Of Human Bondage, Spinoza, and the Meaning of Life
This article first appeared in the March 2025 edition of our email newsletter.
The creation story of W. Somerset Maugham’s book Of Human Bondage has, at least superficially, to do with Spinoza’s Ethics, from which its title was drawn. But it also has a deeper connection to Spinoza: “remedies against the emotions” occupy the fifth part of Spinoza’s difficult work, and Maugham wrote his novel as a sort of remedy against his own emotions. This connection reveals some fascinating ways in which Maugham agrees with Spinoza, and some ways in which he doesn’t.
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.”
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.
The second, more fundamental way in which the novel parts ways from the Ethics is in the former’s explicit ethical relativism. Philip is able to find out the truth about the meaning of life; but he concludes that there’s no such thing as the truth about Ethics. Systems of ethics, Philip comes to think, describe only their author and the author’s personality; if the author claims that their system is universally applicable, then that’s just a detail of the author’s own self-portrait. As Philip puts it during a discussion with an evangelizer of the categorical imperative: “Kant thought things not because they were true, but because he was Kant.”
To see why this presents a conflict with Spinoza’s Ethics, consider what sort of writing has the best chance of failing to reflect the writer’s personality. Surely mathematical writing fits the bill. But that’s what Euclid’s Elements is—and the Elements was the model for Spinoza’s Ethics, whose subtitle translates to: “Demonstrated in Geometrical Order.”
Merely adopting a geometrical structure for his Ethics—as he’d done before in his book-length exposition of Descartes’ philosophy—doesn’t, as A. P. Snow argued over a century ago, commit Spinoza to thinking that ethics has the certainty of geometry. It does appear to commit him to thinking that ethics can be taught, and taught not just by him, but by anyone, because it can be explained impartially.
This is rejected in Of Human Bondage. In mathematics, a proof is sound or unsound independently of who writes it down; but in ethics, according to Philip, a system is “valid only for the writer.” As Philip concludes after reading his way through the history of philosophy: “It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it.”
Both of these departures from the Ethics reinforce the same question: what kind of relations hold between concepts we’d consider ethical, like freedom, courage, and temperance, and those we’d consider theoretical, like truth, knowledge, and understanding?
Maugham’s answer has to do with art; but like the significance of the piece of carpet in the novel, that answer is better pieced together yourself—and the question itself may not even seem sensible to everyone.
