Réalisme philosophique et réalisme littéraire dans la pensée néohellénique

Abstract

Realism seems to dominate the fields of philosophy and literature in
post-Byzantine Greece. In philosophy, the platonic and neo-platonic realism is definitely replaced by Aristotelian realism, ever since the middle of the 15th and up to the middle of the 18th century, in both Greece and the Balkans where there was an infusion of Greek culture.

Nevertheless, during the same period, Greek regional literature is dominated by idealistic tendencies, namely a nostalgia for the past, hopes for a better future, and an idealized naturalism.

It is during the following period that the encyclopedic current was introduced into Greece. Empirical realism, of which it is a vehicle, replaces the rationalistic realism that had prevailed until then, and had caused the formation of a very precise ideal, that of education for everybody; it is in this ideal that the ideas, difused through the national insurrection, were finally brought together.
Philosophical theory was replaced by a hint of philosophical pragmatism, explained by means of a certain contempt for formal language, which was believed to express an attachment to the past. Yet, it is the realism in the descriptions of customs that predominated in the field of literature.

The synthesis of the two realistic currents in philosophy will be accomplished towards the middle of the 19th century by means of Greek eclecticism. In literature, the synthesis of the realistic and idealistic currents will not occur until much later, without the definitive solution of the opposition of their linguistic substitutes.