Chapter 7 - Relating to the World, Encountering the Other

Summary

In Neoplatonism, kosmos is the first ideal entity that human beings can emulate in their search for god-likeness. Kosmos displays perfection, harmony and completeness, all regulative of ideal selfhood. The chapter discusses cosmic activity as a human telos. It aims to contextualise human action within this ideal and to show the limits as such an ideal. First, human bodies are not totalities like the body of the universe or kosmos, nor perfect like the bodies of stars. Second, since human encounters are between parts, not totalities, human action is essentially different from the perfect and self-sufficient activities of cosmic entities. It involves either affecting or being affected in an encounter with something external to oneself. At 3.3.5.40-6, Plotinus offers a brief but telling glimpse at the challenges of human moral life. By using the example of the Trojan War, he outlines different kinds of encounters between virtuous and vicious people. Through situating the Homeric example in the Platonic framework of affecting and being affected, the text yields an opening for a theory of practical action and morality. Action emerges as ontologically relational, cosmologically situational and morally interpersonal. This human predicament is the inescapable framework of ethics for embodied human beings.