The
Marquis de Sade was perhaps not much of a philosopher, but what philosophy
there is in his work is clearly the brain-child of the enlightenment. It is as
if the age of reason has gone a bit senile after all those years and has now,
shortly before her final demise, decided to present her dirty backside to the
public. The Marquis de Sade is Voltaire’s ugly little brother, the Mr Hyde to
his Dr Jekyll, urging us to be reasonable, to pay no attention to the “heart”,
to seek out and kill off all prejudices, to claim our political and intellectual
freedom: “Ah, smash those chains – nature wants you to smash them! You should
have no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no
other moral than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that
caused your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts.”
Some
of Sade’s demands appear downright progressive, even today. You can find
passages in his work that could easily be cited by gay rights campaigners and
feminists. He argues vehemently against the death penalty and the right of any
government or state to inflict capital punishment on its citizens. He defends
the right to freely pursue one’s own sexual orientation, especially
homosexuality (but also incest and paedophilia), without fear of punishment. He
demands that every woman should be granted the right to decide what happens to
and with her own body. Women should be allowed to express their sexuality just
as freely as men, and abortion is absolutely fine if that is what a woman wants,
because this decision is only hers to make: “A woman is always the mistress of
what she carries in her womb, and there is as little wrong with destroying this
kind of material as there is with purging the other kind with medicaments, if
we feel the need.” He also rejects the institution of marriage on the grounds
that a woman should never become, or be seen as, the possession of any man. Marriage
binds a woman unjustly to a man, makes her his property, which violates the
rights of men and nature: “No act of possession can ever be perpetrated on a
free being; it is as unjust to own a wife monogamously as it is to own slaves.
All men are born free, all are equal before the law (...) The act of possession
can be exercised only on an animal or an immobile object, but never on an
individual that resembles us”. Therefore women, being neither animals nor
things, should be free to do whatever they want, which of course for Sade means
especially to have sex whenever and with whomever they want: “Fuck – in a word
– fuck! That’s why you were put upon this earth!” “Fuck, Eugénie, fuck away, my
dear angel! Your body belongs to you, to you alone. You are the only person in
the world who has the right to enjoy your body and to let anyone you wish enjoy
it.”
Yet
despite all his talk of human freedom, all the exuberant liberationist
rhetoric, the world that Sade seeks to create is in fact deeply oppressive. By
granting so much freedom to the individual, he effectively proposes to leave
the weak and vulnerable without protection. He argues against the death
penalty, but mainly because he feels that individual (not state-committed) murder
and theft should not be seen as crimes, but as natural, and hence ought not to
be punished, which of course is not exactly good news for the victims of such
crimes. He imagines a completely free society, a kind of republican utopia:
“Citizens, remember: in granting freedom of conscience and freedom of the
press, you must also allow freedom of action, with few exceptions”, and killing
other people is not one of them: “The freest nations are those that welcome
murder.” He denies that parents have any duties towards their children, but
also that children have any duties (of gratitude) to their parents, which
leaves not only the unborn, but also all children who are not yet old enough to
fend for themselves entirely at their parents’ mercy (infanticide is just as
permissible as abortion). It also leaves those same parents free to pursue
their pleasure without having to care for their own ageing parents. In fact,
they would be perfectly in their rights to get rid of them for good.
The
oppressive nature of Sade’s libertarianism is also due to his peculiar
understanding of the normative authority of nature, according to which every
right that nature bestows on us is also a duty: what we are allowed to do is also what we are meant to do. “We obey its laws if we
yield to the desires that nature alone has placed in front of us; and we
outrage nature if we resist it.” Thus the allegedly natural right to satisfy
one’s desires and to take pleasure wherever one finds it is transformed into a
holy duty: “Let pleasure be the sole god of your existence. It is to pleasure
alone that a girl must sacrifice everything, and nothing should be as sacred to
her as pleasure.” And what if she doesn’t want so much pleasure? Well, then she
needs to be forced. Nature must be
obeyed, which is certainly very convenient for men: “In whatever state a woman
may be, my darling – whether girl, woman, or widow – she must never have any
other goal, any other occupation, any other desire than to be fucked from dawn
till dusk. It’s toward that single end that nature has created her.” For this
reason, “we even have the right to pass laws that compel a woman to yield to
the ardour of the man who desires her, whereby violence itself, as a result of
such a right, can be used legally by us.” “A woman’s fate is to be like a
she-wolf, a bitch: she must belong to everyone who wants her.” Sade denies that
this contradicts what he said earlier about women never being the property of
any man. It is true, no woman belongs
to any one man, but that doesn’t mean that she cannot be used by any man who wants her. In other words, she can never be private property because she is meant to be public property. And because this is in fact what she wants anyway,
that is, what her nature commands her to do, men do not really wrong her by
forcing their will upon her. They just help her being what she is meant to be. They
allow her to exercise her rights: “First of all, by what right do you demand
that a woman should be excepted from the blind submission that nature
prescribes for her in male caprices? And then, by what other right do you
demand that she should surrender to a continence that is impossible for her
body and absolutely hopeless for her honour?” So by a happy coincidence both
men and women get what they want. And this will certainly, Sade claims, increase
universal happiness.
Yet
Sade goes even further than that, invoking yet another (and of course equally
faulty) argument from nature: “If nature didn’t mean for man to be superior,
then it would not have taken the creatures given to him for this instant and
created them weaker than man. The debility to which nature has doomed women proves
incontestably that it intends for man, who delights more than ever in his
power, to exercise it with all the violence he prefers. Indeed, he can even
torture the woman to death if he so wishes.” Not much is left here of the
rights of women that Sade seemed to be defending earlier.
Sade
was certainly a misogynist, but I suspect that underlying Sade’s whole
philosophy is a deep-seated hatred not only of the female sex, but in fact of
the whole human race. “The entire human species could be snuffed out, and the
air would be no less pure, the constellations no less radiant, the rhythm of
the universe no less exact!” It would certainly be no great loss, assuming that
the universe is indeed as cold and empty as Sade believed. Born out of
self-loathing, a human-nature disgust that Sade may have inherited from Jonathan
Swift, what he proposes is essentially a recipe for self-destruction. Because
what nature ultimately wants is us gone.
