pleasure

Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement: some evil seems to have befallen the man or his belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in the entire Animate. But this account leaves still a question as to the source and seat of the judgement: does it belong to the Soul or to the Couplement? Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling of grief: the judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow: one may think oneself slighted and yet not be angry; and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a PLEASURE. We are, thus, no nearer than before to any warrant for assigning these affections to the Couplement. Enneads I,1,

If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon sensation but upon another, a higher faculty; and well-being is vested not in a faculty receptive of PLEASURE but in one competent to discern that PLEASURE is the Good. Enneads I,4,

Then the cause of the well-being is no longer PLEASURE but the faculty competent to pronounce as to PLEASURE’s value. Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of Reason or of Intellection: PLEASURE is a state: the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order? No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life. Enneads I,4,

“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,

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,

If anyone seeks for some other kind of PLEASURE in the life of the Sage, it is not the life of the Sage he is looking for. Enneads I,4,

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,

Still the one life has known PLEASURE longer than the other? But PLEASURE cannot be fairly reckoned in with Happiness – unless indeed by PLEASURE is meant the unhindered Act (of the true man), in which case this PLEASURE is simply our “Happiness.” And even PLEASURE, though it exist continuously, has never anything but the present; its past is over and done with. Enneads I,5,

And what is there pleasant in the memory of PLEASURE? What is it to recall yesterday’s excellent dinner? Still more ridiculous, one of ten years ago. So, too, of last year’s morality. Enneads I,5,

A wicked man no less than a Sage may save the country, and the good of the act is for all alike, no matter whose was the saving hand. The contentment of the Sage does not hang upon such actions and events: it is his own inner habit that creates at once his felicity and whatever PLEASURE may accompany it. Enneads I,5,

“Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland”: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso – not content to linger for all the PLEASURE offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days. Enneads I,6,

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos (the stars) that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire, our sense of PLEASURE and of pain – and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul (as total of Principle and affections) takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars’ ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions. Enneads II,3,

There are two theories as to the attainment of the End of life. The one proposes PLEASURE, bodily PLEASURE, as the term; the other pronounces for good and virtue, the desire of which comes from God and moves, by ways to be studied elsewhere, towards God. Enneads: II VIII.

Epicurus denies a Providence and recommends PLEASURE and its enjoyment, all that is left to us: but the doctrine under discussion is still more wanton; it carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence; it scorns every law known to us; immemorial virtue and all restraint it makes into a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth; it cuts at the root of all orderly living, and of the righteousness which, innate in the moral sense, is made perfect by thought and by self-discipline: all that would give us a noble human being is gone. What is left for them except where the pupil by his own character betters the teaching – comes to PLEASURE, self-seeking, the grudge of any share with one’s fellows, the pursuit of advantage. Enneads: II VIII.

This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of virtue: any discussion of such matters is missing utterly: we are not told what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients; we do not learn what constitutes it or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For to say “Look to God” is not helpful without some instruction as to what this looking imports: it might very well be said that one can “look” and still sacrifice no PLEASURE, still be the slave of impulse, repeating the word God but held in the grip of every passion and making no effort to master any. Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked with thought, occupying a Soul makes God manifest: God on the lips, without a good conduct of life, is a word. Enneads: II VIII.

For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony in sensible sounds? What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take PLEASURE in the symmetries, correspondences and principles of order observed in visible things? Consider, even, the case of pictures: those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way; they are deeply stirred by recognizing in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth – the very experience out of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense – this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display – no one could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither fathomed this world nor had any vision of that other. Enneads: II VIII.

Or would this school reject the word Sister? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling. of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside PLEASURE and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock; there is nothing that can affect it: but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength. Enneads: II VIII.

But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and anger and PLEASURE, desire and fear – are these not changes, affectings, present and stirring within the Soul? This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and are intensely felt is in sharp contradiction to obvious facts. But, while we recognize this, we must make very sure what it is that changes. To represent the Soul or Mind as being the seat of these emotions is not far removed from making it blush or turn pale; it is to forget that while the Soul or Mind is the means, the effect takes place in the distinct organism, the animated body. Enneads III,6,

At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the Soul; but the body is occupied by the Soul – not to trouble about words – is, at any rate, close to it and very different from soulless matter; and so, is affected in the blood, mobile in its nature. Fear begins in the mind; the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood inwards. So in PLEASURE, the elation is mental, but makes itself felt in the body; the purely mental phase has not reached the point of sensation: the same is true of pain. So desire is ignored in the Soul where the impulse takes its rise; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows. Enneads III,6,

In general terms it means the centre about which we recognize the affections to be grouped; and by affections we mean those states upon which follow PLEASURE and pain. Enneads III,6,

Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like air traversed by light; it must be like air storing heat: the body holding animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul; and it is body thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and PLEASUREs which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to produce knowledge without emotion. By “us, the true human being” I mean the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason: “attached,” for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is an accessory and dependent of the human being; “we” means the master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an “ours”; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and PLEASURE, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than working towards detachment. Enneads IV,4,

Thus what we know as PLEASURE and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; PLEASURE our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain (non-material) conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity. Enneads IV,4,

As with bodily pain and PLEASURE so with the bodily desires; their origin, also, must be attributed to what thus stands midway, to that Nature we described as the corporeal. Enneads IV,4,

In the case of PLEASURE and pain we showed how upon distress follows the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction. Similarly in the case of desire: there is the knowledge in the sensation (the sensitive phase of the soul) and in the next lower phase, that described as the “Nature” which carries the imprint of the soul to the body; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is the culmination of the less formed desire in body; sensation knows the image thence imprinted upon the Nature; and from the moment of the sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that which subsequently entertained it. Enneads IV,4,

But why, thus, two phases of desire; why should not the body as a determined entity (the living total) be the sole desirer? Because there are (in man) two distinct things, this Nature and the body, which, through it, becomes a living being: the Nature precedes the determined body which is its creation, made and shaped by it; it cannot originate the desires; they must belong to the living body meeting the experiences of this life and seeking in its distress to alter its state, to substitute PLEASURE for pain, sufficiency for want: this Nature must be like a mother reading the wishes of a suffering child, and seeking to set it right and to bring it back to herself; in her search for the remedy she attaches herself by that very concern to the sufferer’s desire and makes the child’s experience her own. Enneads IV,4,

But, we will be asked to say what are the experiences, within the earth, upon which the earth-soul is thus to form its decisions: certainly vegetal forms, in so far as they belong to earth have no sensation or perception: in what then, and through what, does such sensation take place, for sensation without organs is too rash a notion. Besides, what would this sense-perception profit the soul? It could not be necessary to knowledge: surely the consciousness of wisdom suffices to beings which have nothing to gain from sensation? This argument is not to be accepted: it ignores the consideration that, apart from all question of practical utility, objects of sense provide occasion for a knowing which brings PLEASURE: thus we ourselves take delight in looking upon sun, stars, sky, landscape, for their own sake. But we will deal with this point later: for the present we ask whether the earth has perceptions and sensations, and if so through what vital members these would take place and by what method: this requires us to examine certain difficulties, and above all to decide whether earth could have sensation without organs, and whether this would be directed to some necessary purpose even when incidentally it might bring other results as well. Enneads IV,4,

Pleasures and pains – the conditions, that is, not the perception of them – and the nascent stage of desire, we assigned to the body as a determined thing, the body brought, in some sense, to life: are we entitled to say the same of the nascent stage of passion? Are we to consider passion in all its forms as vested in the determined body or in something belonging to it, for instance in the heart or the bile necessarily taking condition within a body not dead? Or are we to think that just as that which bestows the vestige of the soul is a distinct entity, so we may reason in this case – the passionate element being one distinct thing, itself, and not deriving from any passionate or percipient faculty? Now in the first case the soul-principle involved, the vegetal, pervades the entire body, so that pain and PLEASURE and nascent desire for the satisfaction of need are present all over it – there is possibly some doubt as to the sexual impulse, which, however, it may suffice to assign to the organs by which it is executed – but in general the region about the liver may be taken to be the starting point of desire, since it is the main acting point of the vegetal principle which transmits the vestige phase of the soul to the liver and body – the seat, because the spring. Enneads IV,4,

Thus anger has two phases; there is firstly that which, rising apart from all process of reasoning, draws reason to itself by the medium of the imaging faculty, and secondly that which, rising in reason, touches finally upon the specific principle of the emotion. Both these depend upon the existence of that principle of vegetal life and generation by which the body becomes an organism aware of PLEASURE and pain: this principle it was that made the body a thing of bile and bitterness, and thus it leads the indwelling soul-phase to corresponding states – churlish and angry under stress of environment – so that being wronged itself, it tries, as we may put it, to return the wrong upon its surroundings, and bring them to the same condition. Enneads IV,4,

And so we might expect: commerce with the body is repudiated for two only reasons, as hindering the soul’s intellective act and as filling with PLEASURE, desire, pain; but neither of these misfortunes can befall a soul which has never deeply penetrated into the body, is not a slave but a sovereign ruling a body of such an order as to have no need and no shortcoming and therefore to give ground for neither desire nor fear. Enneads IV,8,

The souls that have gone into division and become appropriated to some thing partial have also their transcendent phase, but are preoccupied by sensation, and in the mere fact of exercising perception they take in much that clashes with their nature and brings distress and trouble since the object of their concern is partial, deficient, exposed to many alien influences, filled with desires of its own and taking its PLEASURE, that PLEASURE which is its lure. Enneads IV,8,

But there is always the other, that which finds no savour in passing PLEASURE, but holds its own even way. Enneads IV,8,

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a PLEASURE in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine. Enneads: V I

The Good is gentle and friendly and tender, and we have it present when we but will. Beauty is all violence and stupefaction; its PLEASURE is spoiled with pain, and it even draws the thoughtless away from The Good as some attraction will lure the child from the father’s side: these things tell of youth. The Good is the older – not in time but by degree of reality – and it has the higher and earlier power, all power in fact, for the sequent holds only a power subordinate and delegated of which the prior remains sovereign. Enneads V,5,

We have told how this vision is to be procured, whether by the mode of separation or in identity: now, seen in either way, what does it give to report? The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a painless labour and – rejoiced in what he has brought into being, proud of his children – keeping all closely by Him, for PLEASURE He has in his radiance and in theirs. Enneads V,8,

In the case of virtue and vice, whole must be compared with whole, and the differentiation conducted on this basis. As for the differentia being derived from the same genus as themselves, namely, Quality, and from no other genus, if we proceed on the principle that virtue is bound up with PLEASURE, vice with lust, virtue again with the acquisition of food, vice with idle extravagance, and accept these definitions as satisfactory, then clearly we have, here too, differentiae which are not qualities. Enneads VI,3,

A living thing comes into existence containing soul, present to it from the Authentic, and by soul is inbound with Reality entire; it possesses also a body; but this body is not a husk having no part in soul, not a thing that earlier lay away in the soulless; the body had its aptitude and by this draws near: now it is not body merely, but living body. By this neighboring it is enhanced with some impress of soul – not in the sense of a portion of soul entering into it, but that it is warmed and lit by soul entire: at once there is the ground of desire, PLEASURE, pain; the body of the living form that has come to be was certainly no unrelated thing. Enneads VI,4,

It is in view, probably, of this difficulty that Plato, in the Philebus, makes PLEASURE an element in the Term; the good is not defined as a simplex or set in Intellectual-Principle alone; while he rightly refrains from identifying the good with the pleasant, yet he does not allow Intellectual-Principle, foreign to PLEASURE, to be The Good, since he sees no attractive power in it. He may also have had in mind that the good, to answer to its name, must be a thing of delight and that an object of pursuit must at least hold some PLEASURE for those that acquire and possess it, so that where there is no joy the good too is absent, further that PLEASURE, implying pursuit, cannot pertain to the First and that therefore good cannot. Enneads VI,7,

All the striving, all the pain, show that to everything something is a good: the lifeless finds its share in something outside itself; where there is life the longing for good sets up pursuit; the very dead are cared for and mourned for by the living; the living plan for their own good. The witness of attainment is betterment, cleaving to state, satisfaction, settlement, suspension of pursuit. Here PLEASURE shows itself inadequate; its choice does not hold; repeated, it is no longer the same; it demands endless novelty. The good, worthy of the name, can be no such tasting of the casual; anyone that takes this kind of thing for the good goes empty, carrying away nothing but an emotion which the good might have produced. No one could be content to take his PLEASURE thus in an emotion over a thing not possessed any more than over a child not there; I cannot think that those setting their good in bodily satisfactions find table-PLEASURE without the meal, or love-PLEASURE without intercourse with their chosen, or any PLEASURE where nothing is done. Enneads VI,7,

There remains the question with regard to the Simplex: where there is utter absence of distinction does this self-aptness constitute the good to that Simplex? If thus far we have been right, the striving of the lower possesses itself of the good as of a thing resident in a certain Kind, and it is not the striving that constitutes the good but the good that calls out the striving: where the good is attained something is acquired and on this acquisition there follows PLEASURE. But the thing must be chosen even though no PLEASURE ensued; it must be desirable for its own sake. Enneads VI,7,

Suppose, however, that PLEASURE did not result from the good but there were something preceding PLEASURE and accounting for it, would not this be a thing to be embraced? But when we say “to be embraced” we say “PLEASURE.” Enneads VI,7,

It would seem possible, however, to perceive and yet be unmoved by the possession; this is quite likely in the case of the wiser and least dependent – and indeed it is so with the First, immune not merely because simplex, but because PLEASURE by acquisition implies lack. Enneads VI,7,

Whether PLEASURE must enter into the good, so that life in the contemplation of the divine things and especially of their source remains still imperfect, is a question not to be ignored in any enquiry into the nature of the good. Enneads VI,7,

Now to found the good upon the Intellect and upon that state of soul or mind which springs from wisdom does not imply that the end or the absolute good is the conjunction (of Intellect and state): it would follow merely that Intellect is the good and that we feel happy in possession of that good. That is one theory; another associates PLEASURE with Intellect in the sense that the Good is taken to be some one thing founded upon both but depending upon our attaining or at least contemplating an Intellect so modified; this theory would maintain that the isolated and unrelated could be the good, could be an object of desire. Enneads VI,7,

But how could Intellect and PLEASURE combine into one mutually complementary nature? Bodily PLEASURE no one, certainly, would think capable of blending in with Intellect; the unreasoning satisfactions of soul (or lower mind) are equally incompatible with it. Enneads VI,7,

Every activity, state, and life, will be followed and as it were escorted by the over-dwelling consciousness; sometimes as these take their natural course they will be met by hindrance and by intrusion of the conflicting so that the life is the less self-guided; sometimes the natural activity is unmixed, wholly free, and then the life goes brilliantly; this last state is judged the pleasantest, the most to be chosen; so, for lack of an accurate expression, we hear of “Intellect in conjunction with PLEASURE.” But this is no more than metaphor, like a hundred others drawn by the poets from our natural likings – “Drunk with nectar,” “To banquet and feast,” “The Father smiled.” No: the veritably pleasant lies away in that other realm, the most to be loved and sought for, not something brought about and changing but the very principle of all the colour and radiance and brightness found here. This is why we read of “Truth introduced into the Mixture” and of the “measuring standard as a prior condition” and are told that the symmetry and beauty necessary to the Mixture come Thence into whatever has beauty; it is in this way that we have our share in Beauty; but in another way, also, we achieve the truly desirable, that is by leading our selves up to what is best within us; this best is what is symmetry, beauty, collective Idea, life clear, Intellective and good. Enneads VI,7,

The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where nothing bounds it or to take impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest as on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with PLEASURE on the bold. Enneads VI,8,

This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no PLEASURE in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary. Enneads VI,8,