Sunday 25 August 2013

Not so Tender-hearted Fucking: the Marquis de Sade on Happiness, Nature, and Liberty (Part 1)




The Philosophy in the Boudoir or, The Immoral Mentors, ironically subtitled Dialogues Aimed at the Education of Young Ladies and published anonymously in 1795 in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is the most philosophically reflective of all the Marquis de Sade’s pornographic works. Absurdly hyperbolic sex scenes (“The sperm jumped more than ten feet! Fucking God! The room’s filled with it!”) are interspersed with theoretical reflections about the human condition, about religion and morality, nature and freedom, happiness and suffering. The sex itself, the cold-hearted, self-centred way it is practised, is presented as a practical application of a particular, libertine philosophy of life and the accompanying political and moral philosophy.

For Sade and his mouthpiece Dolmancé the world is a bleak place. We have been “tossed reluctantly into this dismal universe” and are forced to lead a miserable existence. There is no God, no afterlife, no hope, no meaning. Religion is a mere superstition and morality has been invented by the weak to put and hold the strong in shackles. The only thing that matters in such a world is that one does everything in one’s power to be happy, as much as possible in such a world, and happiness consists in nothing other than the satisfaction of one’s own passions and desires. “Don’t I have enough misery of my own without burdening myself with the misery of others?” The pleasure and pain of others is (or should be) nothing to me: “isn’t everyone out for himself in the world?” Sade’s world is the cruel world of Hobbes, characterised by “a state of perpetual and reciprocal warfare”, where everyone is by nature everyone else’s enemy. Real love between people, or even friendship, is an illusion. Everyone has to take care of number one, and only number one. Just as Kallikles in Plato’s Gorgias, who argued that morality and law had no authority over the strong who by nature had a right to suppress the weak and take what they want without paying any attention to the interests and the welfare of others, Sade invokes the normative force of nature to show that nothing can be wrong that allows people to satisfy their wants and needs. “Nature, the mother of us all, never speaks to us, except about ourselves. Nothing is as egotistical as nature’s voice. And what we hear most sharply in that voice is the holy and immutable advice to enjoy ourselves, no matter what it costs others.” And what we enjoy most is completely unrestrained and copious sexual activity, dominance over others, and violence.

Sade insists that we should not let ourselves be hampered by the usual moral considerations. There are several reasons for why morality should not concern us:

1)      Conventional morality places constraints on the expression of our passions, which is highly unnatural. Not only are all restrictions per se bad for the individual, suppressing one’s passions also violates the laws of nature, which (for some unexplained reason) have normative priority. 

2)      Giving in to moral demands robs us of a lot of pleasure that we could otherwise enjoy, and pleasure is far more valuable than anything else in this world. In fact, it is the only thing valuable in and by itself. So foregoing or giving up a pleasure for whatever reason (unless it were in order to gain an even greater pleasure) can never be good. 

3)      An adherence to moral norms, or moral behaviour, is usually motivated by certain passions such as pride, ambition, greed and vanity, and is hence no better than the immorality of the libertine, which is simply guided by other passions: “Benevolence is more a vice of pride than a true virtue of the soul. A person comforts his fellowmen purely in order to show off and never simply to do a good deed.” Nobody ever does anything except out of self-love, so all virtue is ultimately a sham.

4)      Morality is culturally relative: “the words ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’ supply us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre you may picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in.” 

5)      By violating moral norms we only do what nature does all the time, for instance by robbing us of our possessions or killing us through natural disasters, and if nature does it, then we must assume that doing so somehow serves nature (e.g. by making room for new life) and is hence good: “Since destruction is a primary law of nature, nothing destructive could be a crime.” 

6)      A lot of what if supposed to be morally wrong is immensely pleasurable, which shows that nature welcomes it, and if it is all right with nature, even rewarded by it (with the pleasure it incites) then it can’t possibly be bad.

Sade’s strategy (which foreshadows Nietzsche’s project of a “revaluation of all values”) is, however, not entirely consistent. On the one hand he denies that what we are used to regard as crimes or immoral behaviour is in any way wrong, on the other he delights in the idea of wrong-doing and seems to believe that the pleasure we derive from certain activities depends to a considerable extent on our knowledge that we are doing something very bad indeed. Thus when Eugénie wonders whether incest is not a crime, Domancé answers: “Can we regard the most beautiful natural union as a crime, a union that nature prescribes and so warmly recommends?” And similarly: “Cruelty is nothing but human energy that hasn’t yet been corrupted by civilization. Hence, cruelty is a virtue and not a vice.” Yet there are other passages where it is pretty obvious that the crime committed really needs to be seen as a crime, as some kind of violation (and not only of human laws) in order to do its job, namely to excite and arouse: “May the horrors, the atrocities, the most odious crimes no longer astonish you, Eugénie. The foulest, the filthiest, the most forbidden things are always the most exciting.” And: “Oh, Lucifer! Lone and single god of my soul! Inspire me more!”

In any case, however, it is the law of nature (be nature bad or good or simply neutral), which alone commands authority. “Nature has acted according to its goals, its plans, and its needs. We must submit.” But why exactly must we submit? Sade does not mean that we have no choice. What he means is rather that to act in accordance with nature is what we should do. But the only reason that emerges from what Sade says about the matter is that there is no other possible authority. There is nothing but nature. Nature is all there is, so if anything has normative authority, then it must be nature. Sade’s frequent use of arguments from nature in order to justify certain practices, however, is entirely arbitrary – as arguments from nature tend to be. Natural, and hence desirable or at least defensible, is basically whatever Sade happens to be in favour of, and unnatural whatever he happens to dislike. But his arguments serve very nicely, intended or unintended, as a parody of the kind of physicotheological argument for intelligent design and (as a corollary) the existence of God that was popular at the time (culminating in William Paley’s famous version in his Natural Theology, published in 1802). Here are my two favourite examples:

1)      “Had nature wanted us to hide certain areas of our bodies, it would have done so itself. But nature created us naked. So it means us to go naked.” 

2)      “If nature didn’t intend to have us fuck the ass, then would nature have so precisely adjusted the hole to the forms of our members? Isn’t this orifice round like them? What enemy of common sense can imagine that nature can have created an oval hole for a round member?”   

(to be continued)

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