Читать книгу The Libertine's Nature - Lars-Henrik Schmidt - Страница 16

Sade wishes to demonstrate that we can only refer to the demands of nature, since human adaptations are completely arbitrary. But then this is something we actually can do. This reference is the torch of philosophy, and in Sade its light is such that it is comparable to ‘the speed of light’ in Einstein: relativity is absolute. The weight of philosophy is that of the universe.

Sade accepts all of the consequences of the rise of anthropological knowledge and the predominant form of problematization in the French Enlightenment; that is, a ‘climatism’. A characteristic of the Sadian libertines is that they are well-travelled. As hommes du monde they have knowledge, and therefore they are aware of the wide variety of customs and mores. Claude Lévi-Strauss has said that Rousseau founded anthropological science with his Discourse on Inequality from 1753; but inasmuch as ethnography is also referred to in Sade, he may now be regarded as contending with Rousseau for precedence.

Scattered throughout Sade’s writings we find a highly detailed, almost manic, and at any rate un-literary in the sense of stylistically encumbering, collection of examples of odd customs and practices. Sade has systematically taken excerpts from one travel account after another and has also had an eye for the bizarre. The ethnographic material documents the absence of shared and universal adaptations. Given the extreme differences in form and figure displayed by humans according to their climatic circumstances, one has to reject the notion of something common to all mankind beyond the simple fact that human beings form a species, but as a species are also comparable to rabbits and hens. In other words, referring to human beings’ diversity, Sade denies the great innovation of Enlightenment philosophy meant to replace the neighbor in Christianity and fellow man in humanism: humanity and humaneness. So, on this level, he denies both historical and transcendental universality. People are nature; they cannot override nature, for to override, to transcend, this is nature itself. So the only way we can deal with the absolute relativity of the work of man and the resultant cultural relativism is to let nature have its way and follow its plan. Nature does not, however, have any special, Kantian for example, plan for humankind. Nature’s plan is to remain being what it is: nature.

Thus, on the one hand it would be justifiabloe to pin the label “back to nature” on Sade’s philosophy rather than on Rousseau’s, but on the other hand a libertine’s nature is entirely different from the good nature of romanticism. It also means that we are not to ‘return’ to nature, so to speak, seeing as we never left it. We can safely trust in nature. If this expression can nevertheless be used in connection with both Sade and Rousseau, it is because through the work of man we have attempted to leave nature behind us. Allow me to cite a long quotation put into the mouth of Juliette’s first instructor, Delbène, summing up a redundant series of parallel formulations from Sade’s earlier work. As an important part of the libertine’s passions, it is as always a question of securing an apprentice by breaking down this still innocent being’s prejudices on ways and customs, morality and religion. Not until the apprentice has become a hardened libertine and can argue as a libertine is the seduction consummated. In the battle against ingrained prejudices, the following is said about customs: “Depending absolutely upon the degree of latitude in which a country chances to be located, manners and morals are an arbitrary affair, and can be nothing else. Nature prohibits nothing; but laws are dreamt up by men, and these petty regulations pretend to impose certain restraints upon people; it’s all a question of the air’s temperature, of the richness or poverty of the soil in the district, of the climate, of the sort of men involved, these are the unconstant factors that go into making your manners and morals. And these limitative laws, these curbs and injunctions, aren’t in any sense sacred, in any way legitimate from the viewpoint of pilosophy, whose clairvoyance penetrates error, dissipates myth, and to the wise man leaves nothing standing but the fundamental inspirations of Nature. Well, nothing is more immoral than Nature; never has she burdened us with interdictions or restraints, manners and morals have never been promulgated by her” (JL VIII p. 97f.; p. 51). In this emphasis we find a synopsis of Sade’s philosophical point, which is an interesting one repeated in various ways throughout thousands of highly immoral pages.

It is all about the pure impulses of nature and the transgression of limitations and laws demanded by them. Nothing is prohibited by nature. Prohibitions stem from cultural bonds without sanctions in nature. Ways and customs vary and are in reality relative: if one drives 50 kilometers away from Paris, for example, the world looks different. The only possible reason for obeying a country’s laws is that it is wise to do so – with a view to being able to follow the pure impulses of one’s nature. Thus, we see an empirically based philosophy of spontaneous manifestations of life, that is, of violence and transgression; complemented by a lesson in social wisdom saying that it is natural to look after one’s nature.

The lesson is founded in a radical relativism that makes the later versions of the same phenomenon, from the romantic national characters in Herder through the many cultures of Malinowski’s cultural anthropology and on to the versions in the philosophy of language from Wittgenstein to Lyotard, seem feeble. But the point is that this does not present a problem for Sade, since in fact he is not arguing for relativism and against universalism but against one universalism and for another universalism: against dogmatic universalism and for a natural universalism. Or, in short, against law, for Nature. Only here does he become godless. He does not mix up divinity and nature as was the habit of the times, but he challenges God because the champions of virtue want to sanction the law in God. It is the law he is examining.