From 18b462bb52ba6a9f649c3d501efb8e4dcdddec9d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alex Cabal Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2025 15:01:22 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] Fix typo in blog post --- www/blog/of-human-bondage-spinoza-and-the-meaning-of-life.php | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/www/blog/of-human-bondage-spinoza-and-the-meaning-of-life.php b/www/blog/of-human-bondage-spinoza-and-the-meaning-of-life.php index 34b1ca96..ee9f9a5a 100644 --- a/www/blog/of-human-bondage-spinoza-and-the-meaning-of-life.php +++ b/www/blog/of-human-bondage-spinoza-and-the-meaning-of-life.php @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ $carousel = Db::Query('SELECT * from Ebooks where EbookId in ' . Db::CreateSetSq

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, The Summing Up. 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, coincidentally, Stephen.

After the novel was published in 1915 as Of Human Bondage (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.

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.”

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Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics 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 Of Human Bondage 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 reining in an unruly horse, is a struggle. Spinoza appreciated the difficulty of implementing his solutions, criticizing Descartes for implying that human beings could have “absolute dominion” over the passions.

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Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics 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 Of Human Bondage 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 reining in an unruly horse, is a struggle. Spinoza appreciated the difficulty of implementing his solutions, criticizing Descartes for implying that human beings could have “absolute dominion” over the passions.

Another way in which the novel accords with the Ethics is in assuming some relation between human freedom and knowing the truth. This appears notably in the Ethics 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 Ethics—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.

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.

The first is how in Of Human Bondage 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, free. In the novel’s world the “wise man” and “free man” are not always the same person; in Spinoza’s Ethics, they must be.