Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), the Göttingen physicist and satirist, is best known for his posthumously published notebooks (the “Sudelbücher” or waste books), where he recorded aphorisms, observations, and moral-psychological sketches rather than polished essays. The “moral backside” remark belongs to this tradition of sharp, often bodily metaphors used to puncture social pretension. In late Enlightenment German bourgeois culture, “decorum” and outward respectability were powerful social currencies; Lichtenberg repeatedly scrutinized the gap between public virtue and private weakness. The image suggests an entry aimed less at a particular event than at a general, skeptical anatomy of human self-presentation.

Lichtenberg’s metaphor treats moral life as having an unpresentable side: shameful motives, hypocrisies, and petty impulses that most people conceal. “The trousers of decorum” stand for manners, reputation, and social conventions that cover these defects and allow everyday coexistence. The sting is double-edged: it mocks individuals for pretending to spotless virtue, but it also implies that society depends on a certain amount of concealment to function. The line anticipates later psychological and sociological accounts of the “public self” versus the “private self,” insisting that moral judgment should reckon with what people hide as well as what they display.