THE MARQUIS DE SADE (1740-1814), libertine, pervert, and pornographer, was also apivotal 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

an attitude of skepticism regarding traditional values and beliefs or their frank rejection.

a delusion of nonexistence of part or all of the self or the world.nihilis´ticni·hil·ism (n, and illustrated all its evil consequences and implications.Sade's philosophy flowed from his radical egotism, which led him to propound militantantitheism. (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 aredeterminist machines, which annuls moral responsibility. You cannot help it, then, if you aresexually 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 thereforefictive. (5) Nature is our only ethical guide; humans are no more significant to Nature thaninsects. 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 themass murderer is the highest human type. (6)Ads by GoogleTheory of Everything Discuss the four pillars of the TOE Physics-Philosophy-Biology-Spirit

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Born isolated, the individual is solely important, with obligations to nobody and only selfishmotivations. Each individual is pitted against all others. His only maxim is to "Enjoy myself, atno matter whose expense." (7) Man tends naturally to dominate others and inflict pain, whichhe enjoys. (8) Ordinary people are utilitarian objects, the playthings of the wealthy, powerfuland godlike libertines, who are utterly unloving. (9) Beauty and innocence inspire onlydiabolical cruelty. Since materialism makes pleasure proportional to stimulus, the greater your cruelty, the greater your pleasure. (10) Maximum selfishness and cruelty are thereforethe 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. Nihilismliberates. For the Sadean egotist, then, everything is permitted. Sade incessantly rationalizedthe most depraved and libertine sexuality, and every crime including cannibalism andmurder.Insatiable appetite and boredom goad Sade's libertines to ever-worsening crimes,culminating in mass murder. They become so steeped in evil that repentance andrighteousness become impossible. (11) Frustrated and enraged at reality's inability to satisfytheir 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, obscenesacrileges, and Satanic practices including the Black Mass pervade Sade's novels. Thecentral fact of the Sadean universe is not matter in motion but rebelliousegoism

any of several ethical doctrines describing the relationship between morality, self-interest,and behavior.

excessive preoccupation with oneself, self-interest with disregard for the needs of others.

egotism.'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 whatthey wanted to hear, his example and rationalizing philosophy liberating them to indulge andto express their obsessions with cruelty and perverse sex. Sade thus contributed to thegrowing pathology and nihilism in Western thought and culture.IIOne writer, however, devoted himself to opposing the Sadean, nihilist current of thenineteenth century: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky knew of Sade. As Dostoevsky scholar Robert Louis Jackson has shown, references to Sade occur frequently in both his notebooksand his novels, e.g., The Insulted and Injured, The Possessed, and The BrothersKaramazov. Far from being a "Russian Sade," as Ivan Turgenev posthumously characterizedhim, 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 hewrote, "Swinish sensuality, with all its consequences, passing into cruelty, crime, the Marquisde Sade." In Svidrigaylov, the debauched, repulsive victimizer of women in Crime andPunishment, Jackson rightly finds a "clear embodiment" of the Sadean philosophy and self- justifying libertine. Dostoevsky, he concludes, "appreciated the gravity of the moral andpsychological 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 andDecadentsdecadents, inliterature, name loosely applied to those 19th-century, fin-de-siècle European authors whosought inspiration, both in their lives and in their writings, in aestheticism and in all the moreor less morbid and macabre expressions of human emotion. In reaction to the naturalism of the European realists, the decadents espoused that art should exist for its own sake,independent of moral and social concerns. self-indulgently embraced Sade as a liberator,Dostoevsky confronted and repudiated him, and reaffirmed the Christian world view thatSade so ferociously rejected. Evidence in Crime and Punishment (1866) and The BrothersKaramazov (1880) makes clear that Dostoevsky had read Sade's novels closely andpondered them. He drew on specific incidents in them, and addressed specific arguments.Dostoevsky shared Sade's insight that egoism repudiates God and propounds nihilism inorder to attain liberation for sexual license, crime, destruction, and murder. But where Sadegleefully preached this, Dostoevsky condemned it. His work reveals a steadily deepeningcritical engagement with Sade, culminating in The Brothers Karamazov.At first, Sade was a marginal figure in Dostoevsky's mind. The House of the Dead (1862),Dostoevsky's novel about Siberian prison life, addresses corporal punishment. Somefloggers, he observes, obtain "something that suggests the Marquis de Sade.... There arepeople who are like tigers thirsting for blood." He describes how "Blood and power intoxicate," and a dynamic of corruption turns such cruel specimens into tyrants who cannotrevert to normal humanity. (15) This Sadean reference, however, is merely in passing.Likewise, in The Insulted and Injured (1862), Dostoevsky's awareness of Sade clearlyemerges in the scheming, avaricious Prince Valkovsky. His philosophy is one of extremeegoism, repudiating all obligations and ideals, seeing life as "a commercial transaction."Regarding women, he likes "secret, hidden vice, a bit more strange and original, even a littlefilthy for variety." (16) But Dostoevsky does not, at this stage in his career, pose Sadeanegoism and nihilism as central problems, nor does he devote himself to answering them.Two years later, in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky's treatment of cruelty and egoism isfar more sophisticated. He scorns the optimistic argument that people misbehave onlybecause they do not know their own interests, and would behave properly once thisignorance is dispelled. Optimists construe our interests as peace, freedom, wealth,prosperity, and such, and overlook man's craving for one value that outweighs them all.Equally erroneous are those who believe that modern civilization will make man morepeaceful. In fact, it has merely made him more sensitive, to the point where he will find"pleasure in bloodshed." Citing Cleopatra, who stuck pins into her slave girls' breasts and"enjoyed their screams and contortions," Dostoevsky argues that in the perfect world of nineteenth century progressives, in which science has taught that man has no free will andall problems can be solved, people might practice cruelty out of sheer boredom. In such a

world, man commits stupid, even self-injurious acts simply to prove that he is not adeterminist puppet, since his greatest desire, the overlooked value trumping all others, is for "an absolutely free [original italics] choice." Man's greatest failing, Dostoevsky adds, is a"constant lack of moral sense." (17)Put in another way, Dostoevsky now sees man much as Sade does: self-willed, desiringunfettered free choice, prone to commit irrational acts to transcend determinism, lackingmoral sense, and a potential sadist. Moreover, "progress," blinking man's need for moralorder and spiritual fulfillment, is lethally wrongheaded, inciting sadistic transgressions.Dostoevsky is beginning to come to grips with modern man's predicament--and with Sade.IIIIn Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, spiritual warfare and Sade's worldview are now Dostoevsky's central concerns, suggesting that as his vision matured anddeepened to focus on man's predicament in working out his destiny in modernity's impiousmilieu, his awareness of and alarm at Sade's impiety and its implications grew apace. Godand Satan clash through the battle between Christianity and Sadean nihilism. Crime andPunishment's central situation--the murder of an old womanpawnbroker

pawnbroker, onewho makes loans on personal effects that are left as security. The practice of pawnbroking isancient, as is recognition of the danger it involves of oppressing the poor. In fact, the Bibleprovides the poor with a number of safeguards against oppression from their creditors.According to Ex. 22.25–27 and Deut. and her sister by the student Rodion Raskolnikov, andhis subsequent, saving involvement with Sonia Marmeladov, leading to his confession andimprisonment in Siberia--is a microcosm of that conflict.Like the Sadean egotist and Sade himself, Raskolnikov is isolated from others. Virtuallyfriendless, he spends most of his time brooding in his dingy room, and when in the streets heis oblivious of his surroundings. His fellow student Razhumikhin observes his sense of superiority to everybody else, and that Raskolnikov is sometimes "cold and inhumanlycallous." His Sadean egoist craving for moral liberation is established early (Chapter 2): if man is not a beast, then morality is mere prejudice, "and there is nothing to stop you fromdoing anything you like, and that's as it should be!"It emerges that Raskolnikov had previously published an essay expounding a socialphilosophy exactly like Sade's, dividing society into "ordinary" persons, who must suffer abuse and have a "duty to be docile, for that is their vocation in life," and the "extraordinary,"who are all actual or potential "destroyers" and who, being extraordinary, "have a right tocommit any crime." All those who are extraordinary "must by their very nature be criminals."Lycurgus

Lycurgus, founder of the Spartan constitution

Lycurgus (līkûr`gəs), traditional name of the founder of the Spartan constitution. The earliestmention of him is in Herodotus. Nothing is known of his life—when he lived or if he was areal man, a god, or a mythical figure., Solon,MahometMahomet: see Muhammad., andNapoleon were all criminals, because they "transgressed the ancient laws." This formulationfollows Sade's technique of rationalizing crime and cruelty by giving lists of famous lawgiversor rulers who authorized crime. Indeed, all the same names except Napoleon's appear inSade's lists in Philosophy in the Bedroom. (18)Raskolnikov wants to be an "extraordinary"--i.e., one of Sade's self-divinizing elite. Headmires Napoleon, "A real ruler of men [original italics], a man to whom everything ispermitted." He later tells Sonia that he killed the old woman because he "wanted to becomea Napoleon." (19)Raskolnikov shows close parallels with Justine's surgeon Rodin. His first name, Rodion, issimilar. And both men rationalize their crimes on exactly similar utilitarian grounds. Rodin andhis colleague Rombeau plot to kill and dissect Rodin's fifteen-year-old daughter in a medicalexperiment. Rodin declares: "Only think of it! you sacrifice one, but you save a million,perhaps; may one hesitate when the price is so modest?... is not the purpose of [capitalpunishment], which [is] commonly found so wise, the sacrifice of one in order to save a