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"Contributions to Ontological Social Thought"

Written by Dimitrios Od. Stathakopoulos

Presented by Major General (retd) Konstantinos Argyropoulos

The title of the book was a reasonable stimulus for me to contemplate and study the meanings within it. The result of this curiosity in me also organized that complex feeling, that every person with anthropocentric concerns, with political skepticism and intellectual confusion about what is happening in the world, will focus on this work in search of keys, leading to meaningful and beneficial "symbol(s)" of awakening. And we mean the authentic, the innocent awakening and not the circulating disorienting, the sophisticated, the colorful, the fantasy woke. In this specific case, we accept the spiritual awakening, the one that detects the reasons for our distance from the traditional values. The awakening that leads to self-knowledge, to an expansion of consciousness, to creativity, to responsibility. The awakening through reflections and the search for meaning beyond material life. The awakening that returns us to values through moral reconstruction. The awakening that welcomes the overcoming of spiritual and mental commitments. It is this awakening that contributes to the emergence of creative thought and spiritual spontaneity. In general, we accept the effectiveness of genuine awakening as that of the awakened scholars and the popular Greeks who led to the Rebirth of 1821.

In the book, the reader is met with a compendium of versions of a number of issues and questions, related to philosophy in all its fields of consideration, which cause the thinking person to penetrate into the sphere of Untruth. Where Untruth is the resistance to oblivion, to deception, to error. On the other hand, it is the duty of thought and spiritual honesty. Here the reader is forced to reconcile philosophy, the physical verification of phenomena with a basis, such as the familiar - as far as possible - understandable Earthly reference system. With our own metaphysical, almost qualitatively inexact curiosities, where - as a fact - there is no possibility of answering scientifically except with expressed assumptions of those who invoke the revealed.

The book reflects the author's painstaking effort to blend philosophy with the possible applications of its theoretical dimension in today's world. That is, where a small number of muses-loving and studious people subconsciously act on the concerns of ancestral philosophers. Those timeless thinkers, characterized as pioneers of today's infinite planetary noosphere.

In all the chapters of the book, the methodicality and scientific responsibility of the author are highlighted, who moves with the safe guide of sound logic. For the author to deal with such a difficult subject as ontological social thought means great spiritual bravery and philosophical boldness, which presupposes or even requires deep knowledge of the things he knows. Things based on inductive or deductive logic. This is also the superiority of those who recognize it, as the result of thoughtful and profound preparation with self-discipline as a compass and the sincere intention for a fruitful intellectual product. The superior intellectual person is aware of what he knows, that he knows nothing. The superior knows that superiority consists in spiritual humility, in the marginalization of prejudices and in the pragmatic condition, which is the constant learning from the experiences of life. And the result of systematic practice, complete dedication and intense concentration on essential areas of interest is called deep knowledge. Knowledge is not a simple theory. It is a deepening of practical experience until it leads the profound knower to the condition recognized as intuitive understanding. On every page of the book these findings are verified. They are verified, as if they constituted a dynamic advantage in reality.

In the book, infinite stimuli suddenly and ostentatiously appear that fascinate those distinguished for their restless spirit and their creative intentions. The author in this case mediates by facilitating those who intend to utilize the information material provided, which as a positive intellectual direction performs in the development of every inquiring mind. The described cosmology is revealed, within the lines of text recording the work of a scholar on the causes of "I exist as a being in an indefinite universe". It is a search involving combinations of inorganic matter and living factors with the aim of explaining the cause, stimulating conscious and rational acts interpreting with the accumulated experience the evolution understood aesthetically by man.

I imagine the author, with his practicality, bent over a glass ball, like that of astrologers, observing with absolute devotion and tense concentration the astronomical speeds of change of the universal co-factors. From zero to infinity. Expansions and supernovae. Nebulae and black holes. Admiring the gravitational consequences. Meditating on his role as the infinitesimal unit of energy and the magnitude of his own contribution to the cosmological process. Consulting with himself with as much responsibility as a reductive necessity imposes on social consciousness, so that his courageous undertaking does not escape attention. Praying before the majesty of nature. He considers it as the mirror of hyperactive spirits. He accepts the fact that nature is an object of respect on the part of science, philosophy, poetry, the arts and theology. He wonders whether nature ultimately obeys a higher power. Is nature a Divine imprint or is it a neutral sequence of happenings and unexpected events? In the end, he ends with the usual statement of mortal beings that “everything is relative”. And the relativity of me the reader is attributed to the inadequacy of human perception in grasping the cosmic wonders and always with a supportive disposition towards the timeless pioneers and the assistance of the advancing twin “Science-Technology”.

An essential and useful admonition of the author is that by understanding the Truth we gain the meaning of life, being now overfilled with our own certainty and self-confidence. And we in turn, perceiving the complex social view of a worldview with the assistance of the partitive apologists on astrophysics, numbers, cosmology, we encounter a mixture of guiding principles, intellectual frameworks and general orientations, which indirectly introduce us to the field of philosophy. In the end, there remains an attempt of our own to process the author's tickling and stimulating question: ...is the universe ultimately "The Word" of a superintelligence?

And something very useful for those who fall into the mistake of judging figures from the distant past and their actions with shallow arguments and without due consideration. Dimitrios Stathakopoulos underlines this for us: We do not judge the societies of that time with a modern perspective and the available tools of analysis.

In his epilogue, our author confesses: "...in conclusion, perhaps the only thing that I could testify to with sparing and sincere humility is my "poor" life experience, which has acrobatically and acrobatically between the "I want", the "I want" and the "I must", "I must", which seemingly moved and moves on the boundaries of the "decent", the politically correct and the "social standards", without really knowing if it was really such".

We bow to the admirable honesty and integrity of the author, who reminds us that accepting to reveal our thoughts means that we have reached a point of transcending the prevailing intellectual limitations and that we are in a position to cultivate a broader, more complex and certainly freer view of reality, values, institutions and, above all, ourselves. This intellectual freedom gives the ability to accept the multiplicity of aspects of reality, and indeed without our spirit being trapped in dogmas and absolutes.

At many points in his work, the author reveals an emotional sensitivity. Especially when he suspects that some of his views are exposed to the risk of being challenged. Perhaps because he has so many things going on at the same time, where - naturally - there is the possibility of a clash of multi-meaning, under-exposed ideas. We, however, know that the world we live in is malicious, envious, malicious, unpleasant and insidious. Therefore, for this unacceptable world, when someone with good intentions has to say many things abstractly - and indeed, when others expect him to say what they want him to say, then there is the risk of unfamiliar positions, which usually echo ideological and utopian structures of thought. This emotional exponent of thought owes nothing to clarification, because the hostility of the world is part of the history of humanity. Moreover, it is known that the role of intellectuals is to produce ideology, which, when utilized, offers incentives for social development. In any case, history does not end here, nor will we lack in the future the demand for the apology of intellectuals against war activities. As for the rest of us under a regime of spiritual hostility, it is good to consider that our self-defense is our power not to engage in evil. It is naive to think that it can be believed that human nature can be changed into a completely rational and prudent one. Therefore, when we protect our conscious self, it means that this defense corresponds to "value" in the moral-normative sense of the term. The author shows us the way by informing us that acquired knowledge, experiences with wisdom as a guardian will have as an output the preservation of the advantage of true wisdom.

In light of all of the above, I believe that our stance is a wise warning to those opposed to confronting them with the moral demands of their conscience and the practice of pure reason.

In conclusion, I consider myself to have benefited from Dimitrios Stathakopoulos' book, because it gave me the opportunity to broaden my thinking in areas of universal values, which he described in a way where the conscious reader recognizes things through the book before his senses perceive them. Here is the opportunity to grasp superior ideas.