mirror of
https://github.com/standardebooks/web.git
synced 2025-07-05 22:30:30 -04:00
Fix typo in blog post
This commit is contained in:
parent
1385d4bf9f
commit
18b462bb52
1 changed files with 1 additions and 1 deletions
|
@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ $carousel = Db::Query('SELECT * from Ebooks where EbookId in ' . Db::CreateSetSq
|
|||
<p>By his late thirties Maugham had become a successful playwright, but the memories of his youth tormented and obsessed him, as he recounts in a later preface to the novel and an autobiographical work, <i>The Summing Up</i>. He quit his well-paying job at a theater to produce a novel from these memories, a draft of which he’d begun years before, in which the protagonist’s name was, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-joyce/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man">coincidentally, Stephen.</a></p>
|
||||
<p>After the novel was published in 1915 as <i>Of Human Bondage</i> (with the protagonist renamed Philip), Maugham begin receiving a considerable amount of fan mail, against his expectations that the world was suffering too much to bother with it.</p>
|
||||
<p>But the book’s reception didn’t really matter to him; what mattered was that its publication succeeded in liberating him from his “unhappy recollections.”</p>
|
||||
<p>Part IV of Spinoza’s <i>Ethics</i> begins by suggesting that freedom requires moderating emotion by reason; if people don’t do that well enough, they may pursue things that they know will harm them. Various characters in <i>Of Human Bondage</i> illustrate this danger, but most the most obvious example is Philip’s tortuous obsession with a waitress who mistreats him. Unbridled impulse leads to disaster for Philip; controlling his desires, like <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-jowett/text/phaedrus">reining in an unruly horse</a>, is a struggle. Spinoza appreciated the difficulty of implementing his solutions, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3800/pg3800-images.html#chap05">criticizing Descartes</a> for implying that human beings could have “absolute dominion” over the passions.</p>
|
||||
<p>Part IV of Spinoza’s <i>Ethics</i> begins by suggesting that freedom requires moderating emotion by reason; if people don’t do that well enough, they may pursue things that they know will harm them. Various characters in <i>Of Human Bondage</i> illustrate this danger, but the most obvious example is Philip’s tortuous obsession with a waitress who mistreats him. Unbridled impulse leads to disaster for Philip; controlling his desires, like <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-jowett/text/phaedrus">reining in an unruly horse</a>, is a struggle. Spinoza appreciated the difficulty of implementing his solutions, <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3800/pg3800-images.html#chap05">criticizing Descartes</a> for implying that human beings could have “absolute dominion” over the passions.</p>
|
||||
<p>Another way in which the novel accords with the <i>Ethics</i> is in assuming some relation between human freedom and knowing the truth. This appears notably in the <i>Ethics</i> as the concept of the “intellectual love of God.” In the novel, Philip abandons Christian theism—given Spinoza’s understanding of deity, this is consistent with the <i>Ethics</i>—but it’s striking that the first time Philip reports feeling utterly free is when he thinks he has just arrived at the truth about a question that has occupied him throughout the book: the question of the meaning of life.</p>
|
||||
<p>Whatever our attitude may be to that question, it brings us to two points of difference between the novel and the philosophy that is its namesake.</p>
|
||||
<p>The first is how in <i>Of Human Bondage</i> freedom diverges from wisdom. It’s a failed poet, Cronshaw, who leads Philip to this ultimate wisdom, the meaning of life; it’s also on Cronshaw’s advice that Philip makes some of his few good decisions. But Cronshaw is nothing if not a slave to the passions, and therefore he’s not, in respects that count most to Spinoza, <em>free</em>. In the novel’s world the “wise man” and “free man” are not always the same person; in Spinoza’s <i>Ethics</i>, they <em>must</em> be.</p>
|
||||
|
|
Loading…
Add table
Add a link
Reference in a new issue