"They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch"
About this Quote
Moralists love to scold desire as if it were a stain on human dignity; de Sade’s move is to call that posture intellectually lazy. His line is built like a provocation: the people who “declaim against the passions” are performing virtue in public, but they won’t do the harder work of noticing that reason doesn’t hover above the body. It’s sparked by it. The “flame” is doing double duty - erotic heat, yes, but also the combustive energy that makes inquiry possible. Philosophy’s “torch” is an Enlightenment emblem, and de Sade twists it: the age that worships rational light is secretly fueled by the very appetites it wants to discipline.
The subtext is both accusation and prank. He’s mocking a familiar 18th-century division of the self where reason is clean and passion is animal. De Sade insists that the “clean” part is a parasite: it feeds on the intensity it condemns. That’s not a defense of impulsiveness so much as a diagnosis of hypocrisy, aimed at priests, censors, and polite thinkers who want desire to be both the engine of culture and the scapegoat for its messiness.
Context matters: de Sade wrote under regimes (monarchical, then revolutionary, then Napoleonic) obsessed with regulating bodies and speech. His fiction is notorious for extremity, but this sentence is a manifesto for his broader tactic: use scandal to expose the Enlightenment’s bad faith. If reason needs heat to see, then the project of “pure” rational morality starts to look less like progress and more like self-deception dressed up as enlightenment.
The subtext is both accusation and prank. He’s mocking a familiar 18th-century division of the self where reason is clean and passion is animal. De Sade insists that the “clean” part is a parasite: it feeds on the intensity it condemns. That’s not a defense of impulsiveness so much as a diagnosis of hypocrisy, aimed at priests, censors, and polite thinkers who want desire to be both the engine of culture and the scapegoat for its messiness.
Context matters: de Sade wrote under regimes (monarchical, then revolutionary, then Napoleonic) obsessed with regulating bodies and speech. His fiction is notorious for extremity, but this sentence is a manifesto for his broader tactic: use scandal to expose the Enlightenment’s bad faith. If reason needs heat to see, then the project of “pure” rational morality starts to look less like progress and more like self-deception dressed up as enlightenment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Marquis
Add to List
