Enneads I iv: On Well-Being (Revised)

[sdi]

I've been pretty down lately: most of this month I've been ill and very weak, and even after that, it's been stressful trying to catch back up with everything that fell by the wayside, and frustrating to strugglingly clear the fog from my mind and get back to being capable of thinking. I had a little space available to me, today, and I thought I might pluck Plotinos off the shelf... little did I know that this essay, which I struggled to make sense of two years ago, was just what I needed today.

Despite being a little lost last time, my summary actually wasn't too bad, but I still wanted to tinker with it, some:

I iv: On Well-Being [Revision of my original summary.]

Let us consider a musician and his lyre. It is the lyre that sings sweetly, but can it be considered to have well-being? No—the lyre might be in tune or in good repair, but it is the musician that can be well; the lyre is a mere instrument of the musician's well-being. But let us suppose that the lyre is out of sorts: does this mean the musician is unwell? Not necessarily: perhaps it fell out of tune in his absence and he is not even aware of it, or perhaps he sings on even without accompaniment, or perhaps he has grown tired of playing and does something else. In whatever case, the musician cares for the instrument, tuning it and fixing it as needed, but only insofar as it contributes to his own well-being.

In the same way, a man's body is the mere instrument of the soul; and while the body might experience pleasure or contentment, this is merely akin to the lyre being in good shape. No, the Good is the highest of all, and so a man's good must come from his higher part: his well-being is of the soul, and being of the soul it is to be found solely within and not subject to the vagaries of without.

Just like how the lyre is not essential to the musician's well being, what does the saintly man—he who is consumed with divinity—care for the body? He will be swayed neither by power and luxury, on the one hand, nor disease and disaster, on the other. Would we not call him a man of tremendous well-being, who could be satisfied even as he is placed on the pyre? But this is just what happens when the practice of the virtues is taken to its end.

In general, in my summaries of Plotinos, I have taken the tack of summarizing his conclusions and more-or-less ignoring his arguments. I think I was upset with my summary the first time since this was the first essay in which doing so was really glaring... it really leaves a lot out. But I think, by the end of summarizing the Enneads, I came to the conclusion that I can't really do justice to the full arguments; really, these summaries exist to A) remind me of the contents of the essays, and B) maybe, hopefully, entice others to read Plotinos—at least, those essays that seem most interesting to them. So if my summary seems abrupt and you want to know what the good man is like and why, then just read the real thing: it's linked above and it's not very long.

I didn't realize this the first time through Plotinos, but this essay is about εὐδαιμονία eudaimonia, the meaning of which was one of my Big Questions™ when I went through On the Gods and the World. The dictionary gives "prosperity, good fortune, wealth;" Murray and Nock translate this word as "happiness;" Taylor translates it "felicity;" MacKenna goes a little further and translates it "true happiness;" and Armstrong is critical of these and translates it as "well-being." I agree with Armstrong that any variation on "happiness" is misleading: the philosophers are not saying that the virtuous feel good, they are saying that they have transcended feeling. But it would be wrong to call such people "stoic" or "impassive," I think: Taoist and Zen masters are well known for their good humor, and angels (as the beings intrinsically possessing the virtues we try to take on) are full of joy. (Indeed, when I think of my own angel, I think of them first and foremost as playful.) Perhaps a very literal translation of eudaimonia might be "well-spirited," which I can sorta see as encompassing all of these notions.

In my summary I mention tossing the good man on a pyre, but Plotinos's actual example was of tossing him in the Bull of Phalaris. I wasn't familiar with it, but good old Diodoros tells us the story in the Library of History IX xviii–xix. Yipes!

Even though Plotinos is following Plato in his arguments, and even though Plato and Diogenes were at odds, it is hard not to see the stray dog as an exemplar of eudaimonia, retaining his well-being even as he was sold into slavery.

Comments

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for sharing! I read Plotinus' the THE FIRST ENNEAD: FOURTH TRACTATE. I admire the part where he writes that animals and plants can be happy, and where he says that unhealthy men can be as happy as healthy men. But I do not share his belief that man is "not prevented from abandoning the body".

I think of my mind as the planning instrument of my body. My mind's plans can fail and it has to plan within my body's limits. Happiness is the reward given by a body that is satisfied with its planning organ.

Best wishes for your health!

[sdi]

Glad to see people reading Plotinos! The Enneads is a very rare treasure, I am always shocked that it has survived the ages pretty intact. Thanks also for your well-wishes!

When Plotinos speaks of being able to leave the body whenever one wants, he is referring to suicide. Normally he is opposed to suicide, though he accepts its use in dire circumstances and where the decision to do so is only arrived at with reason and is strictly free from feeling.

Metaphysically, he distinguishes between the "lower soul" (which experiences emotion, talks, imagines) and the "higher soul" (which reasons, intuits, knows). The "lower soul" is the "mind" that you are referring to; he would say that this is still a material thing, related to your body, and is not the part of you that transcends death. In my experience, the only way to experience the higher soul is to meditate, though it doesn't come regularly—one can prepare oneself, but the experience itself seems to be a gift. I have only brushed up against it twice, alas! a long time ago, now.

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks for your reply! I've had a few intuitive experiences when I was weak, for example sick, drunk or recovering from a fall. Feeling I was falling in a void or circling around a golden sun. I think of those experiences as an emergency response where part of my mind is shut down, in a way removing limits, and this leaves me feeling high.

[sdi]

While I'm in no position to judge your personal experiences, for whatever it's worth those don't match mystical experiences of the kinds I have experienced myself or have read about. (In particular, you are describing sensations, while mystical experiences are generally accompanied by an expansion of awareness.) I would urge you to keep seeking!

[boccaderlupo]

I dig that translation of eudaimonia. For me, though, the word "transcends" sticks a bit, as it seems people use "transcend" these days to mean "move beyond," which suggest a kind of pulling away (probably unintentionally, but that's my perception). Instead, eudamonia suggests to me a type of resonance, the resounding of ones spirit with Spirit, as it were.

Axé

[sdi]

Yes, exactly! I like your felicitous turn of phrase; indeed, the entire essay can be well summarized by: "What is the good life? The resonance of spirit with Spirit."

It's like Plotinos says in Enneads I ii "On Virtue:" to come close to a fire is to become accidentally warm, but to become a fire is to become intrinsically warm. "Transcending warmth" is therefore to become the fire; this doesn't mean you're cold, it just means that warmness or coldness is no longer the point—you've moved on to something else.

I think that's what he's getting at when he says the One transcends existence. This doesn't mean the One doesn't exist, as if it were some kind of chaos or void—that would be quite the paradox!—but rather that it is unreflective or unselfconscious (in sofar as one can say it is anything), and so existence is of no concern...

I guess this is all to say that "transcend" is a technical term with a peculiar meaning that needs to be kept in mind when dealing with mysticism...

[jprussell]

One of the many cases where I feel like knowing the actual Greek word is always going to be more helpful than any one translation - having a daimon who is eu gives a lot more nuance if you know what those words mean than "happiness," "felicity," "true happiness," or whatever, even if all of those are getting at the right sort of thing. Similarly with Aristotle's megalopsyche.

For what it's worth, it's likely also the case that English has drifted away from what these words might once have meant as much as it is the Greek puts it better - "happiness" didn't used to mean "material well-being only," even if in modern parlance it has come something close to that.

To my mind, the lyre-player analogy is a beautiful one that does a good job of explaining the helpfulness of "material happiness" while pointing to its fundamental unsatisfactoriness. To take a more Epicurean stance, poisonous or unhealthy food might hinder the ability to express the satisfaction and "happiness" of a well-ordered soul, and a fine diet might make it easier (sometimes) to recognize and embody that "happiness," but the idea that a fine feast will make you "truly happy/felicitous/etc" is ridiculous on its face (or at least should be, with a modicum of spiritual training/reflection).

Cheers,
Jeff

[sdi]

This is one of those things that bites me a lot when studying Greek. There's just so many ways that words are slippery.

Another way is that "daimon" means very different things in different times and places. (On the one hand, Homer treats theos and daimon as synonyms; the Platonists treat daimons as a category of beings intermediate between gods and men; others treat it in the same way we use the word "spirit," as sort of a generic term for any paranormal thing; and of course there's the non-theological use as "to distribute, to allot, to share," as in the mythological king Lakedaimon "the benefactor of Lakonia.")

And still another is that words shift in usage over time, both in the literal etymology of a word, but also in how the word is described. To borrow your example of μεγαλοψυχία, calling a magnanimous person "noble-spirited" will mean something very different to a royalist and a revolutionary. (And don't get me started about λόγος!)

And on top of all that, it doesn't help that basically all our Greek dictionaries were written by Victorians, who were very peculiar by modern standards.

So I've just come to have to ignore the dictionary sometimes and see how a given author uses a word in practice, but even that is difficult, because then we're in subjective territory; we're now "interpreting" rather than "translating" (as if such a thing as "translation" is even possible). My favorite example of that is the Egyptian netcher; the orthodox translation of this word is "god;" but some translators very reasonably take it to mean "marker, symbol" (the hieroglyph of the word is literally a surveying flag)—that is, a label, like the use of a variable in arithmetic to let you reason about something that you don't really know what it is. (This is much like how the average ancient Greek laity considered Zeus to be an mighty bearded man in the sky, while a Pythagorean considered "Zeus" to be a label for a set of abstract philosophical concepts.) I have a half-written post on the topic lying around that I need to return to one of these days...

To your example of the feast, that also reminds me of the Stoic stance, where the memory of good things can act as an antidote to the experience of bad things. Plotinos dismantles that example explicitly in §8 of the next essay, and extends it to the memory of less ridiculous things, like morals.