The dialectic of Enlightenment

Kantian concepts are ambiguous

No one is different from what he has become: a useful member, successful or unsuccessful, of professional and national groups. He is a representative of his geographic, sociological type. Logic is democratic, in which the great have no advantage over the small. The former belong to the category of eminent people, while the latter are among the occasional objects of social assistance. Science in general does not behave differently towards nature and men than actuarial science, in particular, with regard to life and death. Who dies is indifferent, what matters is the proportion of occurrences relative to the obligations of the company. It is the law of the great number, not the individual case, that is always repeated in the formula. The concordance of the universal and the particular is also no longer hidden in an intellect that perceives each particular only as a case of the universal and the universal only as the side of the particular by which it allows itself to be grasped and handled. Science itself is not self-conscious; it is an instrument, while enlightenment is the philosophy that identifies truth with the scientific system.

Sade

The work of the Marquis de Sade shows “understanding without the guidance of others”, that is, the bourgeois subject freed from all tutelage.

Sade erected a first monument to his sense of planning. Thanks to its inflexible organization, the conspiracy of the powerful against the people is as close to the enlightened spirit since Machiavelli and Hobbes as the bourgeois republic. This spirit is only hostile to authority when it does not have the power to impose obedience, and to force when this is not a fact. As long as we ignore who employs reason, it will have as much affinity with force as with mediation; depending on the situation of the individual and the groups, it makes peace or war, tolerance or repression, appear as the best. Since it unmasks the power of nature over the spirit in materially determined objectives, as a threat to the integrity of its self-legislation, reason finds itself, formally as it is, at the disposal of every natural interest. Thought becomes a pure and simple organ and is reduced to nature. For rulers, however, men become a kind of material, as is the whole of nature for society.

Kant

What Kant transcendentally substantiated, the affinity between knowledge and the plan, which gives the character of an inescapable functionality to the fully rationalized bourgeois life, including its pauses for breath, Sade realized empirically a century before the advent of sport. Modern sports teams, whose cooperation is regulated in such a way that no member has any doubts about his role and for each there is a substitute at the ready, find their exact model in Juliette’s sexual themes, where no moment is idle, no openingThe body’s structure is disdained, no function remains inactive. In sports, as in all branches of mass culture, an intense and functional activity reigns, so much so that only the perfectly initiated spectator can understand the difference in combinations, the meaning of the adventures, determined by arbitrarily established rules. The architectural structure typical of the Kantian system, like the pyramids of gymnasts in Sade’s orgies and the principles of the first bourgeois Masonic lodges - the cynical image that reflects it is the rigorous regulation of the society of libertines of the 120 journées - announces a form of integral organization of life devoid of any purpose and having a determined content. More than pleasure, what seems to matter in such formalities is the eagerness with which they are conducted, the organization, just as in other demythologized eras, the Rome of the Caesars and the Renaissance, or the Baroque, the scheme of the activity weighed more than its content.\n# Sade

Sade writes: “It is necessary,” replied the prince, “that the government regulate the population itself, that it have in its hands all the means to extinguish it, if it fears it; to increase it, if it deems it necessary; and that it never have any other scale for its justice than that of its interests or its passions, combined solely with the passions and interests of those who, as we have just said, have received from it all the necessary portion of authority to increase their own a hundredfold.”14 The prince indicates the path that imperialism has always followed as the most terrible figure of ratio. “… incessantly atheize and demoralize the people you wish to subjugate; as long as they do not worship a god other than yours, do not have customs different from yours, you will always be their sovereign… in return, leave them the most extensive criminal faculty; punish them only when their darts are directed against you.”

The Enlightenment had no arguments even against such a perversion of itself, for pure truth enjoys no privilege in the face of distortion, rationalization in the face of ratio, if it has no practical privilege to display in its favor. With the formalization of reason, theory itself, insofar as it claims to be more than a symbol for neutral procedures, becomes an unintelligible concept, and thought is accepted as having meaning only after the abandonment of meaning. Tied to the dominant mode of production, the Enlightenment, which strives to undermine the order that has become repressive, dissolves itself.

Sade’s work, like Nietzsche’s, on the contrary, forms the uncompromising critique of practical reason, compared to which the work of the “universal crusher” appears as a revocation of his own thought. It raises the scientific principle to an annihilating level. Kant, however, had already purged the moral law in me of all heteronomous faith, and this so long ago that respect for his assertions had become a mere natural psychological fact, as is aa natural physical fact, the starry sky above me. “A factum of reason,” as he himself calls it,16 “an instinct général de société,” as Leibniz calls it.17 But facts are worthless when they are not given. Sade does not deny their existence. Justine, the good of the two sisters, is a martyr of the moral law. Juliette, however, draws the consequences that the bourgeoisie wanted to avoid: she curses Catholicism, in which she sees the most recent mythology and, with it, civilization in general. The energies linked to the sacrament are redirected towards sacrilege. This inversion, however, is transferred purely and simply to the community. In all this, Juliette in no way acts with the fanaticism of the Catholics towards the Incas. She simply devotes herself, enlightenedly, diligently, to the task of sacrilege, which Catholics have also had in their blood since archaic times. The protohistorical behaviors that civilization had declared taboo and that had been transformed under the stigma of bestiality into destructive behaviors continued to lead an underground life. Juliette no longer practices them as natural behaviors, but as forbidden by a taboo. She compensates for the contrary value judgment, unfounded insofar as no value judgment has any foundation, by its opposite.

Thus, when she repeats the primitive reactions, they are no longer the primitive ones, but the bestial ones. Juliette, and in this she is no different from Merteuil in Liaisons dangereuses, embodies, in psychological terms, neither the unsublimated libido nor the regressed libido, but the intellectual taste for regression, amor intellectualis diaboli, the pleasure of defeating civilization with its own weapons. She loves system and coherence, and she handles the organ of rational thought excellently. As far as self-control is concerned, her instructions are sometimes similar to Kant’s, as special application is to the principle. “Virtue,” says Kant, “insofar as it is founded on inner freedom, also contains for men an affirmative command, which is to subject all their powers and inclinations to the power of their reason, and therefore the command of self-control, which is added to the prohibition of allowing oneself to be dominated by one’s emotions and inclinations, the duty of apathy: because, if reason does not take the reins of government into its own hands, they act over men as if they were their masters.”

Juliette discusses the self-discipline of the criminal. “First, imagine your plan several days in advance, reflect on all the consequences, examine carefully what could be useful to you… what would be likely to betray you, and weigh these things with the same coolness as if you were certain of being discovered.”20 The murderer’s countenance should reveal the utmost calm. “…make calm and indifference reign in her and try to acquire the greatest possible composure in this situation… if you were not certain that you had no remorse, and you will never have it except through the habit of crime, if, I said, you did not have the completeIf you were certain of this, you would work in vain to become the master of the game of your physiognomy.”21 Freedom from remorse is as essential to formalist reason as freedom from love or hate. Repentance presents as existing the past that the bourgeoisie, contrary to popular ideology, has always considered as nothing; it is the relapse, and its only justification before bourgeois praxis would be to prevent it.

“Apathy, considered as strength, is an indispensable prerequisite of virtue,” says Kant,24 distinguishing this “moral apathy,” somewhat in the manner of Sade, from insensitivity in the sense of indifference to sensitive stimuli. Enthusiasm is bad. Calmness and determination constitute the strength of virtue. “Such is the state of health in the moral life; on the contrary, emotion, even when it is excited by the representation of good, is a brilliant and instantaneous appearance that leaves behind lassitude.”25 Juliette’s friend Clairwil observes the same thing about vice. “My soul is hard, and I am far from finding sensitivity preferable to the happy apathy I enjoy. O Juliette, … you are perhaps mistaken about that dangerous sensitivity of which so many imbeciles pride themselves.”26 Apathy appears at decisive moments in bourgeois history, and even in Antiquity, when the pauci beatia, faced with the superior force of the historical trend, realize their own impotence. It marks the retreat of individual-human spontaneity into the private sphere, which only then manages to constitute itself, as does the authentic bourgeois form of life. Stoicism – and this is what bourgeois philosophy consists of – makes it easier for the privileged, faced with the sufferings of others, to face threats to themselves. It preserves the universal, elevating private life to the level of a principle in order to protect itself from it. The private sphere of the bourgeois is the fallen cultural heritage of the upper class.

Juliette’s creed is science. She abhors all veneration whose rationality cannot be demonstrated: faith in God and in his dead son, obedience to the Ten Commandments, the superiority of good over evil, of salvation over sin. She finds herself attracted to reactions proscribed by the legends of civilization. She operates with semantics and logical syntax like the most modern positivism, but unlike this employee of the newest administration, she does not direct her linguistic criticism preferably against thought and philosophy, but, as a daughter of militant enlightenment, against religion. “A dead God,” she says of Christ, “nothing is more comical than this incoherence in the Catholic dictionary: God means eternal; dead means not eternal. Imbecile Christians, what do you want to do with your dead God?” The transformation of what is condemned without scientific proof into something worthy of being desired, as well as of what is recognized without any basis in evidence into an object of abomination, the transvaluation of values, “the courage for the forbidden” without the treacherous “let’s go.” of Nietzsche, without his biological idealism, here is his specific passion. “Is it necessary to have pretexts to commit a crime?” exclaims Princess Borghese, his good friend, right in his spirit. 29 Nietzsche proclaims the quintessence of his doctrine. 30 “The weak and the deformed must perish: the first proposition of our philanthropy. And it is also fitting to help them in this. What is more harmful than any vice – active compassion for all the deformed and weak – is Christianity…”31 The Christian religion, “singularly interested in taming tyrants and reducing them to principles of fraternity … plays here the role of the weak; it represents him, it must speak like him … and we must be convinced that this bond of fraternity was in fact proposed by the weak, was sanctioned by him when priestly authority happened to be in his hands.” This is what Noirceuil, Juliette’s mentor, contributes to the genealogy of morality. Nietzsche maliciously celebrates the powerful and their cruelty exercised “outwards, where the land of others begins”, that is, towards everything that does not belong to them. “They enjoy freedom from all social coercion, they seek in the wild regions a compensation for the tension caused by a long confinement and seclusion in the peace of the community, they return to the moral innocence of the beast of prey, like monsters rejoicing, perhaps emerging from a horrific series of murders, fires, rapes, tortures, with the insolence and serenity of those who have committed only a student prank, convinced that poets will now and for a long time to come have something to sing and celebrate… This ‘audacity’ of noble races, crazy, absurd, sudden, as it is expressed, the very unpredictable and improbable character of their enterprises… their indifference and contempt for security, body, life, comfort, their terrible joviality and the depth of the pleasure in destruction, of the pleasure that is derived from all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty”33, this audacity, which Nietzsche proclaims, also captivated Juliette.

There are the weak and the strong, there are classes, races and nations that dominate and those that allow themselves to be defeated. “Where is there,” exclaims Monsieur de Verneuil35, “the mortal who would be so foolish as to assert against all evidence that men are born equal in law and in fact? It was up to a misanthrope like Rousseau to formulate such a paradox, because, extremely weak as he was, he wanted to lower to his own level those to whose level he could not raise himself. But what imprudence, I ask, could authorize this pygmy of four feet and two inches to compare himself to the stature that nature endowed with the strength and appearance of a Hercules? Is it not as if the fly were trying to resemble the elephants? Strength, beauty, stature, eloquence: in the early days of society, these virtues were decisive when authority passed into the hands of the dominant.”\n# Nietzsche

“Demand of force,” Nietzsche continues, “that it not manifest itself as force, that it not be a will to conquer, to overthrowand to dominate, that it should not be a seat of enemies, resistance and triumphs, is as great a contradiction as to demand of weakness that it manifest itself as strength.” – “How is it that you want,” says Verneuil, “that he who has received from nature the greatest disposition for crime, whether by the superiority of his strength and the fineness of his organs, or by the education befitting his status or his wealth; how is it that you want, I repeat, that this individual be judged in accordance with the same law as he who everything incites to virtue and moderation? Would the law be more just if it punished both men in the same way? Is it natural that the man whom everything invites to do evil should be treated as the man who everything impels to behave prudently?” After the objective order of nature was set aside as prejudice and myth, only nature remained as a mass of matter.

The guilty ones, this is Nietzsche’s doctrine, are the weak, they deceive the natural law with their cunning. “The greatest danger to men is the sickly, not the wicked, not the ‘predators.’ It is the unfortunate, the defeated, the destroyed in advance – it is they, the weak who most undermine life among men, who poison and question in the most dangerous way our trust in life and in men.”39 They spread Christianity throughout the world, which Nietzsche abhors and hates no less than Sade. “… in truth, it is not the reprisals of the weak against the strong that are in nature; they are there in the moral, but not in the physical, since, in order to employ these reprisals, he must use forces that he has not received, he must adopt a character that is not given to him, he must constrain nature in some way. But what is truly in the laws of this wise mother is the injury of the weak by the strong, since, in order to achieve this procedure, he does nothing but use the gifts that he has received. He does not need to clothe himself, like the weak, with a character different from his own: he only puts into action the effects of the character he has received from nature. Therefore, everything that results from this is natural: his oppression, his violence, his cruelty, his tyranny, his injustices, … are therefore pure as the hand that engraved them; and when he uses all his rights to oppress the weak, to despoil him, he does nothing but the most natural thing in the world… Let us therefore have no scruples about what we can take from the weak, for it is not we who commit the crime, it is the defense or revenge of the weak that characterizes the crime.” When the weak defend himself, he commits an injustice, namely, the injustice “of departing from the character that nature has imprinted on him: it created him to be a slave and poor, he does not want to submit to that, that is his fault.”41 In these masterful speeches, Dorval, the leader of a respectable Parisian gang, develops before Juliette the secret creed of all the ruling classes, which Nietzsche reproached, together with the psychology of resentment, to his contemporaries. As JuJuliette admires “the terrible beauty of crime”42 even though, as a German professor, he distinguishes himself from Sade by disapproving of the criminal because his egoism “is directed and restricted to such low goals. If the goals are grandiose, humanity uses another standard and does not evaluate ‘crime’ as such, not even the most terrible means”43. The enlightened Juliette is still free from this prejudice in favor of what is great, which in fact characterizes the bourgeois world. For her, the crook is no less likable than the minister simply because his victims are fewer in number. For the German, however, beauty comes from the scope of the act; he cannot free himself, amidst all the twilight of idols, from the idealistic habit of wanting to hang the petty thief and transform imperialist assaults into universal-historical missions. By erecting the cult of force into a universal-historical doctrine, German fascism at the same time reduced it to the absurdity that characterizes it. As a protest against civilization, the morality of the masters indirectly defended the oppressed: hatred for atrophied instincts objectively denounces the true nature of the master, the disciplinarian, who only manifests himself in his victims.

If repentance was already considered contrary to reason, compassion is sin pure and simple. Whoever gives in to it “perverts the universal law: from which it follows that pity, far from being a virtue, becomes a true vice as soon as it leads us to interfere with an inequality prescribed by the laws of nature.”44 Sade and Nietzsche saw that, after the formalization of reason, compassion subsisted, so to speak, as the sensitive awareness of the identity of the universal and the particular, as a naturalized mediation. It constitutes the most compulsive prejudice, “quamvis pietatis specimen prae se ferre videatur”, as Spinoza says,45 “for he who is not led to help others either by reason or by compassion is rightly called inhuman”.46 Commiseratio is humanity in its immediate form, but at the same time “mala et inutilis”,47 that is, the opposite of the virile value that, from the Roman virtus through the Medici to the efficiency of the Ford family, has always been the only truly bourgeois virtue. Effeminate and childish, this is how Clairwil calls compassion, boasting of its “stoicism”, of the “rest of the passions”, which allows it to “do and endure everything without emotion” … pity, far from being a virtue, is nothing but a weakness born of fear and misfortune, a weakness that must be absorbed, especially when we strive to dull an excessive sensitivity incompatible with the maxims of philosophy.”49 It is from women that “outbursts of unlimited compassion” come.50 Sade and Nietzsche knew that their doctrine of the sinfulness of compassion was an old bourgeois inheritance. The latter points to all “strong ages”, to “higher civilizations”, the former to Aristotle51 and the Peripatetics.52 Compassion does not resist philosophy, and Kant himself was not aThere is no exception. For Kant, it is “a certain sentimentality” and would not have “in itself the dignity of virtue.”53 However, he fails to see that the principle of “universal benevolence towards the human race,”54 with which he tries to replace compassion, in opposition to Clairwil’s rationalism, incurs the same curse of irrationality cast upon this “kind passion” that can easily tempt man to become “a sentimental idler.” The Enlightenment is not deceived; in it the universal fact has no privilege over the particular fact, nor does unlimited love have any privilege over limited love. Compassion is suspect.

Like Sade, Nitezsche also resorts to the ars poetica for a critical assessment. “According to Aristotle, the Greeks often suffered from an excess of compassion: hence the need for discharge through tragedy. We thus see how this inclination seemed suspect to them. It is dangerous for the State, it takes away the necessary hardness and rigor, it makes heroes behave like women in tears, etc.”55 Zarathustra preaches: “I see so much goodness, so much weakness. So much justice and compassion, so much weakness.”56 In fact, compassion has an aspect that does not fit with justice, with which Nietzsche confuses it. It confirms the rule of inhumanity through the exception that it practices. By reserving the task of overcoming injustice to the misfortunes of love for one’s neighbor, compassion accepts the law of universal alienation, which it wanted to soften, as something unchangeable. Certainly, the compassionate individual defends the claim of the universal – namely, of living – against the universal, against nature and society that refuse it. But the unity with the universal, understood as interiority, which the individual practices, reveals itself as fallacious in its own weakness. It is not the softness, but the limiting aspect of compassion, that makes it questionable, it is always insufficient. Just as stoic apathy, which serves to train bourgeois coldness, the opposite of compassion, has preserved better than participatory vulgarity, which has adapted itself to the whole, the miserable loyalty to the universal from which it had distanced itself, so too those who have unmasked compassion have declared themselves negative for the revolution.

The narcissistic distortions of compassion, such as the sublime feelings of the philanthropist and the moral arrogance of the social worker, are the internalized confirmation of the difference between rich and poor. However, the fact that philosophy has imprudently publicized the pleasure provided by harshness has made it available to those who are least forgiving of its confession. The fascists who dominated the world translated the horror of compassion into the horror of political indulgence and the recourse to martial law, in which they joined Schopenhauer, the metaphysician of compassion. He considered the hope of establishing humanity as the reckless madness of those whose only hope is unhappiness. The enemies of compassion did not want to identify man with unhappiness, whose existence was, for them, a shame.Her delicate impotence could not tolerate man being the object of lamentations. In desperation, she became the praise of the power that, however, they denied in practice whenever it was offered to them.

Goodness and beneficence became sin, domination and oppression became virtue. “All good things were once bad things; every original sin was transformed into an original virtue.”57 Juliette takes this seriously even now, in the new era; for the first time she proceeds consciously to transvaluation. Once all ideologies have been destroyed, she adopts as her personal morality what Christianity considered execrable in ideology, although not always in practice. As a good philosopher, she remains, in doing so, cool and reflective. Everything happens without illusions. When Clairwil proposes to her that she commit sacrilege, she gives the following response: “Since we no longer believe in God, my dear, the profanations you desire are nothing more than absolutely useless childishness… perhaps I am more secure than you; my atheism is at its height. Do not imagine, therefore, that I need, in order to strengthen myself, the childishness you propose to me; I am ready to carry them out, since they please you, but as mere amusement” – the American murderer Annie Henry is said to have said: just for func – “and never as something necessary, either to strengthen my way of thinking or to convince others.”58 Transfigured by a fleeting impulse of benevolence towards her accomplice, she lets her principles prevail. Even injustice, hatred and destruction become a mechanical activity after, due to the formalization of reason, all objectives have lost, like a mirage, the character of necessity and objectivity. Magic is transferred to mere doing, to the means, in short, to industry. The formalization of reason is the mere intellectual expression of the machine mode of production. The means are fetishized: they absorb pleasure. Just as enlightenment theoretically transformed the goals with which the old domination was adorned into illusions, so it also deprives them, with the possibility of abundance, of their practical foundation. Domination survives as an end in itself, in the form of economic power. Enjoyment now seems something old-fashioned, unrealistic, like the metaphysics that prohibited it. Juliette speaks about the motives for the crime. She herself is no less greedy for honors and money than her friend Sbrigani, but she idolizes the forbidden. Sbrigani, who is a man of means and duty, is more advanced: “What matters is to enrich ourselves, and we become gravely guilty if we do not achieve this goal; Only when we are well advanced on the path to wealth can we allow ourselves to reap pleasures: until then, we must forget them.” Despite all her rational superiority, Juliette still retains a superstition. She recognizes the naivety of sacrilege, but ends up taking pleasure in it. All pleasure, however, reveals an idolatry: it is the abandonment of oneself to asomething else.

Nature does not really know pleasure: it does not prolong it beyond what is necessary to satisfy the need. All pleasure is social, whether in the unsublimated or sublimated emotions, and it originates in alienation. Even when pleasure ignores the prohibition it transgresses, it always originates in civilization, the fixed order, from which it aspires to return to nature, from which nature protects it. Men only feel the magic of pleasure when the dream, freeing them from the compulsion to work, from the individual’s attachment to a certain social function and finally to an ego, takes them back to a prehistoric past without domination and without discipline. It is the nostalgia of individuals trapped in civilization, the “objective despair” of those who had to become elements of the social order, that feeds the love for gods and demons; it was to these, as transfigured nature, that they turned in worship. Thought originates in the process of liberation from this terrible nature, which has ended up being completely dominated. Pleasure is, so to speak, its revenge. In it, people free themselves from thought and escape from civilization. In the oldest societies, festivals made this return to nature possible as a communal return. Primitive orgies are the collective origin of enjoyment. “This interval of universal confusion that constitutes the festival,” says Roger Caillois, “appears as the space of time in which the order of the world is suspended. That is why all excesses are then permitted. What matters is to act against the rules. Everything must be done in reverse. In mythical times, the course of time was reversed: people were born old, they died as children… Thus, all the prescriptions that protect the good natural and social order are then systematically violated.”60 People abandon themselves to the transfigured powers of origin; but from the point of view of the suspension of the prohibition, this way of acting has the character of excess and madness.61 It is only with the progress of civilization and enlightenment that the strengthened self and consolidated domination transform the festival into a simple farce. The dominators present enjoyment as something rational, as a tribute to nature that has not been entirely tamed; at the same time they try to make it harmless for their use and to preserve it in the higher culture; and finally, when it is impossible to eliminate it completely, they try to dose it for the dominated. Enjoyment becomes an object of manipulation until it disappears entirely in organized entertainment. The process develops from the primitive festival to the holidays. “The more the complexity of the social organism increases, the less it tolerates the interruption of the ordinary course of life. Everything must continue today as yesterday and tomorrow as today. General effervescence is no longer possible. The period of turbulence has become individualized. Holidays follow the party.”62 In the fascist regime, they are complemented by the false collective euphoria produced by the radio, slogans and benzedrine. Sbrigani has a certainI have a feeling about that. He allows himself some fun “sur la route de la fortune”, under the guise of a vacation. Juliette, on the contrary, sympathizes with the Ancien Régime. She deifies sin. Her libertinism is under the ascendancy of Catholicism, just as the nun’s ecstasy is under the sign of paganism.