Marquis de Sade — "What is more immoral than war?"
What is more immoral than war?
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime."
"The only true pleasure is that which is forbidden."
"One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush."
"I have no God, no morality, no law but my will. I reject the poison that they call religion, for it is nothing but a chain that binds the soul, a vile invention of the cowardly man to escape the torme…"
"All universal moral principles are idle fancies."
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.