Enneads I vii: On the Primal Good and Secondary Forms of Good

Welcome, class, to Neoplatonism 101! I spent a little time summarizing this very short tractate more fully as it seems like something handy to refer to.

I vii: On the Primal Good and Secondary Forms of Good

All things act on the basis of their desires. They must consider those desires Good (and not just Good, but more Good than their present state) in order to desire them in the first place. But those Good things that they desire must, themselves, desire their own Good. In the limit, therefore, there must be some Ultimate Good. But what does the Ultimate Good desire? There is nothing more Good, so the only thing worthy of Its desire is Itself. But then, in requiring nothing outside of Itself, It must be the ontological First Thing, from which all action arises.

Following that, what is Good to all other things must depend on what is ontologically prior to them. For example, life is Good to the living and thought is Good to the thinking, and further if something is both living and thinking, then it has multiple pathways, so to speak, to the Ultimate Good.

But this doesn't mean that the opposites of those things are evil. For example, just because life is Good doesn't mean that death is evil. As we have said, neither body nor soul are alive, but only the man; indeed, when the man dies, the soul is free to act on its own once again. So, in that sense, death is Good to the soul!