The Development of Atheist Amoralism: De Sade

Theistic Background

Contents
Enlightenment Context
Early Arguments
Virtuous Atheism
Atheist Amoralism

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The fear that the aims of the radical Enlightenment culminated in moral nihilism seems for many to have been realised in the figure of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Contrary to those who would place him outside the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment, Sade - as Winfried Schroeder has convincingly shown in his Moral Nihilism (2005) - presented the destruction of morality precisely as a project which Enlightenment progressivism demanded, expressing this aim by availing himself of the Enlightenment language of increase in freedom and rights.[1]

According to Sade, philosophy helps us to extend our rights, freeing us from morality itself. As Schroeder notes, thanks to the reconstruction of de Sade's personal library it is now possible to appreciate the extent to which he was steeped in the ideas of the radical Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Spinoza to Helvetius and d'Holbach.[2] What De Sade attempted was a philosophical justification (from Enlightenment principles) of amoralism.[3] He furthermore offers a reductionist explanation of the origins of morality - it owes its existence to Christianity, which he regarded as an inferior 'oriental religion', invented by inferiors to serve their interests. As Schroeder points out, in De Sade's view Christians succeeded in enslaving and weakening the aggressive type of person ('homme puissant') which nature created as a free and cruel being.[4] He derives the following teaching from these considerations: everything is allowed, from prostitution, divorce, incest, rape, and infanticide. Nothing forbids us from seeking our desires at the expense of others, and nothing is more satisfying than exercising our will to destroy and to inflict cruelty. In order to do this, we should free ourselves from feelings of remorse which are also natural but not as powerful and worthy of realisation.[5]

The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) in Prison

(engraving) by French School, (19th century) Private Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

What one in fact finds in De Sade, as in Nietzsche whom he strikingly prefigures, is a disturbing form of 'ethics' which belongs quite outside conventional morality. As Schroeder observes, De Sade sees nature, which acts destructively, as demanding from us the harming and destruction of others. He does not deny that we also have natural altruistic feelings, but he believes that they should be snuffed out since the law of nature primarily demands cruelty. Every failure to act with cruelty is a crime against nature.[6]

This consequence of the Enlightenment liberation from religious morality - and Sade's ethics must be counted as an outcome of the Enlightenment project, as has been shown - anticipates many aspects of Nietzschean amoralism and important aspects of social Darwinism, strands of atheist thought which are often underplayed by the contemporary New Atheists.

It would be over-simplistic to claim that the Enlightenment project of autonomous naturalistic ethics inevitably culminates in the 'ethical' vision of Sade. However, it is also not clear that the movement of liberation from religious morality can block this consequence. As Schroeder has observed, part of the explanation of Sade's disturbing 'ethical' vision may be found in the oversimplified portrayal by contemporary religious apologists of the alternatives to theistic morality. According to the apologists, if there was no God, the only alternative was amoralism: either humans recognised the existence of a divine guarantor of morality, or they denied God's existence and gave themselves over to their evil desires, there being no third option.[7] Sade accepted the counter-Enlightenment polemic of the apologists together with their pessimistic assumptions about fallen humanity. Both essentially agreed that if God did not exist neither did morality.[8]

However, even granting that Sade's position only seems inevitable on the supposition that human beings are fundamentally perverse and there is an either-or choice between theistic morality or amorality, the additional difficulties of grounding a nontheistic morality together with problem of the implications of determinism leave open the worrying possibility that the logic of Enlightenment liberation from religious morality permits both the adoption of a naturalistic morality based on altruism and amoralism, there being no normative standpoint (at least on a moral sense or contractualist understanding of morality) from where amoralism could be declared illegitimate. Nature has equipped human beings with urges which are both altruistic and non-altruistic, but as the example of Sade makes clear, atheism may not be able to provide normative reasons for stating which ones should be followed.

References

Schroeder, Winfried. Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von den Sophisten bis Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005.

Bibliography

Footnotes

[1]↑ Winfried Schroeder, Moralischer Nihilismus: Radikale Moralkritik von den Sophisten bis Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 142.
[2]↑ Ibid.
[3]↑ Ibid., 143.
[4]↑ Ibid., 144.
[5]↑ Ibid., 145.
[6]↑ Ibid., 146.
[7]↑ Ibid., 159.
[8]↑ Ibid.

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