The affective cost of philosophical self-transformation

Some early-modern philosophers portray a perfectly philosophical way of life as a condition approaching the divine. The philosopher becomes as like God as a human being can, and in doing so experiences unparalleled and unalloyed joy. Spinoza advocates a version of this view and defends it with impressive consistency. To suggest that the process of philosophical enlightenment involves any affective cost, he argues, is simply to display a lack of understanding, and thus to fall short of the insight and joy that understanding ultimately yields. Nevertheless, something seems to be missing. I turn to a pair of novels by J. M. Coetzee to elucidate a significant though suppressed form of emotional loss that is integral to Spinoza’s image of the philosophical life