Much Sense the Starkest Madness

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Notes

notes

I would like to thank Jacob Busch, Lauren Ashwell, Katrina Lawson, and Sterling Lynch for various conversations that informed and strengthened the arguments in this paper. I would also like to thank Charles Pigden, Chris Mathews and Denis Robinson for bringing some important texts to my attention. Finally, I would like to thank Erik Koed and an anonymous reviewer for Angelaki for invaluable guidance and criticism of earlier versions, and S.K. for her generous assistance with material in French.

1 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1999) 118.

2 Marcel Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, trans. Xavier Callahan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999) 288–89; Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Melbourne: Scribe, 2003) 190–95; Annie Le Brun, Sade: A Sudden Abyss, trans. Camille Naish (San Francisco: City Lights, 1990) 70.

3 A number of critics have disagreed with the whole principle of reading Sade as a philosopher, arguing that Sade was primarily a writer of humorous satires (John Phillips), of pure text (Roland Barthes) or pure fictions (Hénaff). See John Phillips, “Laugh? I Nearly Died! Humor in Sade's Fiction,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40.1 (1999): 46–67; Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 137. To place Sade in the context of other philosophers, argues Hénaff, we “draw Sade into a debate that is not and cannot be his own [because a] theoretical statement embedded in a work of fiction is itself a work of fiction […] ” (Hénaff 290). In response, it could be argued that Sade repeatedly referred to himself as a philosopher in his correspondence, that he filled his novels with philosophical debate, frequently plagiarized from Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Baron d’Holbach, and that he did on occasion write explicit statements of philosophical belief, such as the poem La Vérité. But these facts are really beside the point. Against Hénaff, I suggest that it is simply a fallacy of relevance to take as relevant the identity of the author (whether as a writer of philosophy or a writer of fictions) when analysing an argument penned by that author. That is, the fictional context of an argument does not bear on that argument's validity. If this were not the case, the philosophical novel would be a logical impossibility, as would the explicitly (and paradoxical) philosophical claims of Sade's importance made by Phillips, Hénaff and others. In short, whether Sade had ever existed (and was in fact the product of an elaborate literary hoax) is irrelevant to the general, philosophical thesis I am proposing: against Adorno and Horkheimer, I argue that the works traditionally attributed to Sade do not contain a compelling rejection of conventional morality. The poem La Vérité is in Marquis de Sade, Œuvres complètes, eds. Annie le Brun and Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 15 vols. (Paris: Pauvert, 1986–91) 1: 548–59. For Sade's insistence that he was a philosopher, see Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writing, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (London: Arrow, 1991) 137, 138, 153.

4 As Sade denied authorship of his immoralist works, we cannot be sure that his characters represent his own views. For examples of such denials, see Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (London: Arrow, 1990) 116, 122.

5 Marquis de Sade, [the story of] Juliette [or, Prosperities of Vice], trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove, 1968) 174.

6 A fourth, conventional theory appears in Sade's 1793 novel Aline et Valcour ou le Roman philosophique [Aline and Valcour or the Philosophical Novel]. Zamé, philosopher-king of a fictional island near New Zealand, espouses a doctrine of benevolent despotism based on the more Spartan principles of Rousseau. See Marquis de Sade, Aline et Valcour ou le Roman philosophique, ed. Jean M. Goulemot (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1994) 294–339.

7 Sade's characters all but identify the naturalistic fallacy in two passages. In The Misfortunes of Virtue, the character Dubois presents the naturalistic argument in favour of vice. In response, Justine notes that this same argument can just as easily be applied to defend virtue. See Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 126. In Juliette, Pope Pius VI notes that all “creatures,” including humans, are merely the result of “Nature's unthinking operations […] ” He concludes that man “thus has no relationship to Nature, nor Nature to man […] whether he were to quadruple his species or annihilate it totally, the universe would not be in the slightest the worse for it. If man destroys himself, he does wrong–in his own eyes” (Sade, Juliette 766–67). For discussion of Sade's ethical naturalism, see Pierre Klossowski, Sade my Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991) 86–93; Caroline Warman, Sade: From Materialism to Pornography, SVEC 2002:1 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002) 146–63; Maurice Blanchot, “Sade,” trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writing (London: Arrow, 1991) 37–72.

8 Tzvetan Todorov, Le Jardin imparfait: La Pensée humaniste en France (Paris: Grasset, 1998) 45–46.

9 This is not to say that Sade's arguments for immoralism were not possibly very compelling to his contemporaries.

10 J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin, 1990) 88.

11 For a discussion of this view, see Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Monday 30 July 2007), available <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/> (accessed 8 Aug. 2009). For Sade's anti-realism stance, see Juliette 170–71.

12 In Juliette, Sade writes:

we had better, I think, come to some sort of understanding upon what we mean by just and unjust. If now you meditate a little upon the ideas lying behind these terms, you will recognize that they are most profoundly relative, and profoundly lacking in anything intrinsically real. Similar to concepts of virtue and vice, they are purely local and geographical; that which is vicious in Paris turns up, as we know, a virtue in Peking, and it is quite the same thing here […] Amidst these manifold variations do we discover anything constant? Only this: each country's peculiar legal code, each individual's peculiar interests, provide[s] the sole basis of justice […] Despite the allegations of your demi-philosopher Montesquieu, justice is not eternal, it is not immutable, it is not in all lands and in all ages the same; those are falsehoods, and the truth is the reverse: justice depends purely upon the human conventions, the character, the temperament, the national moral codes of a country. (Sade, Juliette 605, 606–07; my emphasis)

13 Saint-Prât reasons:

One might as well doubt the reality of a river, because it divides into a thousand different streams […] Show me a single race that lives without virtue, a single one among whom good deeds and humanity are not the fundamental bonds, I will go further, show me even a band of villains who are not kept together by some principles of virtue, and I [will] renounce my cause; but if on the contrary it is shown to be useful everywhere, if there is no nation, no state, no society, no individual that can do without it, if man, in fact, cannot live happily or safely without it, would I be wrong, my child, in exhorting you never to relinquish it? (Marquis de Sade, The Gothic Tales of the Marquis de Sade, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Picador, 1990) 104–05)

14 Sade, Juliette 782–98, 620, 917.

15 For discussion of this point, see sections 2 and 3 of Chris Gowans, “Moral Relativism” (substantive revision Wednesday 10 Mar. 2004), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, available <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/> (accessed 30 Oct. 2009).

16 Sade, Juliette 170–71; idem, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings 495.

17 Idem, Juliette 642.

18 See David Hume, Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (London and New York: Hafner, 1948) 25; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1991) 314.

19 See, for example, Alison Hills, “Is Ethics Rationally Required?,” Inquiry 47.1 (2004): 1–19; Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), in particular chapter 4; Kai Nielsen, Ethics without God, rev. ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1990) 178.

20 For discussion of this point, see Joshua Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (Oct. 2003) 846–49.

21 Sade, Juliette 171.

22 Ibid. 277.

23 As such, Sade echoes Baruch de Spinoza: “[h]e who is moved to help others neither by reason nor by compassion, is rightly styled inhuman, for […] he seems unlike a man” (Benedict de [Baruch de] Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding/The Ethics/Correspondence, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955) 221–22).

24 For discussion on the social reality of money, see Gloria L. Zúñiga, “An Ontology of Economic Objects,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 58.2 (1999): 299–312. For discussion on realist and quasi-realist accounts of morality, see Peter Tramel, “Moral Epistemology” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden (2008), available <http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/mor-epis.htm> (accessed 5 Aug. 2009).

25 Mackie 106.

26 Ibid. 34; Charles E. Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 149; Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) 236; Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).

27 Le Brun, Sade 70.

28 Rousseau 292.

29 See Donald A. Crosby, The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism (New York: State U of New York P, 1988) chapter 9.

30 Nielsen 118.

31 Sade, Juliette 115.

32 Ibid. 144.

33 See, for example, Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1988); Robert Nozick, Invariances: The Structures of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2001) 266–67; Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature Vol. 1, adapted from an original translation by H.D. Robinson, 1868 (London: Clinamen, 1999) 99, 108, 221.

34 Sade, Juliette 318.

35 Marquis de Sade, La Nouvelle Justine, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions 10/18, 1978) 1: 380. Trans. author and S.K.

36 For discussion, see Mackie 165; Nielsen 176; Robert Axelrod, “The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists,” American Political Science Review 75.2 (1981): 306–18; Steven Kuhn, “Prisoner's Dilemma” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (fall 2003 ed.), available <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/prisoner-dilemma/> (accessed 8 Sept. 2009); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002) 255–58.

37 Plato, The Republic, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987) 96–97.

38 Note again the explicit association of atheism and immorality.

39 Sade, Juliette 418.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid. 41; Sade's emphasis.

42 Ibid. 427.

43 Ibid. 421, 424, 425.

44 Ibid. 420, 421–25.

45 Ibid. 421.

46 Ibid. 143; Béatrice Fink, “The Case for a Political System in Sade,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 88 (1972): 493–512 (501).

47 Sade, Juliette 418.

48 Article 29 of the Statutes of the Sodality of the Friends of Crime reads:

The jealousies, the quarrels, the scenes entailed in love, as well as the language of love, endearing expressions, tender ones, etc., are absolutely prohibited; all this is detrimental to libertinage, and libertinage is the business to which the Sodality is to attend. (Sade, Juliette 423)

49 Ibid. 419, 423.

50 Ibid. 418.

51 Ibid. 425.

52 Ibid. 147, 206, 243, 270.

53 Ibid. 619, 626, 740, 908; idem, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings 611–622, 666.

54 Plato, Protagoras and Meno, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie (London: Penguin, 1986) 53–55. Cited in Mackie 108, 110.

55 Sade does not explicitly refer to utilitarianism by name, but he refers to Claude Adrien Helvétius, a utilitarian ethicist for whom all morality and social policy is a matter of configurating society to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. See Sade, Juliette 175.

56 Ibid. 143.

57 Sade, Aline et Valcour ou le Roman philosophique 539. For discussion of this account as a reflection of Sade's “moral autism,” see Laurence Bongie, Sade: A Biographical Essay (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998) 241–43.

58 Sade, La Nouvelle Justine 1: 212; idem, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales 57, 59, 104; idem, Juliette 727–28.

59 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907) 420.

60 Sade, La Nouvelle Justine 1: 138.

61 See, for example, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994) 191.

62 For discussion of this approach, see John Van Ingen, Why be Moral? The Egoistic Challenge (New York: Lang, 1994) 37–55, 79.

63 Whether or not Sade had read Plato's Republic is not known. Jean Deprun has noted the similarity between Sade and Callicles, and that there was an excellent translation available in Sade's time. See Jean Deprun, “Sade devant la ‘Règle d’or’” in La Quête du bonheur et l’expression de la douleur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises: mélanges offerts à Corrado Rosso, eds. Corrado Rosso and Carminella Biondi (Geneva: Droz, 1995) 307–11 (309). Michel Foucault loosely makes the association of Juliette and Thrasymachus in Madness and Civilization; see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988) xi–xii.

64 Plato, Gorgias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1994) 42–43; idem, The Republic 85–86.

65 Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings 453. Note the narcissism implicit in this description: crime is “brilliant” as it “dazzles” the victim with the assailant's power.

66 Sade, Juliette 553.

67 Ibid. 215, 124, 279–80.

68 Plato, The Republic 392.

69 Hume 261; Mackie 190.

70 See, for example, Nielsen 116; Hume 259; [François-Marie Arouet] Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Theodore Besterman (London: Penguin, 1972) 29.

71 Here I am paraphrasing Hilary Bok, “Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Friday 18 July 2003), available <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu>, section 4.1 (accessed 24 Oct. 2009).

72 Hume 261.

73 Sade, La Nouvelle Justine 1: 357.

74 Idem, Juliette 243, 274, 1030.

75 Ibid. 1186.

76 Ibid. 598, 958, 1003, 1030, 1168.

77 Joyce, The Myth of Morality 33.

78 Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales xli.

79 For compilations of such libertine works, see Michel Feher (ed.), The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Zone, 1997); and Patrick Wald Lasowski (ed.), Romanciers libertins du XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade/Gallimard, 2000). For discussion of Kant's sexual conservativeness, see Alan Soble, “Kant and Sexual Perversion,” The Monist 86.1 (2003): 55–89.

80 For discussion of Sade's account of the psychology of sadistic pleasure, see Geoffrey Roche, “Enigma of the Will: Sade's Psychology of Evil,” Janus Head 11.2 (2009): 365–401.

81 Sade, Juliette 710, 763.

82 Mackie 213.

83 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings 251.

84 Idem, Juliette 550–51.

85 Idem, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales 126–27.

86 See Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787–1868 (London: Pan, 1987) 24.

87 Simon Blackburn, Being Good (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 71.

88 For discussion of this point in the context of evolutionary theory, see Linda Mealey, “The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 18.3 (1995): 523–99; Martin A. Nowak, Robert M. May and Karl Sigmund, “The Arithmetics of Mutual Help,” Scientific American 272.6 (1995): 76–81.

89 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor, 1956) 174.

90 Adorno and Horkheimer 118.