Kazantzakis’ Poor Man of God: Philosophy without Philosophy

The fragments collected below are an attempt to develop what might be called, adopting Maurice Blanchot’s turn of phrase, a “philosophy without philosophy,” that is to say, a philosophy that chooses to go without the metaphysical support of objective, supra-perspectival truth and without the institutional backing of the academic establishment. A philosophy of this sort is a “weak philosophy” in Vattimo’s sense, as it has given up the tradi-tional philosophical ambition of providing a systematic, precise and thoroughly “rational” account of the fundamental features of the world. What emerges, then, is a way of thinking and writing which, in the manner of Jabès, produces books “against the book,” “against the word” and “against truth,” and thus looks towards literary and artistic exemplars for its inspira-tion. The exemplar I put forward here is Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, The Poor Man of God (first published in Greek in 1956).