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)
No comments:
Post a Comment