[Download] "Dostoevsky vs. The Marquis de Sade." by Modern Age ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Dostoevsky vs. The Marquis de Sade.
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 183 KB
Description
THE MARQUIS DE SADE (1740-1814), libertine, pervert, and pornographer, was also a pivotal 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, and illustrated all its evil consequences and implications. Sade's philosophy flowed from his radical egotism, which led him to propound militant antitheism. (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 are determinist machines, which annuls moral responsibility. You cannot help it, then, if you are sexually 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 therefore fictive. (5) Nature is our only ethical guide; humans are no more significant to Nature than insects. 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 the mass murderer is the highest human type. (6)