An Infatuation with Spinoza

This is poignant stuff. I recognize when I'm outclassed. I can think of no improving commentary on what follows. So I'll simply steal it from The Irish Times where it first appeared. 

An Irish philosopher is writing about her infatuation with the long dead Dutchman.  

However, I realised in that moment that all of the serious relationships I had had in my early 20s were with long-dead philosophers and were conducted entirely inside my own head. Fortunately for me, that didn’t constitute any diagnosable mental-health condition that there was an existing medication to cure.

It’s simply the case that no young man I had ever encountered was sufficient competition to threaten my devotion to Baruch Spinoza. Of all the gin joints he could have sauntered into, he had to choose mine. That certainly isn’t to imply that he physically did anything much at all. Dying in 1677 will limit you that way.

However, with liquid brown eyes that implied his parents were a giraffe and a King Charles Spaniel and a philosophical prowess that makes academics shudder with awe inside their tweed blazers, he was the most compelling man I’d ever had the pleasure of not meeting.

My love affair with Spinoza followed the trajectory of any normal, deeply unhealthy relationship. There was the tentative early stage. We’d meet secretly in Trinity’s Ussher Library, and I would feel largely confused by the things he said. Over time, I became more confident around him and would challenge his ideas. I would find myself in everyday scenarios thinking: what would Spinoza say about this? Apart from the minor issue of posthumous consent, Spinoza was my boyfriend.

I'm going to end it there, in hopes that I can still claim this was merely fair use. 

At the end, though, our heroine (Laura Kennedy) discovers that she has to 'break up' with Spinoza, given his view of women as inferiors, expressed in one of his Tractati. Tractatuses. Whatever. 

They still 'see each other professionally' though, since after all she is still pursuing a career in philosophy, and he is rather ubiquitous in those circles.