The Ethics of Joy: Spinoza on the Empowered Life: Longform review essay

In spite of the forbidding geometrical formality of his writing, Benedict de Spinoza has long drawn the passion and affection of readers far beyond the bounds of academic philosophy. One does not need to fully grasp his metaphysical arguments in order to sense the human appeal of his ethics. This ethics, far from ignoring the emotions that dominate our lived experience, or simply issuing a series of ‘thou shalt nots’ condemning the bad behaviour which may issue from them, instead takes our emotions and feelings as the necessary starting point for ethical inquiry, and proposes a pathway for the transformation of sadness into joy. Andrew Youpa's new book The Ethics of Joy takes these intuitively appealing features of Spinoza's thought and rigorously explores their exegetical validity and conceptual coherence. The result is a remarkably lucid interpretation of Spinoza's moral philosophy, with rewards equally for readers seeking an introduction to the...