Plotinus, Elytis and the “Refusal to Work”
The leading twentieth-century Greek poet Odysseas Elytis has often referred to Plato and Plotinus as philosophers of the unity that he saw as the principle of the Greek dialectic of creativity, where the creative solution always takes precedence over the genre and mode of critical expression. I argue that, in fact, Elytis’ project fits into that critique of the correlation of work and production, which justifies creative innovationas a refusal to work and a form of contemplation. I prove that this critique could be motivated both by Marxism and by rejection of Marxist models, for example, in the philosophy of art and literary journalism of the Russian emigration, where this correlation was criticized as the beginning of cultural decay. Anti-correlationism insists that the supreme unity and the supreme incomprehensibility are correlated in culture, not as realities, but as vectors of movement toward perfection, so that our imperfect experience of unity is an encounter with things as something surprising in their imperfect incomprehensibility. Elytis, who developed the cultural myth of the unity of Greek civilization throughout history, also saw the light that Plotinus spoke of in an anti-correlationist way: not as a source of creative or ethical solutions, but as a field of wonder, of knowledge, and of action. For him, therefore, Plotinus’ light represents the most perfect of disordered things. This allowed Elytis to reinvent his aesthetics as a program for an ecstatic ordering of things, including the incomprehensible. His interpretation of Plotinus fundamentally disregards the hierarchical aspects of this philosopher’s system, but emphasizes the cognitive status of light.