“His prefaces involve several hundreds of pages; there he presents his theory as regards language and education; these make him a pioneer of newer pedagogical theories and a guide for the best solution of the language question. There, he also presents his philosophy, he elaborates on the need for Greeks to align their education with that of the other parts of the so called “enlightened” Europe: this is the ‘metakenosis’ for which he was strongly criticized by his adversaries, mostly for the programme rather for the word that expressed it. (p. 337)
Korais is no revolutionary, and his thinking is not revolutionary either: he is evolutionary, progressive; he belongs to the intellectual circle of Ideologists, with who he seems to have had direct contact too. The exaggerations he witnessed in French Revolution disappointed him, as he also denounced on Bonapartism: he used to write “I love freedom, but I would like to see it always laying between justice and humanity. Freedom without justice is nothing but cheating”. […] His thinking, expressed with the same aesthetics, characterizes the entirety of his long life and it is applied in different subjects; he believes that religion should keep a distance “from the Scylla of atheism and the Charybdis of superstition”; and the same as regards language: “neither tyrants of the vulgar neither slaves of their vulgarity”. This is how the ‘middle way’ is presented. The entire Enlightenment is enclosed in the teachings of Korais, full of faith in human destiny, full of respect for acquired order. And along with this teaching they also incorporate the Greek vision of the last decays of the 18th century: to regain what we lost, without losing what we possess”. (pp. 337-338)