Myth of the Noble savage

For broader usage of the word "savage", see Savage (pejorative term).
For other uses, see Noble Savage (disambiguation).

In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the Myth of the Noble savage refers to a stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the "noble" savage symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with Nature.[1] In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.[2]

The intellectual politics of the Stuart Restoration (1660–1688) expanded Dryden's playwright usage of savage to denote a human wild beast and a wild man.[3] Concerning civility and incivility, in the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit (1699), the philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, said that men and women possess an innate morality, a sense of right and wrong conduct, which is based upon the intellect and the emotions, and not based upon religious doctrine.[4]

In the philosophic debates of 17th-century Britain, the Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit was the Earl of Shaftesbury's ethical response to the political philosophy of Leviathan (1651), in which Thomas Hobbes defended absolute monarchy and justified centralized government as necessary because the condition of Man in the apolitical state of nature is a "war of all against all", for which reason the lives of men and women are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" without the political organization of people and resources. The European Hobbes gave, incorrectly, as example the Native Americans as people living in the bellicose state of nature that precedes tribes and clans organizing into the societies that compose a civilization.[4]

In 18th-century anthropology, the term noble savage then denoted nature's gentleman, an ideal man born from the sentimentalism of moral sense theory. In the 19th century, in the essay "The Noble Savage" (1853) Charles Dickens rendered the noble savage into a rhetorical oxymoron by satirizing the British romanticisation of Primitivism in philosophy and in the arts made possible by moral sentimentalism.[5]

In many ways, the myth of the noble savage entails fantasies about the non-West that cut to the core of the conversation in the social sciences about Orientalism, colonialism and exoticism. The key question that emerges here is whether an admiration of "the Other" as noble undermines or reproduces the dominant hierarchy, whereby the Other is subjugated by Western powers.[6]

  1. ^ "The noble savage", Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory Third Edition (1991) J.A. Cudon, Ed. pp. 588–589.
  2. ^ Miner, Earl (1972), "The Wild Man Through the Looking Glass", in Dudley, Edward; Novak, Maximillian E (eds.), The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, University of Pittsburgh Press, p. 106, ISBN 9780822975991
  3. ^ OED s.v. "savage" B.3.a.
  4. ^ a b Harrison, Ross. Locke, Hobbes, and Confusion's Masterpiece (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 70.
  5. ^ Moore, Grace "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'", The Dickensian 98:458 (2002): 236–243.
  6. ^ Kalantzis, Konstantinos. "The Indigenous Sublime Rethinking Orientalism and Desire from documenta 14 to Highland Crete". Current Anthropology. doi:10.1086/728171.