Plotinus: Enneads - AwardSpace

Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not
on the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of
Reason?
But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why
precisely they make Reason an essential to the happiness in a
living being:
"When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is
resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal needs of
nature; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless
in that domain?"
If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with
the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as long
as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants:
Reason becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in it
for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which,
we hold, is virtue.
If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and
not as supplying these human needs, you must tell us what
other services it renders, what is its proper nature and what
makes it the perfect thing it is.
For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such
planning and providing: its perfection will be something quite
different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be
itself one of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a
cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that
order: it must be nobler than any and all of such things:
otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so
highly.
Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at
which they still halt, they must be left where they are and
where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good
of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to
what kind of beings it is accessible.
What then is happiness? Let us try basing it upon Life.
3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything
that lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be
effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which
every living thing is by nature receptive. We could not deny it
to the irrational whilst allowing it to the rational. If happiness
were inherent in the bare being­alive, the common ground in
which the cause of happiness could always take root would be
simply life.