Fix typo in blog post

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Alex Cabal 2025-03-12 15:01:22 -05:00
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@ -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 hed begun years before, in which the protagonists 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 books reception didnt really matter to him; what mattered was that its publication succeeded in liberating him from his “unhappy recollections.</p>
<p>Part IV of Spinozas <i>Ethics</i> begins by suggesting that freedom requires moderating emotion by reason; if people dont 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 Philips 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 Spinozas <i>Ethics</i> begins by suggesting that freedom requires moderating emotion by reason; if people dont 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 Philips 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 Spinozas understanding of deity, this is consistent with the <i>Ethics</i>—but its 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. Its a failed poet, Cronshaw, who leads Philip to this ultimate wisdom, the meaning of life; its also on Cronshaws advice that Philip makes some of his few good decisions. But Cronshaw is nothing if not a slave to the passions, and therefore hes not, in respects that count most to Spinoza, <em>free</em>. In the novels world the “wise man” and “free man” are not always the same person; in Spinozas <i>Ethics</i>, they <em>must</em> be.</p>