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Abstract. According to the materialist philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, humans, as an extension of Nature's primary laws of creation and destruction, must become "Nature's executioners," by embracing her aspects of cruelty, crime, and murder. The consequences of this philosophy became evident in the nihilism, fascism, and the rule of dictators in the twentieth century, which Albert Camus discusses in Caligula and in The Rebel. This article examines the Marquis de Sade's philosophy of Nature, the moral objections that Camus had with his form of nihilistic thought, and its reemergence in the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, Bakunin, and Nechaev.
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WITHOUT THE IDEA OF God, and the moral values and law that derive from divine authority, how does Man determine the limits of his actions? Are moral values and principles of justice simply human constructs created to protect society that do not realistically reflect the truth about human nature? Without the concept of the sacred, where does authority reside and what constitutes the boundaries that humans must not transgress? In Caligula, Albert Camus confronts these questions and takes them to their ultimate logical conclusions. The character he creates in order to do this, as I will seek to show, is the figurative equivalent of a system of thought most eminently articulated by the Marquis de Sade in his materialistic denunciation of God, his paradoxical take on Nature and its laws, and his subsequent glorification of destruction and crime.
It has not been sufficiently noted how much space Camus devotes to the Marquis de Sade in his Notebooks, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, and specifically in The Rebel. In this latter text, under the heading of "Absolute Negation," Camus importantly identifies Sade as a key historical figure in the process of desacralization: "Historically speaking, the first coherent offensive is that of Sade, who musters into one vast war machine the arguments of the freethinkers up to Father Meslier and Voltaire" (p. 36).1 Given the proximity between his character of Caligula and Sade's philosophy, I think one can argue that Sade's writings had a strong influence on Camus' intellectual formation. The two basic premises in Caligula that Camus expresses in The Rebel are first: "all Sade's atheists suppose, in principle, the nonexistence of God for...