La vita è una fuga. La filosofia dell’abitudine di Samuel Butler

In the first section of this essay I discuss Samuel Butler’s philosophy of habit, showing how he identified habit with an original force coextensive with life itself. In the second section, I discuss how Butler did not ignore the fact that what he saw as a positive and creative force could at times degenerate into a negative and regressive tendency. Butler represented extensively such regressive dimension of habit in his novel The Way of All Flesh, in which habits become inherited neurotic dispositions that stifle individual freedom, while at the same time offering a meditation on how to contain these negative tendencies, both for individuals and collectivities.