Marquis de Sade — "Virtue is a chimera, a dream, a fantasy."
Virtue is a chimera, a dream, a fantasy.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"The only way to arrive at the truth is through the most profound errors."
"I am an atheist, and I am proud of it."
"To be truly free, one must be free from all laws, even those of nature."
"There is no God, no heaven, no hell, no virtue, no vice, no good, no evil."
"The most powerful empires are those that are founded on crime."
About Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
French aristocrat-libertine whose name became 'sadism' and whose novels test the limits of Enlightenment liberalism's 'do as you will' axiom. Closely associated with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses author). For an intellectual contrast, see Immanuel Kant, German Enlightenment philosopher of the categorical imperative — Sade and Kant published in the same decades; Kant's 'treat others as ends, never means' is the systematic ethical opposite of Sade's libertine instrumentalism — the two roads philosophy took out of Enlightenment freedom.
The standard scholarly entry points to Marquis de Sade's work: Maurice Blanchot (French literary critic) — Lautréamont and Sade (1949); Jacques Lacan (École freudienne de Paris) — Kant with Sade (1963 essay); Camille Paglia (University of the Arts Philadelphia) — Sexual Personae (1990) — extensive Sade chapters. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Marquis de Sade.