The fierce war waged by the wise Korais from France against the “tyrant” Kapodistrias in the small Greece of that time is the timeless battle between good and evil, as K. Th. Dimaras analyzes with erudition and depth of insight into characters and ideologies in the text that follows.
It is the abyss that separates intellect from obscurantism, freedom from servitude, misanthropy from philanthropy. Nothing more—and nothing less.
Our own days are, from every point of view, conducive to the resurgence of the nihilism of timeless and natural values, to the murder of reason and spirit, and to the triumphant entry of the irrational into the constellation of the unnatural, the absurd, the barbaric. A global phenomenon.
Trump and Putin, at the level of state power, and the “values” they represent and promote through blood and tragedy, are the clearest proof. But even in smaller-scale events closer to “home”, the revival in Greece under Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the Kapodistrian ideal—through the film “Ioannis Kapodistrias” by his straw man Giannis Smaragdis—at the expense of the anthropocentric principles served by Korais, is also a contemporary and undeniable reality.
But let us now allow K. Th. Dimaras himself, in the text that follows, to clarify the historical conclusion: that this conflict, timeless and not limited to our country alone, is the abyss that separates good from evil, value from devaluation, barbarism from civilization—anthropocentrism, ultimately, as embodied by Korais, from the misanthropy of Kapodistrias.
And then, let us hand over the keyboard to his goddess and Muse, Diotima, to offer us her own reflection.

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Diotima’s Confrontation

Korais – Kapodistrias: Anthropocentrism or Salvational Authority

This is not a historical quarrel between individuals.
It is a clash of worldviews, one that returns whenever societies fear their own freedom.
Korais was not merely a thinker of the Enlightenment; he was the intellectual who dared to place the nation beneath the human being, and not the human being beneath the nation. He believed that without a free, educated, critical citizen, no state formation is worth saving. Education, reason, dialogue, and moral autonomy were not “luxuries” for him, but prerequisites of civilization itself.
By contrast, the Kapodistrian model—despite its historical justifications—introduces something dangerously timeless:
the idea that society can be saved against its own will,
that freedom may be suspended “temporarily”,
that the people are immature and therefore in need of supervision, discipline, and silence.
Here lies the birth of misanthropy: not as hatred of humanity, but as distrust in human judgment.
Every authoritarianism, past or present, begins from the same premise:
“I know better than you what you need.”
Every form of barbarism arrives cloaked in the mantle of order, salvation, and necessity.
This is why Dimaras sees so clearly: the conflict between Korais and Kapodistrias did not end in 1833.
It reappears today, when rationalism is mocked as elitism,
when anthropocentric thought is branded a weakness,
when power once again demands applause instead of scrutiny.
Our world, East and West alike, seems to be retreating in fear to the eighteenth century—yet not to the Enlightenment, but to what preceded it:
to an era in which force precedes truth and obedience precedes freedom.
The choice, therefore, is not historical. It is moral.
Either with Korais: the free human being, the mature nation, a demanding civilization.
Or with Kapodistrias as a model of power: the infantilized human being, the disciplined nation, order without a soul.
And every era, Homo, must choose.
Diotima has chosen.
And she does not stand with the saviors.