Dostoevsky vs. the Marquis de Sade

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by John Attarian

THE MARQUIS DE SADE (1740-1814), libertine, pervert, and pornographer, was also a pivotal figure in Western thought. His novels Justine (1791), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), The New Justine and Juliette (1797) presented, for the first time, a philosophy of nihilism, and illustrated all its evil consequences and implications.

Sade's philosophy flowed from his radical egotism, which led him to propound militant antitheism. (1) God's nonexistence reduces the universe to a purely materialist Nature, a self-running mechanism; "the perpetual motion of matter explains everything." (2) People are determinist machines, which annuls moral responsibility. You cannot help it, then, if you are sexually perverse or depraved. (3) There is no afterlife, so your conduct does not matter. (4) Merely the child of local custom, morality is relative to culture and geography, and therefore fictive. (5) Nature is our only ethical guide; humans are no more significant to Nature than insects. And since Nature uses matter from dead life forms to create new ones, crime, destruction, and death are necessary and pleasing to her. Therefore murder is good, and the mass murderer is the highest human type. (6)

Born isolated, the individual is solely important, with obligations to nobody and only selfish motivations. Each individual is pitted against all others. His only maxim is to "Enjoy myself, at no matter whose expense." (7) Man tends naturally to dominate others and inflict pain, which he enjoys. (8) Ordinary people are utilitarian objects, the playthings of the wealthy, powerful and godlike libertines, who are utterly unloving. (9) Beauty and innocence inspire only diabolical cruelty. Since materialism makes pleasure proportional to stimulus, the greater your cruelty, the greater your pleasure. (10) Maximum selfishness and cruelty are therefore the proper course.

If there is no God, no hell, no right and wrong, no moral responsibility, no meaning or significance beyond your pleasure, then existence is meaningless. Nothing you do matters, others do not matter, and what you do with them--and to them--does not matter. Nihilism liberates. For the Sadean egotist, then, everything is permitted. Sade incessantly rationalized the most depraved and libertine sexuality, and every crime including cannibalism and murder.

Insatiable appetite and boredom goad Sade's libertines to ever-worsening crimes, culminating in mass murder. They become so steeped in evil that repentance and righteousness become impossible. (11) Frustrated and enraged at reality's inability to satisfy their unlimited desires, they repudiate their own determinism and crave universal destruction. (12)

As this dynamic of wickedness and Sade's value-inverting views of cruelty and murder indicate, nihilism is ultimately Satanic. Rabid denunciations of God and Christianity, obscene sacrileges, and Satanic practices including the Black Mass pervade Sade's novels. The central fact of the Sadean universe is not matter in motion but rebellious egoism's demonic impiety, seeking transcendence through evil.

Sade greatly influenced Romantic and Decadent authors, such as Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Algernon Swinburne, and Rachilde. (13) He told them what they wanted to hear, his example and rationalizing philosophy liberating them to indulge and to express their obsessions with cruelty and perverse sex. Sade thus contributed to the growing pathology and nihilism in Western thought and culture.

II

One writer, however, devoted himself to opposing the Sadean, nihilist current of the nineteenth century: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky knew of Sade. As Dostoevsky scholar Robert Louis Jackson has shown, references to Sade occur frequently in both his notebooks and his novels, e.g., The Insulted and Injured, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. Far from being a "Russian Sade," as Ivan Turgenev posthumously characterized him, or a sadist or a sadomasochist, as Mario Praz and Sigmund Freud, respectively, claimed, Dostoevsky was appalled by Sade. In his notebooks to The Brothers Karamazov he wrote, "Swinish sensuality, with all its consequences, passing into cruelty, crime, the Marquis de Sade." In Svidrigaylov, the debauched, repulsive victimizer of women in Crime and Punishment, Jackson rightly finds a "clear embodiment" of the Sadean philosophy and self-justifying libertine. Dostoevsky, he concludes, "appreciated the gravity of the moral and psychological questions raised by Sade," but "rejected the Sadean world view as amoral, disfigured and destructive of the moral and social fabric of men and society." (14)

In fact, Dostoevsky did far more. Where the Romantics and Decadents self-indulgently embraced Sade as a liberator, Dostoevsky confronted and repudiated him, and reaffirmed the Christian world view that Sade so ferociously rejected. Evidence in Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) makes clear that Dostoevsky had read Sade's novels closely and pondered them. He drew on specific incidents in them, and addressed specific arguments. Dostoevsky shared Sade's insight that egoism repudiates God and propounds nihilism in order to attain liberation for sexual license, crime, destruction, and murder. But where Sade gleefully preached this, Dostoevsky condemned it. His work reveals a steadily deepening critical engagement with Sade, culminating in The Brothers Karamazov.