A snippet from the entry on Plato.Stanford on Plotinus

Source

“Plotinus views ethics according to the criterion of what contributes to our identification with our higher selves and what contributes to our separation from that identification. All virtuous practices make a positive contribution to this goal. But virtues can be graded according to how they do this (see I 2). The lowest form of virtues, what Plotinus, following Plato, calls ‘civic’ or ‘popular’, are the practices that serve to control the appetites (see I 2. 2). By contrast, higher ‘purificatory’ virtues are those that separate the person from the embodied human being (I 2. 3). One who practices purificatory virtue is no longer subject to the incontinent desires whose restraint constitutes mere civic or popular virtue. Such a person achieves a kind of ‘likeness to God’ recommended by Plato at Theaetetus 176a-b. Both of these types of virtue are inferior to intellectual virtue which consists in the activity of the philosopher (see I 2. 6). One who is purified in embodied practices can turn unimpeded to one’s true self-identity as a thinker.

Plotinus, however, while acknowledging the necessity of virtuous living for happiness, refuses to identify them. Like Aristotle, Plotinus maintains that a property of the happy life is its self-sufficiency (see I.1.4–5). But Plotinus does not agree that a life focused on the practice of virtue is self-sufficient. Even Aristotle concedes that such a life is not self-sufficient in the sense that it is immune to misfortune. Plotinus, insisting that the best life is one that is in fact blessed owing precisely to its immunity to misfortune, alters the meaning of ‘self-sufficient’ in order to identify it with the interior life of the excellent person. This interiority or self-sufficiency is the obverse of attachment to the objects of embodied desires. Interiority is happiness because the longing for the Good, for one who is ideally an intellect, is satisfied by cognitive identification with all that is intelligible. If this is not unqualifiedly possible for the embodied human being, it does at least seem possible that one should have a second order desire, deriving from this longing for the Good, that amounts to a profound indifference to the satisfaction of first order desires. Understanding that the good for an intellect is contemplation of all that the One is means that the will is oriented to one thing only, whatever transient desires may turn up.”