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Chapter 3 - Neoplatonic Contemplative Ethics

Mind Training

from Part I - Ethics across the Late-antique and Byzantine Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2021

Sophia Xenophontos
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Anna Marmodoro
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

In this chapter, I show how the contemplative ethics of Neoplatonism repurposes classical and Hellenistic ethics, advancing a new distinction between practical and theoretical wisdom. The classical and Hellenistic contrast between the bios praktikos and its attendant virtue phronesis, and the bios theoretikos together with its attendant virtue sophia, informs a half millennium or more of ethical thinking. In the discourse surrounding the competing value of these ethical registers, the practical life and the contemplative life, both ancient philosophers and their modern exegetes approach the theoretical life with trepidation, as if a certain amount of apology is owed for the practical limits of contemplative ethics. But such anxiety as to how the life of theoria can be valorised from the point of view of ordinary virtue is out of place when it comes to understanding the ethics of Plotinus and of Porphyry, at least in the Enneads and in the Sententiae. There is an important place for the practical life, if by practical we understand the development of the capacity for contemplation. As such, the practical side of this ethics is a form of mind training ,or even an ethics of concentration. Its complement, wisdom, theoretical virtue, or sophia, consists in insight, or knowledge of the nature of the real, together with realisation of the true self of the practitioner.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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