In this treatise, Plotinus draws upon Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean accounts of happiness to compare them with that of Plato. He draws on elements of the former in order to demonstrate that the best life for a human being is ascent to and immersion in the intelligible world. Happiness, as the Platonists understand it, is the result of the assimilation to the divine. At one level, Plotinus has an affinity to the Stoic view that virtue, properly understood, is sufficient for happiness. And yet the Stoics, owing to their materialism and their denial of the immortality of the soul, are in no position to justify their discounting of the travails of embodiment and so to defend the identity of the person with the intellect.
§1. If Aristotle is right that the best life is the achievement of something’s function, then even non-rational animals and plants can be happy.
§2. The unsustainability of the Epicurean position that identifies happiness with the pleasant life. The Stoic position, that happiness is the rational life, is better, but not if rationality is understood as following nature.
§3. The happy life can only be the life of the Intellect in relation to the Good.
§4. The happy life is not only found in Intellect but it requires the recognition of our true identity with our intellects.
§5. Peripatetic objections to the Platonic position based on the role of externals in the happy life.
§7. Not even great personal misfortunes, whether our own or those of others close to us can detract from our happiness.
§8. Bodily pains do not detract from happiness.
§9. Do we need to be conscious to be happy?
§10. Primary intellectual activity is beyond mental representations.
§11. Externals do not increase happiness.
§12. The unique pleasure of the intellectual life.
§13. The happy person is impervious to fortune.
§14. The happiness we are talking about refers only to the real person, the intellect.
§15. The truly happy person is indifferent to the state of the embodied individual, although this does not require disregard for the body.
§16. The focus of the happy life is only the Good.