Albert Camus’ Caligula and the Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade

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.