A sadist is a person who feels
pleasure in inflicting emotional and physical pain on another person. For the sadistic
personality, the emotional pain that is inflicted on another person for the
sadist’s own pleasure need not be associated with sex because emotional or
physical pain is broader than that which can be inflicted sexually. Hence, the
bottom-line for the sadist psychology is that pleasure that is felt by harming another
person, who thus feels pain as a direct result of the sadist, lies in the making
suffer. A sadist who does not permit oneself to feel emotion is particularly
dangerous because no sympathy or compassion operates as a constraint on how
much hurt is inflicted. In such a case, the sadist is like one of the androids
in the film Ex Machina as the knife is coldly inserted into the torso of
the programmer who built the intelligent machines. Indeed, the narcissistic sadist
can be very intelligent in knowing precisely how to inflict emotional pain
especially in an emotionally vulnerable victim. Once discovered, such a sadist
will endeavor to avoid such a victim, but not because such an unemotional
sadist has a conscience and feels guilty. In the film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015),
Anastasia Steele’s life changes forever when she meets the
emotionally-tormented billionaire, Christian Grey. She falls in love with the
sadist, and, because she wants to be with him, at some point she willingly assumes
the masochist role even though she does not feel pleasure from physical (or
emotional) pain being inflicted on her person. She loves him so much she wants
to enter his deviant world; she even embraces that world. I could see myself
doing that were I to fall deeply in love with a sadist, for accepting a person
even in spite of that person’s flaws is part of love— unless, of course, lies,
sidelining, and emotional betrayals are too much for any trust to be possible. Anastasia
may come to treat Christian’s dungeon as a playroom of sorts in which she is his
so they can be a couple with an opportunity to connect even more, rather
than as a place where he acts out his severe emotional issues in which violence
and sex are too closely related in his brain, whether psychologically or physically.
Love is to a certain extent blind, or at least purblind. Given how toxic and unpleasant life can be, can we be blamed for valuing deep connection so very much even in
cases in which meaning-from-personality comes with such a high cost?
Absent from the movie is the
point that sadists also get pleasure from inflicting emotional, nonsexual pain,
such as in taking advantage of a girlfriend’s emotional vulnerability that is
simply part of being in love, so in real life there is more of a cost to being
in love with a sadist than merely consenting to playing games in a home-dungeon
even though pleasure is not obtained from having pain inflicted by even a loved
one (i.e., a sadist boyfriend). As an example of a non-sexual infliction of
pain that is not in the film, she could really need him to be with her because
she does not want to be alone and feels emotionally vulnerable because she has
just opened up to him emotionally in telling him that she has fallen for him.
Nevertheless, feeling nothing emotionally, he could dismiss her request and even
leave her to join some friends at a bar as if they were more important.
Refusing to allow himself to feel emotional caring, he would not feel culpable
for having humiliated her; instead, the narcissist sadist would gladly feel the
pleasure from having hurt her emotionally, as well as the guiltless pleasure in
socializing with his friends at a bar without even a thought of her, except
that she is suffering. He might even go home with another woman for sex and
even brag to his girlfriend the next day that the woman “was cute.” In the
future, he might even flaunt being with that woman at a bar at which he knows his
girlfriend is present! His motive would not merely be to disrespect her, but
also to inflict still more pain on her for even more pleasure! Even were he
merely “seeing” (i.e., dating) her, such behavior would arguably—at least
according to a retired psychiatrist I informally interviewed for this essay—indicate
severe emotional issues, and thus be more than enough cause for her to bolt. In
Avatar (2009), Jake is suddenly the target of a giant beast. He asks
Grace, the head scientist on Pandora, whether he should face down the animal
(as he has just done with another animal) or run. “Run, definitely run!” she exclaims.
It is not as though the beast has a conscience. A sadist can do real damage,
emotionally, and without having any feeling of remorse; instead,
pleasure is felt in having inflicted pain on another person. Can a sadist truly
love? This seems doubtful. Such a narcissistic mentality can only know self-love,
and not in the sense that Augustine lauds as loving the image of God within. In
Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia loves Christian’s personality (other
than the sadistic element) and thus merely accepts (in disagreement) that
his sexual pleasure is aroused by inflicting pain in her.
I turn now to applying
Nietzsche’s theory on the forgotten origins of punishment so to dig deeper into
the sadist’s psychology. To be sure, because psychology is not one of my
academic fields, I am merely able to present Nietzsche’s account of how punishment
arose in our species and relate that to sadism as it is commonly understood. Before
turning specifically to punishment, I want to sketch and apply Nietzsche’s
overall system of strength and weakness, which is not based on moral
disapprobation or responsibility. In fact, the latter function as weapons,
according to Nietzsche, that are used by the weak against the self-confident
powerful strong out of resentment, or ressentiment. A sadist is
undoubtedly weak in this distinctly Nietzschean sense.
Not being able or willing to
overcome an intractable instinctual urge, a weak person cannot be trusted and
thus should (and does!) avoid commitment. A person who succumbs to whatever
instinctual urge (or desire) is felt most at a given moment is untrustworthy because
such a person disregards the memory of having made a promise and thus does not
value promise-keeping relative to whatever in closest proximity is most in line
with instant gratification. A weak person is more motivated than a strong
person to inflict pain on another person to compensate (or as recompense) for
having been injured or suffered a loss, such as of money or property. Whereas a
strong person says with an overflowing, self-confident feeling of power, “What
are those parasites to me?”, a weak person is oriented to striking out, as if a
master, out of ressentiment, to redress his injuries or loss as if the
pain inflicted in another person were an equivalent and thus as a
remedy. For example, is pain inflicted on a debtor who has failed to repay a
loan equivalent to the money lost? In Shakespeare’s play, Merchant of Venice,
Shylock insists on a pound of flesh in “payment” for the loss of the money that
he lent, though by the end of the play, when a pound of his flesh is
demanded, suddenly he no longer believes in the equivalence of physical pain
and a monetary loss! Such an equivalence Nietzsche states is “strange.” It is
deeply rooted in primitive, prehistoric humankind, but even so, the equivalence
is artificial. To the extent that a sadist’s pleasure from inflicting pain is felt
to pay off an earlier, perhaps even childhood (nonsexual or sexual) trauma,
the equivalence is further strained because the masochist is not even the same
person as had injured the sadist! The vicarious satisfaction may be felt as
reducing the hurt from the injury, but I suspect the effort to do so is in
vain. A strong person accepts the fact of the past injury and the resulting
emotional harm, and moves on. A weak person festers in resentment and
from this motive, pain is sought even in a person who had not committed the
injury. Such pain cannot fill a hole from an injury caused by another person.
Even inflicting pain in the same person is not equivalent to the loss from the
injury, according to Nietzsche.
Having anticipated Nietzsche’s
own words, it is time to turn directly to them for support for my claims.
Filmmakers, including screenwriters, could do worse in reading his words than
ponder how some of his ideas could have been inserted into the dialogue between
Christian and Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Grey, for my overall thesis
is that film has great potential as a medium for philosophical discourse
through dialogue within a narrative.
We associate punishment with
moral responsibility, free will, and accountability, but Nietzsche claims that
“’the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted
differently’—is in fact an extremely late and subtle form of human judgment and
inference: whoever transposes it to the beginning is guilty of a crude
misunderstanding of the psychology of more primitive mankind.”[1]
Free will came before the notion of moral responsibility and hold
holding the culpable accountable. The genealogy of punishment shows quite
another dynamic at work—one whose primitive origin shows up not only in why
immature parents punish their children, but also, I contend, in sadists! “Throughout
the greater part of human history punishment was not imposed because one
held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the
presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents
still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the
one who caused it—but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that
every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid bac, even if
only through the pain of the culprit.”[2]
Although Nietzsche’s empirical claim, presumably unsubstantiated by any
scientific evidence, that parents during Nietzsche’s life in nineteenth-century
Europe were still punishing their respective children out of anger in order to
inflict pain as a sort of requital for the injuries inflicted on the parents by
the disobeying children is questionable, Nietzsche’s focus in the passage is on
the “idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid
back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”[3]
Nietzsche describes the “idea of an equivalence between injury and pain” to be
strange.[4]
How is it that the pleasure obtained from pain inflicted on, and thus felt by,
a person who has caused pain in the initial aggrieved pay back latter such that
one’s own initial pain from the initial injury is lessened? Wouldn’t
one’s own hurt from having been injured last until either the loss is made up in
kind or until the natural process of emotional healing has run its course?
Nietzsche seems to be skeptical that the pleasure from inflicting pain on the
culprit can facilitate the natural healing process, though perhaps by such
pleasure it is easier to let go of the hurt from the injury or loss. To the
extent that the medium of film is ultimately about the human condition, the
dynamic that Nietzsche viewed as strange could be made explicit for audiences,
who could then look at themselves in the mirror and ask whether they truncate
the natural healing process of emotional hurt by making use of the equivalence.
In a modern, anti-Nietzschean vein, it can even be asked whether it is ethical
to derive pleasure by inflicting emotional or physical pain so as to
diminish one’s own injury or loss.
The equivalence that lies at
the root of the origin of punishment according to Nietzsche looks so strange to
him due to his claim that the ‘primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now
ineradicable idea” drew its power “in the contractual relationship between creditor
and debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in
turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade,
and traffic.”[5] Especially
relevant for the case of the modern sadist, in the ancient world a “creditor
could inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor;
for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the
debt” that was not paid back.[6]
“Let us be clear,” Nietzsche states, “as to the logic of this form of
compensation: it is strange enough. An equivalence is provided by the
creditor’s receiving, in place of a literal compensation for an injury (thus in
place of money, land, possessions of any kind), a recompense in the form of a
kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely
upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le
plaisir de le faire,’[7]
the enjoyment of violation.”[8]
That such pleasure could make up for the loss of money is an odd assumption,
especially if some asset, such as land or even useful equipment, could instead
be taken by a creditor to make up for the money lost. To treat pleasure as
equivalent to, and thus as making up for, a monetary loss, is strange and yet
the equivalence was taken for granted during the (pre-) history of humanity
before moral scruples rendered such a transaction as unsavory.
Of course, a sadist would
easily recognize pleasure in being allowed to vent one’s power on a person who is
powerless—perhaps tied up or held to the floor—by inflicting pain on that
person. What, therefore, is the pleasure meant to be equivalent to, and thus in
recompense of what loss or injury? Clearly not one in which the person being
tied up sexually is the culprit, for the inflicted pain is not deserved—hence
the power is vented freely, irrespective of desert (i.e., whether the
pain is deserved). Is the pleasure desired by a sadist only for the sake of
feeling the pleasure itself, especially if it is sexually arousing, or is it
unconsciously sought as recompense to make up for a past injury or loss? If the
latter, can the pleasure from the pain of a person who did not cause the injury
or loss be said to be equivalent to the injury or loss such that the pain from
the injury or loss can be removed by the pleasure from inflicting pain on an
innocent person? If these questions are on target, then perhaps psychologists
treat sadists by helping them to deal with pent-up emotional hurt from having
been subject to abuse of some sort. Perhaps unblocking the natural
psychological healing process would leave a sadist no longer motivated to feel
pleasure by inflicting pain on a person. Cleared of the sordid pleasure,
perhaps a more emotionally intimate sort of pleasure that comes with making
love (i.e., sex with a beloved) could see the light of day. Once tall weeds are
cut in a garden, disinfectant sunlight can directly reach the native fauna
beneath.
What Nietzsche has written
about cruelty is also relevant, not only to sadists, but also masochists. We
moderns err, he claims, in presuming that our species is no longer of the
“’savage cruel beast’ whose conquest is the very pride of [the ancient] more
humane ages.”[9]
Here again, strength must be distinguished from weakness, for the strong
conquerors are not cruel by design or intent, as their intention is to win,
whereas the weak, who are not able to realize such self-confident power, must
turn to the cruelty that is in dominance to feel any pleasure from
power. Nonetheless, the modern moralist is ashamed of the strong noble
conquerors of ancient Rome and the Greek city-states, especially Sparta. Yet
delight in cruelty has not been mortified, for “(a)lmost everything we call
‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its
becoming more profound,” so that “’savage animal’ has not really been
‘mortified’; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine.”[10]
Plays that are tragedies, for example, contain the “admixture of cruelty.”[11]
Audiences enjoy the very sad tragedy of love ended by a misunderstanding in
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Is it not sadist to be drawn to pleasure
vicariously by the infliction of pain on two lovers? Also lost to our
collective memory is the “abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one’s own
suffering, at making oneself suffer.”[12]
The weak among us have for ages been “secretly lured and pushed forward by
[one’s own cruelty], by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against
oneself.”[13]
This weakens oneself, as in the case of a Roman Catholic priest who cruelly
denies himself his innate sexual urge as if it were sinful in itself. In
agreeing to feel pleasure from pain inflicted by a sadist, is not a masochist
self-weakening oneself just as a self-mortifying Christian priest is on account
of guilt? Even if a person who has fallen in love with a sadist refuses to play
the role of masochist because cruelty against oneself is neither sought nor
acceptable, offending the sadist in order that that beloved would be
self-motivated to stay away involves love being cruel to itself—much more so
than it is being cruel to the beloved. To push a beloved away due to unrequited
love, for example, the love must be like steel and thus turn on its own nature,
which wants nothing more than to be with the beloved, unconditionally. Perhaps
alluding to himself, Nietzsche writes “that even the seeker after knowledge
forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit,
and often enough also against the wishes of his heart—by way of saying No where
he would like to say Yes, love, and adore—and thus acts as an artist and
transfigurer of cruelty,” and, I would add, turned really against himself
rather than the beloved even though the latter sees nothing of the interior
artist and cruelty turned inward.[14]
Instead, the beloved takes the insult at face value and flees on that account.
A sadist would be hard-pressed to act in compassion anyway (assuming that
sadists cannot love the objects of their cruelty) if the self-cruelty of the
non-masochist is grasped as a manifestation of love.
In Fifty Shades of Grey,
Anastasia initially bolts but without feigning an insult so Christian will move
on and never want to see or speak with her again, and so she goes back and
plays the role of accepting cruelty from him not because this gives her
pleasure, but, rather, because she really loves him in spite of himself. She is
thus not weak in Nietzsche’s sense. In fact, in mastering her instinctual urge
against having cruelty turned on her, she can be understood as strong. I submit
that she would be even stronger were she to make a deal with Christian by saying,
I will let you inflict pain on me for your sexual pleasure, but you must see
a therapist every week. Because she is not a masochist, her role-playing as
one (i.e., accepting the pain from his cruelty) would perhaps not be
longstanding if Christian would the therapy seriously rather than just a
requirement to keep her. A narcissist sadist would manipulate both the
girlfriend and the therapist, and only seem to be recovering so to
continue having it both ways—retaining his girlfriend while satisfying his
instinctual urge to feel pleasure by inflicting pain on innocent people. At
least in the case of the ancient creditors, the pain was inflicted on culprits.
Sadism can thus be thought of as a distortion of the origin of punishment
rather than as a direct modern manifestation of it. Rather than being viewed as
a legitimate sexual practice, sadism can be viewed as a manifestation of severe
emotional issues that have not been properly processed psychologically. Unclog
the drain, as it were, and the strange equivalence, which is even more of a
stretch than that which arose with ancient creditors and debtors, will
naturally dissipate. In its place, the emotional intimacy of being in love mutually
can deepen such that even making love in terms of two bodies may be viewed
as not close enough, and thus as only on the surface. In contrast, a sadist
does not transcend sexual pleasure and thus is incapable of true love. Ironically,
amid such pleasure, a sadist is alone, without real connection, and thus
is utterly unhappy. In Fifty Shades of Grey, the sadist is fortunate
indeed that his girlfriend loves him. The unasked question is whether he can
actually love her even as he is motivated to feel sexual pleasure by making her
feel pain. If he cannot, perhaps she loves him in spite of himself.
But what do I know about
sadism? Had I inadvertently crossed paths with an actual sadist bent on
inhaling pleasure by inflicting emotional pain, even fallen in love with such a
person, she may still have coldly carved a line down the middle of her bed to
keep me at a distance, as a remote acquaintance at best, and I, in turn,
may have instituted a pathos of distance from such a creature lest my love for
her be infected by all the inhaling and inflicting. I may have enlisted her in
enforcing the distance by insulting her because separation from a beloved is so
very difficult for a person in love. “What are needy parasites to me?” she may
have gone on to coldly remark with an air of primped superiority in briefly
alluding to me to her countless lovers after me, as if I had been a needy
parasite; she would have done so out of spite under the superficial assumption
that I had meant to gravely insult her rather than found myself to be too weak
to walk away for good. This hypothetical involves me being cruel to myself and
thus as weakening myself in order to protect myself emotionally and physically
from an emotionally-inert sadist. In instituting a pathos of distance, I would have
turned the love against itself—denying, in effect, the strength of my love for
another human being. Were I to have agreed to play the role of masochist as Anastasia
does in the film, I could also be viewed in Nietzschean terms as weak for being
willing to be the object of cruelty turned on myself, even if to retain a
connection based on love of the other’s personality. In seeking pleasure by causing
me to feel pain, the sadist too can be seen as weak because the pleasure from the
power obtained cruelly is scant as compared with that of self-confident power
that need not resort to cruelty. Neither the sadist nor the masochist can fit within
Nietzsche’s conception of self-confident, powerful strength. It is a pity that
a sadist and one’s masochist could not commiserate in compassion for each other’s
weakness, rather than continue to inflict and be inflicted upon for what is in actuality
inferior, low-grade pleasure.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library,
1968), p. 499.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 500. Shakespeare drew on this practice in writing his play, The
Merchant of Venice. The common modern expression, a pound of flesh,
comes from that play.
7. Of doing evil for the pleasure of doing it.
8. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, pp. 500-1.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library,
1968), Sec. 229, p. 348.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 348-49.
12. Ibid., p. 349.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
