Enneads I v: Can Well-Being Increase With Time? (Revised)

[sdi]

Re-reading Enneads I v "Can Well-Being Increase With Time?" I think my previous summary is fine and I have simply edited that post with different nomenclature (e.g. changing "happiness" to "well-being," following the reasoning I outlined yesterday).

I would like to flag a few sight-seeing points that stood out to me this time around, though:

• In §4, Plotinos agrees with (and elegantly subsumes) Aristotle's definition of well-being: if one equates well-being with the ability to exercise free will, then they are simply accepting Plotinos's position, for the soul has free will according to its nature, while the body has none.

• In §7, Plotinos makes the case that eternity isn't merely the sum of all times, but is beyond time. (This echoes Proklos's and Taylor's distinction of "perpetual" and "eternal.") Thus something which is eternal is better than something which is perpetual, and therefore eternal good is better than perpetual good, and therefore the well-being of the soul is more to be desired than even perpetual pleasure of the body.

• In §10, Plotinos makes a cute distinction between well-being and well-doing, which echoes Plato's "world of being" and "world of becoming." I think this neatly describes the functions of each: since the intellect essentially is, a soul only accidentally is; thus the intellect can only be, but a soul can be well or be poorly. The soul essentially moves, but a body only accidentally moves; thus the soul can only do, but a body can do well or do poorly. That is to say: something that essentially possesses some quality simply embodies that quality, but something that accidentally possesses it may have it to a greater or lesser degree.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

An aside, but St. Maximus the Confessor—himself influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and thus Proclus—touches a bit on this overall subject in his Ambiguum 7. I can't do full justice to the argument, but the idea is that those who have found rest in God do not become satiated by the fullness of the Divine...because the joy thereof is perpetual, and therefore one only grows in Love. Thus "for those who enjoy fellowship with God who is infinite and beautiful, desire becomes more intense and has no limit."

Interesting to contrast this conception with the ideas of limit and unlimited in Proclus. But I think of it almost as a reverse entropy: if the material world is subject to perpetual degradation and, consequently, bodily death, this immersion in the Divine is the opposite: a perpetual increase in Love without end.

Axé

[sdi]

You know, that notion of "reverse entropy" is an interesting one... one perhaps might say that things tend to order in the spiritual world and disorder in the material world, which is a simple enough thing to say, but the ramifications of it seem profound. I'll have to give some thought to that...