Fourth tractate – On true HAPPINESS. Enneads I,4,6
It may be a distasteful notion, this bringing-down of HAPPINESS so low as to the animal world – making it over, as then we must, even to the vilest of them and not withholding it even from the plants, living they too and having a life unfolding to a Term. Enneads I,4,1
Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found HAPPINESS not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of Reason? But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why precisely they make Reason an essential to the HAPPINESS in a living being: “When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal needs of nature; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?” Enneads I,4,2
If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess HAPPINESS after their kind, as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue. Enneads I,4,2
What then is HAPPINESS? Let us try basing it upon Life. Enneads I,4,2
Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that lives will be capable of HAPPINESS, and those will be effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing is by nature receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing it to the rational. If HAPPINESS were inherent in the bare being-alive, the common ground in which the cause of HAPPINESS could always take root would be simply life. Enneads I,4,3
Those, then, that set HAPPINESS not in the mere living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not really making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning faculty, round which they centre HAPPINESS, is a property (not the subject of a property): the subject, to them, must be the Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the basis of the HAPPINESS: so that they are making it consist not in life but in a particular kind of life – not, of course, a species formally opposite but, in terminology, standing as an “earlier” to a “later” in the one Kind. Enneads I,4,3
If mere Being is insufficient, if HAPPINESS demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that belongs to the idea of life, then HAPPINESS can exist only in a being that lives fully. Enneads I,4,3
If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains HAPPINESS: if not, HAPPINESS must be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone. Enneads I,4,4
But since we hold that HAPPINESS is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be stated thus: It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life. Enneads I,4,4
But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported into his nature? No: there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which we hold to constitute HAPPINESS. Enneads I,4,4
Once the man is a Sage, the means of HAPPINESS, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished. Enneads I,4,4
But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity? What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about? Could either welfare or HAPPINESS be present under such conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing “Miseries of Priam.” Enneads I,4,5
“The Sage,” we shall be told, “may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely… until the body’s appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek HAPPINESS throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate’s distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body’s sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to HAPPINESS.” Enneads I,4,5
Now if HAPPINESS did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good, why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into HAPPINESS? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul. Enneads I,4,6
Anything which, present, has no charm and adds nothing to HAPPINESS, which when lacking is desired because of the presence of an annoying opposite, may reasonably be called a necessity but not a Good. Enneads I,4,6
Then why are these conditions sought and their contraries repelled by the man established in HAPPINESS? Here is our answer: These more pleasant conditions cannot, it is true, add any particle towards the Sage’s felicity: but they do serve towards the integrity of his being, while the presence of the contraries tends against his Being or complicates the Term: it is not that the Sage can be so easily deprived of the Term achieved but simply that he that holds the highest good desires to have that alone, not something else at the same time, something which, though it cannot banish the Good by its incoming, does yet take place by its side. Enneads I,4,7
In any case if the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest lessening of his HAPPINESS for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or falling from day to day; the death of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession. No: a thousand mischances and disappointments may befall him and leave him still in the tranquil possession of the Term. Enneads I,4,7
But a man unconscious of his health may be, none the less, healthy: a man may not be aware of his personal attraction, but he remains handsome none the less: if he has no sense of his wisdom, shall he be any the less wise? It may perhaps be urged that sensation and consciousness are essential to wisdom and that HAPPINESS is only wisdom brought to act. Enneads I,4,9
We shall perhaps be told that in such a state the man is no longer alive: we answer that these people show themselves equally unable to understand his inner life and his HAPPINESS. Enneads I,4,11
If this does not satisfy them, we must ask them to keep in mind a living Sage and, under these terms, to enquire whether the man is in HAPPINESS: they must not whittle away his life and then ask whether he has the happy life; they must not take away man and then look for the HAPPINESS of a man: once they allow that the Sage lives within, they must not seek him among the outer activities, still less look to the outer world for the object of his desires. To consider the outer world to be a field to his desire, to fancy the Sage desiring any good external, would be to deny Substantial-Existence to HAPPINESS; for the Sage would like to see all men prosperous and no evil befalling anyone; but though it prove otherwise, he is still content. Enneads I,4,11
The pleasure demanded for the life cannot be in the enjoyments of the licentious or in any gratifications of the body – there is no place for these, and they stifle HAPPINESS – nor in any violent emotions – what could so move the Sage? – it can be only such pleasure as there must be where Good is, pleasure that does not rise from movement and is not a thing of process, for all that is good is immediately present to the Sage and the Sage is present to himself: his pleasure, his contentment, stands, immovable. Enneads I,4,12
It would be absurd to think that HAPPINESS begins and ends with the living-body: HAPPINESS is the possession of the good of life: it is centred therefore in Soul, is an Act of the Soul – and not of all the Soul at that: for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative soul, the soul of growth; that would at once connect it with the body. Enneads I,4,14
Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away by inattention to its claims; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain: if such troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least: in old age, it is true, he will desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful; his one desire will be to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of HAPPINESS to him nor will their contraries destroy or lessen it. Enneads I,4,14
But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is supposed to be naturally welcome, while the other meets only with the very reverse: do we assert that they have an equal HAPPINESS? We do, if they are equally wise. Enneads I,4,15
We discuss the happy man after our own feebleness; we count alarming and grave what his felicity takes lightly: he would be neither wise nor in the state of HAPPINESS if he had not quitted all trifling with such things and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue; the man is some sort of a half-thing. Enneads I,4,15
Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental, dreading accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of HAPPINESS; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true HAPPINESS is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess HAPPINESS draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That. Enneads I,4,16
We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, that if one man has been happy from first to last, another only at the last, and a third, beginning with HAPPINESS, has lost it, their shares are equal? This is straying from the question: we were comparing the happy among themselves: now we are asked to compare the not-happy at the time when they are out of HAPPINESS with those in actual possession of HAPPINESS. If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of HAPPINESS against men without it and their advantage is always by something in the present. Enneads I,5,5
Well, but take the unhappy man: must not increase of time bring an increase of his unHAPPINESS? Do not all troubles – long-lasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type – yield a greater sum of misery in the longer time? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time why should not time equally augment HAPPINESS when all is well? In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase: for example, in a lingering malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought lower and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there would be no trouble but that of the present moment: we cannot tell the past into the tale of unHAPPINESS except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state – in the sense that, the evil in the sufferer’s condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is due to the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time. Enneads I,5,6
No: true HAPPINESS is not vague and fluid: it is an unchanging state. Enneads I,5,6
If there is in this matter any increase besides that of mere time, it is in the sense that a greater HAPPINESS is the reward of a higher virtue: this is not counting up to the credit of HAPPINESS the years of its continuance; it is simply noting the high-water mark once for all attained. Enneads I,5,6
But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in the past to make the total, why do we not reckon so in the case of time itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the present and call the total greater? Why not suppose a quantity of HAPPINESS equivalent to a quantity of time? This would be no more than taking it lap by lap to correspond with time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as an indivisible, measurable only by the content of a given instant. Enneads I,5,7
There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to be: we are merely counting what is past and finished, as we might count the dead: but to treat past HAPPINESS as actually existent and as outweighing present HAPPINESS, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must be an achieved and existent state, whereas any time over and apart from the present is nonexistent: all progress of time means the extinction of all the time that has been. Enneads I,5,7
But, it may be said, length of time produces an abundance of good actions missed by the man whose attainment of the happy state is recent – if indeed we can think at all of a state of HAPPINESS where good actions have been few. Enneads I,5,10
The lower Soul is moved by the higher which, besides encircling and supporting it, actually resides in whatsoever part of it has thrust upwards and attained the spheres. The lower then, ringed round by the higher and answering its call, turns and tends towards it; and this upward tension communicates motion to the material frame in which it is involved: for if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree moved, without being drawn away from the rest, it moves the whole, and the sphere is set in motion. Something of the same kind happens in the case of our bodies: the unspatial movement of the Soul – in HAPPINESS, for instance, or at the idea of some pleasant event – sets up a spatial movement in the body: the Soul, attaining in its own region some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what pleases it; and so, by force of the union established in the order of nature, it moves the body, in the body’s region, that is in space. Enneads II,2,3
But that this same Mars, or Aphrodite, in certain aspects should cause adulteries – as if they could thus, through the agency of human incontinence, satisfy their own mutual desires – is not such a notion the height of unreason? And who could accept the fancy that their HAPPINESS comes from their seeing each other in this or that relative position and not from their own settled nature? Again: countless myriads of living beings are born and continue to be: to minister continuously to every separate one of these; to make them famous, rich, poor, lascivious; to shape the active tendencies of every single one – what kind of life is this for the stars, how could they possibly handle a task so huge? They are to watch, we must suppose, the rising of each several constellation and upon that signal to act; such a one, they see, has risen by so many degrees, representing so many of the periods of its upward path; they reckon on their fingers at what moment they must take the action which, executed prematurely, would be out of order: and in the sum, there is no One Being controlling the entire scheme; all is made over to the stars singly, as if there were no Sovereign Unity, standing as source of all the forms of Being in subordinate association with it, and delegating to the separate members, in their appropriate Kinds, the task of accomplishing its purposes and bringing its latent potentiality into act. Enneads II,3,6
Punishment naturally follows: there is no injustice in a man suffering what belongs to the condition in which he is; nor can we ask to be happy when our actions have not earned us HAPPINESS; the good, only, are happy; divine beings are happy only because they are good. Enneads III,2,4
As for the disregard of desert – the good afflicted, the unworthy thriving – it is a sound explanation no doubt that to the good nothing is evil and to the evil nothing can be good: still the question remains why should what essentially offends our nature fall to the good while the wicked enjoy all it demands? How can such an allotment be approved? No doubt since pleasant conditions add nothing to true HAPPINESS and the unpleasant do not lessen the evil in the wicked, the conditions matter little: as well complain that a good man happens to be ugly and a bad man handsome. Enneads III,2,6
We have to ask ourselves whether there are not certain Acts which without the addition of a time-element will be thought of as imperfect and therefore classed with motions. Take for instance living and life. The life of a definite person implies a certain adequate period, just as his HAPPINESS is no merely instantaneous thing. Life and HAPPINESS are, in other words, of the nature ascribed to Motion: both therefore must be treated as motions, and Motion must be regarded as a unity, a single genus; besides the quantity and quality belonging to Substance we must take count of the motion manifested in it. Enneads VI,1,19
Suppose the soul to have attained: the highest has come to her, or rather has revealed its presence; she has turned away from all about her and made herself apt, beautiful to the utmost, brought into likeness with the divine by those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision – she has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union, long to blend; the soul has now no further awareness of being in body and will give herself no foreign name, not “man,” not “living being,” not “being,” not “all”; any observation of such things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them; This she sought and This she has found and on This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know. Once There she will barter for This nothing the universe holds; not though one would make over the heavens entire to her; than This there is nothing higher, nothing of more good; above This there is no passing; all the rest, however lofty, lies on the downgoing path: she is of perfect judgement and knows that This was her quest, that nothing higher is. Here can be no deceit; where could she come upon truer than the truth? and the truth she affirms, that she is, herself; but all the affirmation is later and is silent. In this HAPPINESS she knows beyond delusion that she is happy; for this is no affirmation of an excited body but of a soul become again what she was in the time of her early joy. All that she had welcomed of old-office, power, wealth, beauty, knowledge of all she tells her scorn as she never could had she not found their better; linked to This she can fear no disaster nor even know it; let all about her fall to pieces, so she would have it that she may be wholly with This, so huge the HAPPINESS she has won to. Enneads VI,7,34
Seventh tractate – On the primal good and secondary forms of good (otherwise, “On HAPPINESS”). Enneads I,7,9