Glück (Eudaimonie)

This chapter explores Plotinus’ notion of happiness and his version of ancient eudaemonism. In Ennead I 4 [46], a treatise explicitly devoted to happiness or the good life, Plotinus takes up the traditional equation of ‘good life’ and ‘perfect life’ and reinterprets it as the life on the level of Intellect that is characteristic of the Neoplatonic sage. The treatise goes on with a full portrayal of the sage who, much like the Stoic sage but on different metaphysical grounds, remains unaffected by any external influence. In another relevant treatise (I 5 [36]) Plotinus sides with the Stoics against the Peripatetics in arguing that happiness does not increase with time because the exemplary happy person’s (the sage’s) purely intellectual life puts him/her, in a sense, outside of time.