Monday, December 13, 2004

Sadean Philosophy

The Marquis de Sade lived in rather decadent times in the decline of civilization. At the end of civilization, there is almost invariably revolution. There has to be, because man cannot live as a brute. Sade lived at the time of the French Revolution. He has been referred to as the anti-Montesquieu, while in contrast, the Founding Fathers agreed with or took much of their philosophy from Montesquieu. Their philosophy was based on transcendence and Natural Law, Sadean philosophy is based on immanence and the supposed laws of Nature, survival of the fittest. The French Revolution was the advent of socialism and later the Nazis would repeat a brutish Sadean philosophy as socialists.

Evil is essence, it is transcendent. Yet those who live as slaves to Evil typically deny the spiritual, the philosophic, the metaphysical, in favor of the physical, the personal.

Example,
"[Sade] immediately relativizes, personalizes, narcissizes the idea of justice. He makes it into a human structure riddled with egotistical and contradictory impulses, into a sublimation of our passions:

'...let us have the courage to tell men that justice is a myth, and that each individual never actually heeds any but his own version of it; let us say so fearlessly. Declaring it to them, and giving them thus to appreciate all the dangers of human existence, our warning enables them to ready a defense and in their turn to forge themselves the weapon of injustice, since only by becoming as unjust, as vicious as everybody else can they hope to elude the traps set by others. 'Sade, in fact, restores tribal law, a world of retaliation.....

.....the rituals of cruelty staged by Sade do not lead to the accomplishment of any end, nor are they redeemed by any form of transcendence; their function is one of loss, of waste for its own sake. They continually repeat the desire to escape the social order, to liberate the actors from all social taboos. Sadean atrocities—torture, cannibalism, murder—are performed in an absolute vacuum of significance. No mystical transcendence is there to shore it up."
(Original Vengeance: Politics, Anthropology,
and the French Enlightenment
By Pierre Saint-Amand
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26,
No.3. (Spring, 1993), pp. 399-417)

"Sade is the anti-Montesquieu of the Enlightenment. Indeed, he mentions Montesquieu in Juliette only to denigrate him as a second- rate philosopher. Sade exposes, and opposes, the idealistic dimension of Montesquieu’s political science. Montesquieu’si deal of justice is unacceptable in Sadean politics. It must be replaced by an implacable judicial relativism, by private passions and interests — precisely what Montesquieu was at pains to repress in order to demonstrate the possibility of peaceful cohabitation."
(Ib.)

This ".....implacable judicial relativism....." guided by private passions is very popular in the American Republic.

Sade, on private passions,
"The Marquis de Sade reverses the Rousseauean use of nature: Sade uses the category “nature” to affirm bisexual aristocratic libertinage. In Philosophy in the Bedroom (first published in 1795), Sade rejects the contention.....that nature endorses heterosexual vaginal copulation because of its procreative function. Sade asserts that sodomy is within the boundaries of nature and adds,'Those who wish to denigrate the taste or proscribe its practice declare it is harmful to population; how dull-witted they are, these imbeciles who think of nothing but the multiplication of their kind, and who detect nothing but the crime in anything that conduces to a different end. Is it really so firmly established that Nature has so great a need for this overcrowding as they would like to have us believe?

. . . It is false that Nature intends this sperinatic liquid to be employed only and entirely for reproduction.' Sade flatly rejects the absolute, qualitative, procreative standard increasingly used in the eighteenth century to define the “natural.” "
(Erotic "Remedy" Prints and the Fall of the
Aristocracy in Eighteenth-Century France
By Mary L. Bellhouse
Political Theory, Vol. 25, No. 5. (Oct., 1997), pp. 680-715)

"....Nature has so great a need for this overcrowding....."

That is also typical, for Evil. There is this creeping idolatry of Mother Nature, a desire to raise the Asherah poles again, you see.

5 comments:

mynym said...

Excrement and PhilosophySadean: Excrement happens, so throw it on someone else.

Charismatic: This is not excrement and it doesn't smell bad. It's holy excrement.

Jesuit: If excrement happens when nobody is watching, was it really excrement?

Zen: If excrement happens, meditate on it.

Islam: If excrement happens, it is the will of Allah.

Unitarian: Excrement is born that way, we're having a meeting next week to discuss tolerance of excrement. There will be cookies and donuts.

Jewish: Why does excrement always have to happen to us?

Agnostic: I do not know that excrement happens.

Atheist: I do not believe in excrement.

New Age: Try to visualize excrement not happening.

Existentialist: Excrement doesn't happen; excrement is.

Secular Humanist: Excrement evolves.

Hinduism: I think I smelled this in a past life.

Wicca: I have a recipe for excrement.

Theosophy: You do not know half of the excrement that happens.

Seventh Day Adventist: No excrement on Saturdays.

Jehovah's Witnesses: No excrement happens until Armageddon.

Calvinist: Excrement was predestined to happen.

(Anonymous, edited, added to and modified by mynym)

mynym said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mynym said...

Thomas Jefferson, on judicial relativism:

"Nothing in the Constitution has given them a right to decide for the Executive. The opinion which (lets) judges decide what laws are constitutional....would make the Judiciary a despotic branch." --Jefferson

"The original error [was in] establishing a judiciary independent of the nation, and which, from the citadel of the law, can turn its guns on those they were meant to defend, and control and fashion their proceedings to its own will." Ib.

"One single object [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation." Ib.

Anonymous said...

"Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow."

--G.K.Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"Thought you might appreciate this quotation.

Carl

mynym said...

One of these days I'll get around to discussing Neitzche on a blog that is has him in the title.

I think Chesterton also noted his passive agressive writing style.

I may make use of a lot of different styles, including that one. If you read inbetween the lines and twist the twisted, you can draw the line. I would say that Neitzche was brilliant. It's too bad about being a false prophet though. They seem to go insane in the membrane.