical opposition of the free and creative Ancient Greek Spirit against the spirit of every illiberal form of state organization with basic elements of despotism, individual or collective. In particular, despotism under the guise of e.g. of kingship, tyranny or even oligarchy. The aforementioned Freedom of the Spirit also brought the "great upheaval" in terms of the research method, which led from Knowledge to "Wisdom", i.e. to Science. This "great upheaval" in terms of research method was first attempted and achieved by the Pre-Socratic Philosophers.
And under the data presented, it is not difficult to explain why they created a certainly early, but not negligible epistemologically, form of Science. While other peoples of Antiquity, who possessed an impressive amount of corresponding information and, above all, experience, did not manage to reach a similar scientific creation, despite the fact that some of them - e.g. the Babylonian astronomers- were not far from her. And only the case of the Egyptians, who experienced the rise and fall of a great Civilization, provides - of course among some others - a highly representative sample of writing in this direction:In Egypt, the all-powerful priesthood possessed "Knowledge" which, however, it was "static" - especially in the sense that it lacked an adequate proof procedure, par excellence in Mathematics - as immovable and inviolable, impervious to any challenge. The insistence of the "closed" priesthood on its maintenance and the, conscious or unconscious, obstruction of any form of "reflexive" approach had as a fatal result the impossibility of the birth of a science, even a primitive one, in the land of the Nile, as documented by Fr. h. B.L. van der Waerden, in his classic book "The Awakening of Science" (University Press of Crete, 2010).
C. What was clarified, regarding the contrast between the "open society", which prevailed in the West, especially after the victory of the Greeks in Marathon and Salamis, and the "closed circle" of the social structures of the Kingdoms of the East, which developed as institutionally and politically "subordinate" to the respective monarchical "holders", highlight and justify, among other things, the following difference between the West and the East. A difference which was "updated", in 1926, by André Malraux in his essay "La tentation de l'Occident" (published by Grasset, Les Cahiers Rouges, 2006, Greek ed., "The temptation of the West", trans. . Dimitris Dimitriadis, Exantas, Athens, 1987), pointing out that the Man of the East is based on "obedience to the World", while the Man of the West is based on the "aspiration of the Spirit":
In the West - always as it was then defined by the Median Wars - the "air" of Freedom in the field of thought and scientific creation, in combination with the institutions of Direct Democracy, led, almost by law, to the formation of an "open society" and, subsequently, of "open social sets", which are highly visible in the analyzes of the Philosophers of Classical Antiquity, such as e.g. especially in the work of Aristotle. On the contrary, the Despotism of the East, with the above-mentioned characteristics and especially due to a lack of Freedom, led not to the creation of a "society" but to the organization of a "community", essentially structured on closed "castes", intended not so much to facilitate the organization of of social coexistence, as long as they allow any form of authority to be imposed as "principle" against "principles".
Your Congress for digitization of our cultural "treasures". The following magnificent references by André Malraux, excerpts from his monumental speech in Athens, during the first illumination of the Acropolis, on the 28th May 1959:"We will never stop proclaiming:Whatever the so confused word education means to us - the totality of the works of art and the spirit - Greece turned it, to her glory, into a major means of educating man. It is the first civilization without a holy book, where the word intelligence meant asking questions. Questions that were to give birth to the conquest of the world by spirit, of fate by tragedy, of the divine by art and man."
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