But after an hour of heady (though not too heady — it’s Sunday) discussion, we’d leave with a little more clarity on what Spinoza meant by, say, necessity and free will. Our various cats would make appearances onscreen, perhaps also having found some succor from Spinoza. Our collective mood by the time we arrived at the book’s final, salvific chapter was nothing short of ebullient. Union with other people, oneness with the universe, an acceptance of the paths our lives had taken — these were things that we possessed all along. I had been saved, thankfully, but I cannot tell you how. You must read the book yourself, with friends.
The group, by the end a good 15 or so people, decided there was no reason to stop with Spinoza. We needed even more salvation — like, badly. And so, over the course of the last year and a half, we’ve read a number of challenging books, books we otherwise would have never read alone. We read Henri Bergson; we read the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking; we’re currently finishing “Objectivity,” by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, a book that argues our concept of scientific objectivity — like gender, pleasure and artistic value — is historically determined. I admit that I’ve proposed all the titles, each being in some way thematically linked to the book we read previously. So ideally, like Borges’s Library of Babel, this book club could continue infinitely, or at least close to it.
What is the point of this? Why are we doing this to ourselves? Is it merely a fetish for finishing a difficult book, the self-flattery it permits? None of us are academic philosophers, by any means; we have busy jobs and other pressing adult responsibilities. But the process has proved fruitful. A camaraderie emerges, I’ve found, when a group dedicates itself to a task that requires great effort. The experience is also frequently amusing: Half the meetings during our read of “Anti-Oedipus,” a critique of psychoanalysis by Deleuze and Guattari, were dedicated to complaining about the authors’ half-grinning disdain for their readers. (“Literature is like schizophrenia,” they write.) Needless to say, I loved the book. Learning is both painful and pleasant — and above all, communal.