Yet Another Effort, Libertines, If You Would Become Philosophers

[Contains spoilers for Philosophy in the Bedroom, Atlas Shrugged, and The Thousandfold Thought.]

In case you didn’t get it from the title, this is a book review of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. All quotes are from the Seaver and Wainhouse translation.

I.

How much of Socrates’ success was actually due to his clever arguments and profound perception of truth, and how much was just – a judicious choice of students? That is to say: how gullible are young people, really?

We begin with the premise: A teenager, say fourteen or fifteen, meets a stranger in his thirties – a stranger with veeeeeeeeery different values than anyone they’ve encountered before. The society our youth lives in is structured, filled with rules based on tradition and religion – rules which they’ve been brought up to believe are inviolable, that unquestioningly establish the good and honorable, separating it from the bad and wrong. This stranger, though, introduces them to a new world. With convoluted yet strangely compelling logical arguments, he proves unquestionably that the commonly held values in our youth’s society are mere lies, falsehoods, and nonsense. Rules such as these, the outsider claims, were made to be violated. What is forbidden by their society, morally and sexually, should really be not only permitted but encouraged, because the world outside the rules is simply – better. Our teenager swallows this argument completely.

Would converting our youth really be so easy for this morally-questionable stranger, though? Myself, I’m not so sure. I do, though, know two people who would answer yes to this question: the Marquis de Sade, and, yes, R. Scott Bakker. Since of course I am referring to the backstory of Cnaiür and Moënghus.

Would Eugénie, like Cnaiür, later come to regret falling in with Dolmance’s teachings, throwing away the stable value system her society had bequeathed her in favor of anarchy and calculating self-interest? Or was her conversion entire – would she remain a believing libertine to the end of her days?

How gullible, really, are the youth?

But after all, we too were once youths. How gullible were we? And how much that we believe now, came from…but I digress.

II.

As is only right and proper to ask of any book: What, then, is the purpose for which the Marquis de Sade wrote Philosophy in the Bedroom?

The question this time is not so difficult to answer. Like Ayn Rand, de Sade wrote in order to reveal his ideology in the more compelling form of a story, or in this case, a dialog.

If you are unfamiliar with it, his ideology mostly revolves around fulfilling sexual desires to the extreme. That is, he sees the entire purpose of human life as maximizing sexual pleasure. Things that get in the way, such as Christianity, are to be avoided – or if possible, gotten rid of entirely.

His beliefs are not without a political component. In between anti-Christian diatribes, he manages to squeeze in some description of his conception of a utopian society (the only thing he does conceive, children being unneeded impediments to his sexual adventuring). His ideal society is surprisingly libertarian – and yet, still a far cry from Rand’s Atlantis (think fewer railroads, but more sex). Like Rand, de Sade does not believe in excessive government interference. However, unlike Rand, who wants the government to get their dirty fingers out of commerce and trade, those practices de Sade wants the government to stop interfering with are rape and murder:

Briefly, murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State.

The extent to which these two not terribly similar authors share certain ideals of libertarianism might have something to do with their similar views of human nature. That is, both have comparable thoughts on the value of selfishness and humanity’s natural inclinations thereto. Compare de Sade’s version here to Rand’s egoism:

For what reason then ought we to go softly with an individual who feels one thing while we feel another? Why should we spare him a torment that will cost us never a tear, when it is certain that from this suffering a very great pleasure for us will be born? Have we ever felt a single natural impulse advising us to prefer others to ourselves, and is each of us not alone, and for himself in this world? ‘Tis a very false tone you use when you speak to us of this Nature which you interpret as telling us not to do to others what we would not have done to us; such stuff never came but from the lips of men, and weak men.

Despite de Sade’s extreme degree of tolerance of what in other societies would be considered crime, his philosophy is still in some aspects not quite as libertarian as Rand’s – since, he does approve of certain government subsidies. For what, perhaps you can already guess:

We are persuaded that lust, being a product of those penchants, is not to be stifled or legislated against, but that it is, rather, a matter of arranging for the means whereby passion may be satisfied in peace…Various stations, cheerful, sanitary, spacious, properly furnished and in every respect safe, will be erected in divers points in each city; in them, all sexes, all ages, all creatures possible will be offered to the caprices of the libertines who shall come to divert themselves, and the most absolute subordination will be the rule of the individuals participating—the slightest refusal or recalcitrance will be instantly and arbi­trarily punished by the injured party.

This will be useful to the government because, so claims de Sade, it will stop citizens from attempting revolt:

If you would avoid that danger, permit a free flight and rein to those tyrannical desires which, despite himself, torment man ceaselessly: content with having been able to exercise his small dominion in the middle of the harem of sultanas and youths whose submission your good offices and his money procure for him, he will go away appeased and with nothing but fond feelings for a government which so obligingly affords him every means of satisfying his concupiscence…

Besides allowing slander, theft, rape, and murder, de Sade’s ideal society will in general have no laws, no familial relationships, no social safety net, etc. But the rest of this de Sade seems to consider minor details – most of his discussion revolves around that sole topic closest to the French author’s heart.

Considering his other…novels, one should probably not be surprised by this singular focus in de Sade’s politics. But supposing de Sade desires anarchy and chaos, which are what a society set up in that way is bound to produce, there are still other pitfalls he has overlooked. Even if de Sade’s policies were somehow able to be implemented, they would ultimately in a few generations have effects which would not be very pleasing – not even to de Sade.

Suppose people really did implement de Sade’s perfect society, in all its details and policies. What results do you expect it would have, immediately and in the long term?

Well, people would rebel, of course! They wouldn’t stand for it! Rape! Murder! Theft!

Oh, spare me. People already stand for thousands of petty thefts that go unpunished. People stand for rioting in the streets. People stood for Vietnam and Iraq and the Weather Underground and on and on. And if you think we should #doubtwomen and in reality people wouldn’t actually stand for rape – I ask you to please consider history, some of it fairly recent (such as whether certain things about the Allied occupying forces following WWII have been left unsaid). If de Sade’s new society were once implemented, make no mistake – people would stand for it (and lie for it, and bend over for it, etc.).

No, the problems come later. De Sade recognizes that half the fun in opposing Christianity is in the act of opposition itself – in saying what the establishment holds up as good is in fact bad, and vice versa. Christianity makes a good enemy for him because of its high status in society (falling even then, but still, in the late 1700’s, retaining enough prestige to make a worthy target). Opposing Christianity in those days still had the air of overcoming about it, a sense of revolution and of opposition to the mainstream. This is what attracts people to anti-Christianity. That people still do this, coming to atheism these days as if they are rebelling against some all-powerful edifice of the church, instead of merely brushing aside the last remnants of a dying institution, is the greatest trick the Democrats ever pulled (the progressive ones, at least). People these days join the anti-Christian establishment to feel like a rebel, and write for the opposition to feel conservative. Like communism, western liberal ideology constantly needs something to attack, to rebel against, to feed on to stay alive. As in Mao’s China, there is a certain amount of feeding on itself that happens in any case, but having a cultivated opposition certainly helps keep it to a minimum (Yet Another Enemy, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Communists!).

But if de Sade’s philosophy won out, and everyone embraced the ideals of absolute libertinage, embraced them entirely – where would the people go from there?

Imagine you are de Sade, leading the revolution to establish a new sexual utopia. As the first generation, you might be content with having overcome Christianity. But what about the second generation? And the third? (Though as a friend commented, considering de Sade’s advocacy of abortion – what second generation?) With everything allowed, everything permissible, what will your descendants do to rebel? Or do you think your reforms will quench all subsequent revolutionary impulses in your descendants, just because they’re allowed to satisfy certain sexual urges (and only certain ones, even – or especially – in an all-goes society, but I’ll come to that later). As the first generation, you might rebel against the establishment – but what will your children do to rebel against you? For make no mistake, rebel they will. Desiring to experience the thrill of transgression – what route will they then have to follow?

I can see two possibilities. First, they might take your philosophy even further, reaching into depths so dark and terrible I cannot sitting here imagine them – but having been raised in a society where violent and sexual extremes are commonplace, perhaps their imaginations will stretch far afield of mine. How long society would last under such conditions I cannot say. Perhaps it would want to end itself, beg for death to gain some respite from the horrors. Perhaps the land would cast them out as abominations as in the Old Testament. Is this what de Sade wants?

But the second path, and I think perhaps the more likely because it is easier, is one de Sade would be very unhappy to discover. That is, your children will rebel against you by going back to the past, in the manner of reactionaries. They will see your sexual revolution as the next establishment, and in response, turn back to sexual taboos, virginity, Christianity and purity, all the ideals reviled in de Sade’s perfect society, just as de Sade’s are in a Christian-based society. De Sade’s success will lead inevitably to its own failure, as people, in order to be rebels, rebel against the last generation’s revolutionary philosophies. The ideals will switch places every generation or two. Surely, this isn’t what de Sade is aiming for. (And as Moldbug says, a society that cannot maintain itself – that fails on the criterion of security – is a failure.)

Not to mention the limits on sexual gratification that would arise in such a society.

Wait, what? The whole point of de Sade’s utopia was that anything goes, how would there be limits?

Consider: de Sade (as Dolmance) claims to not really care what his partner/victim is experiencing, but still agrees that pain is generally preferred to pleasure. Now, physical pain is just that – physical – and easy enough to cause by means well known even today. But what about people who get off on other, more metaphysical sorts of pain?

In de Sade’s society, people will be taught and come to accept that it is good and right and natural to engage in any sexual impulse, and to go along with everyone else’s sexual impulses as well. How, then, will anyone be able to rape anyone else, if everyone just goes along with them? Where to find an unwilling victim, when all are willing? The game will suddenly be without challenge. Will they have to do it all as acting? I ask you, friend – is that an appropriately libertine way of going about things?

Or consider this – de Sade says to do away with all shame, but what about those who get off on shame itself? He says never to repent – what about those who take a prurient interest in repentance? Not only would hedonists of other stripes be ill-content with de Sade’s sex-fixated utopia, the concept doesn’t even fulfill the purposes of it’s intended beneficiaries.

In this brave new world, how will anyone be able, just as Dolmance is doing (and getting off on doing) in Philosophy in the Bedroom, to teach the starry-eyed youth the joys of transgressing moral boundaries, in a world where no moral boundaries are established in the first place?

Destruction is a joy, but also a loss. Something must be created in order for you to destroy it. An anarchist system is not suited to anarchists, since in such a system everything that can be destroyed already has been, and there is nothing left for them to satisfy their impulses upon.

And again, those who get off on transgressing limits and boundaries, on doing that which they know to be wrong and evil – what will those people then turn to?

III.

So, taken to its logical conclusions, de Sade’s utopia doesn’t hold up to its values and purposes. Well, what utopia does? Alas, de Sade’s justifications for his foundational ideals, although often creative, also find themselves on shaky ground.

De Sade’s arguments for the superiority of his version of hedonism are based primarily on the idea of Natural Law – that is, he claims his ideas are closest to what Nature intended for humanity, if one only considers it logically. Unfortunately for him, determining what Nature intends is a complicated business, as I’ve discussed before, and fraught with contradiction.

For example, take his argument for why men are naturally made to dominate women:

It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, we can employ it lawfully. Indeed! has Nature not proven that we have that right, by bestowing upon us the strength needed to bend women to our will?

But human strength comes from much more than mere physical prowess. Consider: when de Sade describes allowing murder, does he mean it has to be done with one’s bare hands? Or, as seems more likely, are weapons permitted?

And if they are, one might imagine a world in which, if the Women’s Liberation Movement had lived up to its name just a bit more, we might have a very different might-makes-right situation on our hands.

Which brings us to the concept of power, as natural a concept as ever was. If Nature was opposed to power – then why in heaven and earth did she make it a fundamental human drive to seek it? Why make people unequal in their capabilities and circumstances if not to allow one to have power over another?

And if men might have power over women – why not, then, might governments have power over men?

De Sade rails against governments as unnatural constructs. But since every human society seems to form them, well…that seems a pretty good indication of what’s “natural” to me.

Whether power is good or bad, right or wrong, though, it is tough to argue that it doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t affect the world. Power is just about as fundamental of a Natural Law of human societies as one can find.

Thus, why the concept of “consent of the governed” is such nonsense. Governments run on power – and power does not ask for consent. Power just is. As Leckie’s ilk has noticed (review forthcoming), Power might want to ask for consent, might try to ask for consent – but whether it gets it or not, it is still going to be able to do whatever it damn well pleases. So then – why ask? Why bother?

Consent is a false concept, not because it is “wrong” or “right,” but because it is so fundamentally opposed to Natural Law as to make it unimplementable, like a perpetual motion machine.

And as it goes with governments, so it goes with human relationships in general. Power is not going to go away because we wish it away or ignore it. Consent is a lie, a veneer of civility spread over an interaction much more base than people want to imagine themselves engaging in. The world does not operate on rules of consent – neither Nature, nor governments, and not lovers either. Trying to do so is to step deeper into the simulacrum, divorcing oneself from reality in favor of fantasy – because that’s what consent is, just another sexual fantasy. No worse than any other, surely – but at the same time, no better.

Sex and governments are both as Natural as they come, and consent has no place in either.

Thus, de Sade cannot simultaneously claim that the power of one individual over another is in accordance with Nature, while the power of governments over individuals is Unnatural. It’s both or nothing.

But these are small quibbles. Let me attack the fundamental argument de Sade makes – that sexual impulses ought to be gratified, because Nature has given them to us.

Follow your impulses, he says – but people have a lot of impulses. Which impulses, then, are correct to follow? Well, clarifies de Sade, only the sexual ones. The others must be resisted as much as possible. Dolmance tells Eugénie:

Never listen to your heart, my child; it is the most untrustworthy guide we have received from Nature…

So, follow your impulses, just not your conscience. And no impulses towards charity either. And not anything that tends towards goodness or selflessness. And so on.

Um, what? Why? What makes one impulse more worthy of being followed than another?

This same dilemma applies not just to de Sade’s philosophy, though. Anytime you act, you make a choice, to pursue one goal at the expense of another. Doing charitable work might make you feel happy, but making a lot of money might also make you happy, or beating up homeless people might make you happy, etc. If you decide to do “good” and only follow those impulses that lead you to do good, you are choosing one impulse over another. And the same goes for evil impulses.

This question of which impulses to follow cannot be answered by Natural Law. Nature gives us many impulses, but it is up to us to choose which of them we will follow.

This choice is what determines the core nature of your soul. De Sade (or Dolmance), then, by choosing to follow only sexual impulses, is choosing for himself a soul based on sexual gratification:

However, the heart deceives, because it is never anything but the expression of the mind’s miscalculations; allow the latter to mature and the former will yield in good time…

Yes, Chevalier, you are young, your speeches illustrate it; you are wanting in experience; the day will come, and I await it, when you will be seasoned; then, my dear, you will no longer speak so well of mankind, for you will have its acquaintance. ‘Twas men’s ingratitude dried out my heart, their perfidy which destroyed in me those baleful virtues for which, perhaps, like you, I was also born. Now, if the vices of the one establish these dangerous virtues in the other, is it not then to render youth a great service when one throttles those virtues in youth at an early hour? Oh, my friend, how you do speak to me of remorse! Can remorse exist in the soul of him who recognizes crime in nothing? Let your principles weed it out of you if you dread its sting; will it be possible to repent of an action with whose indifference you are profoundly penetrated? When you no longer believe evil anywhere exists, of what evil will you be able to repent?

This is the core of Dolmance’s philosophy, and why he rejects out of hand le Chevalier’s argument that libertines ought to do good and charitable things as well as evil things. Dolmance is in fact controlling his impulses, cutting out the “good” within him to create a personality of pure evil.

For all Dolmance claims he is following Nature, there is a lot he does that seems more like the directed actions of an agent attempting to achieve a goal, than a man surrendering to his passions. For example, he advises acting in a normal and proper way in polite company, lying as necessary, in order to maintain one’s social place in the world. Only then, he explains, can all sexual urges safely be satisfied behind closed doors. (If you’re an exhibitionist, well, I guess you’re flat out of luck.) Thus Dolmance, by stopping himself from acting on even sexual impulses when it would be detrimental to him overall, proves that he is not abandoning himself to his Natural urges, but rather guiding and channeling them into a form and personality of his choosing.

Does he truly have no other impulses than those to evil, or to the sexual? None at all? And even if he doesn’t now – was he born this way? No, of course not. As he describes above to le Chevalier and Eugénie, he once had a conscience too. However, through directed effort he managed to suppress it until its voice shriveled up and died and left him in peace to pursue his evil designs. As to his sexual impulses, the kernel of them might have been in him from birth, but he only reached his current point of debauchery through careful cultivation of his most perverse impulses, allowing them to flourish at the expense of all other inclinations (religious, compassionate, etc.) that he might otherwise have experienced.

What feels “natural” to him now was not something he was born with innately, but rather a set of intuitions and impulses he carefully built up within his personality over the course of years. He may give lip service aplenty to Nature, but at the end of the day, his own ego is still the one in the driver’s seat. This is no unbound soul – only one who loosened the bindings of society and Nature and set them into a new arrangement of his choosing.

IV.

Which leads us to the question – does the Marquis de Sade realize this? What does he really believe about good and evil and Nature?

There is something of a contradiction in the way Dolmance portrays his philosophy. That is, he describes himself as being evil, doing evil, desiring evil, and reviling good. But at the same time, he justifies his actions through logic and reason (however much it may devolve into sophistry), arguing that what he espouses is in fact the true good, whatever other men may say of it – that in fact his philosophy is the right one, and is morally valuable above what the other hypocrites (Christians) are doing.

That is, he explicitly praises evil:

One cannot always do evil; deprived of the pleasure it affords, we can at least find the sensation’s equivalent in the minor but piquant wickedness of never doing good.

But at the same time he also claims that what he does is more virtuous, in terms of true virtue, than others who only ape the name:

Eugénie, be not the dupe of those women you hear called virtuous. Theirs are not, if you wish, the same passions as ours; but they hearken to others, and often more contemptible… There is ambition, there pride, there you find self‑seeking, and often, again, it is a question of mere situational numbness, of torpor: there are beings who have no urges. Are we, I ask, to revere such as them? No; the virtuous woman acts, or is inactive, from pure selfishness. Is it then better, wiser, more just to perform sacrifices to egoism than to one’s passions? As for me, I believe the one far worthier than the other, and who heeds but this latter voice is far better advised, no question of it, since it only is the organ of Nature, while the former is simply that of stupidity and prejudice.

There are a couple possibilities for what might be going on here.

First, consider the question of the objective nature of good and evil. That is, are there such things as good and evil? And are they baked into the world, like the laws of physics are? Or are they man-made constructs, like drinking age? Just because de Sade does not believe in God, by no means does that prove he does not still believe in an objective good and evil. (Many is the atheist rationalist who has reasoned to this conclusion from first principles.)

If de Sade does not in fact believe in any objective good and evil, then we can conclude all his text is just word games, dressing up his theories in pretty clothes, justifying his actions with sophistry. Ultimately, he is going to do whatever he does knowing it will be morally neutral, since there is in fact no true morality. This would well explain his ambivalence towards murder, theft, etc. and his tendency to value things for their convenience or hedonic value rather than by any yardstick of universal principles.

But what if de Sade does believe in a true good and evil? The question then becomes – on what side of it does he think he Falls?

The first possibility is that he believes, like Ayn Rand, that the world has gotten turned about and assigned the word ‘good’ to that which is in fact wrong, and ‘evil’ to that which is in fact right. Rand embraces the vocabulary of ego and selfishness because she truly believes that they are moral virtues for mankind. She believes she has torn through the cloak of morality with which society has covered these concepts, and has found the true moral axis underlying the world. She uses words people might consider ‘evil’ as positive traits, because she believes they really are positive traits, people have just gotten confused (or have been deceived).

If de Sade believes this, then when Dolmance praises the practice of evil, he is really just using the word to match Eugénie’s vocabulary. Raised in a Christian society, she considers sexual perversity, murder, violence, etc. to be evil, and chastity and charity to be good, and she can’t erase these intuitions in an afternoon. Thus, rather than try to overcome years of social conditioning, Dolmance has simply accepted the words the way society uses them, and instead is attempting to change the positive or negative valence associated with them by Eugénie and the libertines.

That is, he is using ‘evil’ to mean moral good, and ‘good’-aligned Christian words to mean moral evil. He has just reversed the vocabulary.

But for this to be true, he would have to believe his own arguments about Nature – that unrelenting sexual gratification is what She desires for humanity, and also that Her wanting something makes that thing morally right.

But one might just as easily suppose that de Sade does not believe this. That is, he believes that the traditional definitions of good and evil more or less match the true morals baked into the universe. Murder and sodomy really are evil, and chastity and kindness really are good. When he says otherwise, he is simply lying to attempt to lure others into the darkness.

Supposing this, we must then conclude that de Sade is doing something rather interesting – he is trying, by his own definition, to be Evil. He knows what he is doing is wrong in every way imaginable, but he is doing it anyways. He has chosen to oppose the moral order of things (though he may or may not believe he is opposing the “natural” order: God/Ethics and Nature need not be the same thing). He is the bad-guy of his own story.

Whatever de Sade believes about good and evil, though, he surely would agree that his utopia cannot be Nature’s intended state for all of humanity. After all, though some may be like de Sade, many more people are inclined towards acts of charity and conscience, and driven by an internal desire to do that which is traditionally considered good. In de Sade’s utopia, they simply wouldn’t fit into their roles there, and thus cannot have been intended for them by Nature, as de Sade of all people should concede:

What person, no matter how great an enemy of common sense, can imagine that an oval hole could have been created for our cylindrical pricks! Ponder this deformity and you will at once apprehend Nature’s intentions…