Kostas Papaioannou is perhaps the only thinker who has so vividly realized the fact that the polarization between the Greek "ataraxy," the inclusion of man in the order of nature, and the "human - all too human" sound and fury of historical order, is constitutive of human nature. And this will reproduce endlessly, or... until the end of history.

This is the tragic search for the world before the start of historical time - which can reach as far back as the Paleolithic man for Raoul Vaneghem - and at the same time the quest for an "end" in the future, in the Hegelian or Marxist version of the post-human.

Papaioannou, pioneering, understands the tragic nature of a dilemma that man is impossible to lift, and compels us to think about new possible compositions, however temporary, partial, and ephemeral they may be. He challenges us to think of utopia in realistic terms.

Not the destruction of the order of the world that technological determinism, which drives our history, leads to, nor of course the now impossible halt of historical time and historical consciousness. But the "utopia" of a human history, which will have been reintegrated into the natural order, into the world, combining "transformation" and "tranquility," the rejection of the instrumental method, the return to the cosmic sense of unity with the universe, with the unceasing quest for truth.

He invites us to repeat the ancient Greek miracle of transcending nature while simultaneously accepting it, in contemporary terms; thus he calls us to transcend ancient Greece itself as much as to reject the mechanistic determinism of progress. The title of his study "World and History" could represent a program where the connective "and" is taken literally.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]