Enneads I.7: Of the First Good, and of the Other Goods
There Is No Unalloyed Evil for the Living Being
3. Though life be a good, it does not belong to all beings. Life is incomplete for the evil person, as for an eye that does not see distinctly; neither accomplish their purpose. If, for us, life, though mingled as it is, be a good, even if an imperfect one, how shall we continue to assert that death is not an evil? But for whom would it be an evil? This we must ask because evil must necessarily be an attribute of somebody. Now there is no more evil for a being which, though even existing, is deprived of life, any more than for a stone (as they say). But if, after death, the being still live, if it be still animate, it will possess good, and so much the more as it exercises its faculties without the body. If it be united to the universal Soul, evidently there can be no evil for it, any more than for the gods who possess good unmingled with evil. Similar is the case of the soul which preserves her purity, inasmuch as he who loses her finds that life, and not death, is the real Evil. If there be chastisements in Hades, again is life an evil for the soul, because she is not pure. If, further, we define life as the union of the soul with the body, and death as their separation, the soul can pass through both these conditions (without, on that account, being unhappy, or losing her hold on the Good).