The Libertine's Nature. Lars-Henrik Schmidt
Here the problem is the notion of happiness; for happiness in Sade’s universe is egotistical: it belongs to the individual and cannot be discussed detached from pleasure and sexual satisfaction. It is this focal point that makes Sade interesting – and untried, so far as I can see. Sade’s problem is, however, (let me already at this point suggest my dissociation from him) that he cannot see the difference between egoism and self-consideration; this is because he completely skips Rousseau, which he should not have done. But his provocative excess is the condition for the appearance of a new problematic: a break with the other’s dominance, a break with the notion that the relation to oneself is mediated through the other, but at the same time a new problematic that is not an exclusion of the other. The question is whether an alternative to mediation can be found.
Sade can be used to call mediation into question but not to illustrate a different involvement of the other.
The way in which I will consider the involvement of the other as different from being a mediator is as constituting a third position. One does not relate to oneself mediated through the other, but one also relates to how the third party relates to oneself as an-other. In this situation we find a reserve that is not mediation. It is in this decency, in the experience of belonging to the difference from and distance to the other that we find the play of ethics.
Ethics
It is in and of itself simple to account for how the ethical problem has been tackled in the history of theory. In compliance with my project, I permit myself to unify the problem in four stages, i.e., in an order that does not present a necessary process of development and that does not imply a phasing out of the individual stages, though their dominance shifts from being epochal to being merely local. The first solution to the problem is the Aristotelian ethics of virtue, which is oriented around physis or nature: in Aristotle, virtuousness and the acting out of a specific nature are one and the same, and, when all is said and done, a natural predisposition cannot be changed. Changes can, however, be made when we reach the second phase; that is, Kantian moral duty: here morality consists in cultivating one’s nature, in working on developing a specific nature or in working against simple nature. Duty is work and work ennobles and thus morals are a profound matter. In the contemporaneous third phase the inner relation is then directed outwards toward the other in the radical morality of emancipation, wherein morality consists in liberating oneself from oppressive yokes and setting real nature free. Finally, the solution in our current epoch is an ethics of limitation, wherein what is considered ethical is being able to contain one’s emissions: a new stinginess and sober-mindedness that must limit any excess. In the light of this new division, the traditional division into moral duty and utilitarian/ consequentialist ethics – or for that matter the modernization of this division as ethics of responsibility and character ethics – seems less interesting.
The interplay between the four phases is characteristic of the new departure in metaphysics taking place in the modern world, namely, its transformation from an ontological through an epistemological to a social metaphysics. That it revolves around modern forms of problematizing behavior in relation to the other, out of regard for and with regard to the other, beyond Christianity and the Church really just means that it basically occurs in a secularized form. The new departure comes with the modern world in the second half of the eighteenth century, more precisely around the year 1793. At this point we find simultaneous formulations of an economic liberalism (Smith), a practical utilitarianism (Bentham), a rights-oriented politics of virtue (Robespierre), a justice-oriented political “anarchism” (Godwin), a secularized morality of duty (Kant), a practical cynicism of every day life or lesson in social wisdom (von Knigge), and then Sade’s libertinism.
In this new breakthrough we find the phases reflected and articulated in very different ways. The keynote is hardly to be mistaken today: we are living in an epoch of moralized limitations; that is, of self-limitation, and at the heart of the matter there seem to be only two ways of arguing for the idea that the demand for self-limitation is imperative. The grounds for moral behavior are given with reference to 1) Law and 2) Nature respectively. That the Law is natural coincides the idea of natural law, and that nature in the course of time provides law is the pedagogical conception; but neither form of articulation changes the factors, nor do they change the fact that in the end an imperative source of authority must be found.
By referring to the law as the source of authority, the limitation is seen as imposed from outside, and so imposed through a prohibition. By referring instead to nature as the obvious final source of authority, the demand is seen as provided from within, and thus provided in the shape of a command. As the philosopher of excess, Sade is the provocation against limitations, but in the name of emancipation, as he follows the command of nature. Meanwhile, his intention is to show that this command has no normative dimensions. Hence, Sade’s paradox is implicitly that a normative foundation can only be found in nature – but cannot be found in nature. His relevant counterpart is actually Kierkegaard, who, on the contrary, claims that a normative foundation can only be found in the law, but cannot be found there.
Grasping the imperative source of authority is the same as grasping how the social is possible, i.e., how the social coheres. Again, we find two grand – and concurrent because by definition unable to counteract each other – traditions that join law and nature as sources of authority. These traditions differ in their descriptions of humans as needful beings and desiring beings respectively. In both of them, however, describing the origin of the social is the same as deciding its foundational essence.
If one’s point of departure is the notion that humans are needful beings, then as a result the starting point is that humans, being equipped with a varying number of needs, are thrown upon each other out of necessity so as to be able to satisfy their needs. Being thrown upon one another out of necessity constitutes the system of needs which is organized around a system of exchange with the marketplace as its source of authority. If, on the other hand, one considers humans to be desiring beings, then their objective is the fulfilment of wishes and with this happiness. In this situation, the other is desirable, but not necessary in the same way as for the needful being. The exchange is a concrete trade in the wish for reciprocity. System and sympathy are the social-philosophical configurations for the law and nature respectively, for the ideas are conceptualized either by the condition of being thrown upon the other or by the will to reciprocity.
Let us elucidate the matter further. Bartering can serve as a metaphor for a system of need: it is based on the idea that we have something to exchange with one another or rather that we have something the others want, otherwise we would not, of course, be of interest to them. The baker wants the shoemaker to need bread, otherwise he cannot get his shoes fixed. More precisely, this means that we want not what the other has positively, but rather what the other needs negatively, what the other lacks. We actually do not need the other’s positivity but his negativity, his lack, i.e., he must lack what we can offer, for otherwise there would not be any motive for the exchange: it appears that I need the other’s need and in reality I need the other’s lack. Of course this is also true for myself: I lack the other’s lack. I scratch your back, you scratch a third person, and he scratches me. Together we form a “scratching system.” In this way the system of need is the foundation for economical discourse, and it is analyzed in this way by Rousseau and later played out in Hegel and Marx.
With respect to a system of desire, in the reciprocity or non-reciprocity of desire – which amount to the same thing – my desire is the other’s desire, or one desires oneself as another. I then desire the other’s desire for me. Here the exchange is concrete, and it is no good if the game does not work out. It is no good if Peter desires Mary, who desires John, who desires Anne, who desires Peter. Each one demands his or her satisfaction, and will lie their way to it. Desire is thus concrete in its wish for, indeed demand for reciprocity: I scratch your back, you scratch mine; you scratch my back because I scratch yours; I scratch yours because you scratch mine. Psychoanalysis is a theory of this problem of desire wherein one desires what is not; what one does not have oneself but believes the other has. What is crucial is the demand for reciprocity, but not of course the redeemability of the demand.