Scattered throughout Sade’s writings we find a highly detailed, almost manic, and at any rate un-literary in the sense of stylistically encumbering, collection of examples of odd customs and practices. Sade has systematically taken excerpts from one travel account after another and has also had an eye for the bizarre. The ethnographic material documents the absence of shared and universal adaptations. Given the extreme differences in form and figure displayed by humans according to their climatic circumstances, one has to reject the notion of something common to all mankind beyond the simple fact that human beings form a species, but as a species are also comparable to rabbits and hens. In other words, referring to human beings’ diversity, Sade denies the great innovation of Enlightenment philosophy meant to replace the neighbor in Christianity and fellow man in humanism: humanity and humaneness. So, on this level, he denies both historical and transcendental universality. People are nature; they cannot override nature, for to override, to transcend, this is nature itself. So the only way we can deal with the absolute relativity of the work of man and the resultant cultural relativism is to let nature have its way and follow its plan. Nature does not, however, have any special, Kantian for example, plan for humankind. Nature’s plan is to remain being what it is: nature.
Thus, on the one hand it would be justifiabloe to pin the label “back to nature” on Sade’s philosophy rather than on Rousseau’s, but on the other hand a libertine’s nature is entirely different from the good nature of romanticism. It also means that we are not to ‘return’ to nature, so to speak, seeing as we never left it. We can safely trust in nature. If this expression can nevertheless be used in connection with both Sade and Rousseau, it is because through the work of man we have attempted to leave nature behind us. Allow me to cite a long quotation put into the mouth of Juliette’s first instructor, Delbène, summing up a redundant series of parallel formulations from Sade’s earlier work. As an important part of the libertine’s passions, it is as always a question of securing an apprentice by breaking down this still innocent being’s prejudices on ways and customs, morality and religion. Not until the apprentice has become a hardened libertine and can argue as a libertine is the seduction consummated. In the battle against ingrained prejudices, the following is said about customs: “Depending absolutely upon the degree of latitude in which a country chances to be located, manners and morals are an arbitrary affair, and can be nothing else. Nature prohibits nothing; but laws are dreamt up by men, and these petty regulations pretend to impose certain restraints upon people; it’s all a question of the air’s temperature, of the richness or poverty of the soil in the district, of the climate, of the sort of men involved, these are the unconstant factors that go into making your manners and morals. And these limitative laws, these curbs and injunctions, aren’t in any sense sacred, in any way legitimate from the viewpoint of pilosophy, whose clairvoyance penetrates error, dissipates myth, and to the wise man leaves nothing standing but the fundamental inspirations of Nature. Well, nothing is more immoral than Nature; never has she burdened us with interdictions or restraints, manners and morals have never been promulgated by her” (JL VIII p. 97f.; p. 51). In this emphasis we find a synopsis of Sade’s philosophical point, which is an interesting one repeated in various ways throughout thousands of highly immoral pages.
It is all about the pure impulses of nature and the transgression of limitations and laws demanded by them. Nothing is prohibited by nature. Prohibitions stem from cultural bonds without sanctions in nature. Ways and customs vary and are in reality relative: if one drives 50 kilometers away from Paris, for example, the world looks different. The only possible reason for obeying a country’s laws is that it is wise to do so – with a view to being able to follow the pure impulses of one’s nature. Thus, we see an empirically based philosophy of spontaneous manifestations of life, that is, of violence and transgression; complemented by a lesson in social wisdom saying that it is natural to look after one’s nature.
The lesson is founded in a radical relativism that makes the later versions of the same phenomenon, from the romantic national characters in Herder through the many cultures of Malinowski’s cultural anthropology and on to the versions in the philosophy of language from Wittgenstein to Lyotard, seem feeble. But the point is that this does not present a problem for Sade, since in fact he is not arguing for relativism and against universalism but against one universalism and for another universalism: against dogmatic universalism and for a natural universalism. Or, in short, against law, for Nature. Only here does he become godless. He does not mix up divinity and nature as was the habit of the times, but he challenges God because the champions of virtue want to sanction the law in God. It is the law he is examining.
Sade and Kierkegaard
Thus, Sade is epistemically bound to the contradiction between law and nature, but his concern constitutes such a radical insistence on nature that the excess is blasting its way toward a new problematic. The way the problem presents itself might be seen more clearly in the light of the opposite position: a position that insists so radically on the law that it is also pointing towards a new problematic. We should not search for a position that insists on a little naturalism and a subsequent feeble relativism; we should search for such a radical insistence on the law that nature is suspended and relative existence is made absolute. This is why I suggested already in my introduction that Sade’s counterpart is Kierkegaard. Sade-Juliette meets his equivalent and illustrative opposition in Kierkegaard-Justine. Opposites they are, but in their eroticization of philosophy and blasting of the ethical problematic they are brothers.
In other words, structurally speaking one can take an interest in Sade’s naturalism for the same reason that one must take an interest today in Kierkegaard, the most radical querist not of nature like Sade but of the law as the basis for morality. Working with this unlikely couple defines the boundaries of a new problematic concerning an ethics beyond law and nature, and the interest in one of them is justified with reference to the other.
Sade is the sharpest critic of the idea that a normative foundation for nature can be derived and traced: if we define morality as the limits to what one can do out of regard for and with regard to the other, then Sade is critical of the notion of natural regard. If nature teaches us anything, its moral is the misfortunes of virtue and the prosperity of vice (lex Sade). In this way he contrasts with Kierkegaard, which can be demonstrated in the manner that each of them relates to sensuality. In Kierkegaard sensuality is marked by elaborate fore-thought; in Sade it is fore-told. Everything must be said in Sade – everything must also be said.
While Kierkegaard claims that the law has reality and that one law can suspend another, Sade claims before him that nature has reality and that one conception of nature suspends another. But both law and nature are thought of radically here. If there is to be an ethics, it has to come from law, claims Kierkegaard. If there is to be an ethics, it has to come from nature, claims Sade; though, of course, neither of them would have expressed it in this way. What is interesting is that an ethics cannot exist on either of these foundations. For Kierkegaard, ethics comes before the law, so to speak, and above and beyond the law. For Sade, ethics comes before nature, and above and beyond nature; that is, as something other than the prevalent conception of law and nature. They defend a more-than societal law or societal nature. For both of them it is a matter of acting out talents, which then results in a kind of usefulness, a philosophy of utilitarianism but without utilitarianism’s principle of happiness, which, on the contrary, is concrete and concerns the happiness of as many as possible. To maintain the idea of being useful to as many as possible as telos seems abominable to these gentlemen. And they agree as well that evil demands talent – contrary to goodness.
The two figures can then be used to play through the two traditional bases for ethics (law, nature), because they are at once the foremost expositors and critics of these two bases. But both of them speak within a discourse of love, a discourse on generalized sexuality. They discuss spiritual and physical love (narcissism as Christian charity and sexuality as the acting out of passions, respectively). They also share the para-philosophy that uses literature.
Kierkegaard wrote Deeds of Love,