Concept
Noble savage
Overview
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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. One question that emerges is whether an admiration of "the Other" as noble undermines or reproduces the dominant hierarchy, whereby the Other is subjugated by Western powers.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The she bears are savage in defence of their cubs, and bitches for their puppies. Elephants also become wild at this period. Wherefore they say that in India those who have the care of them do not permit them to have sexual intercourse with the females; for they become mad at such season and overturn the houses, which are badly built, and do many other violent acts. They say also that abundance of food will render…
Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals In Ten Books
States what Noble savage is; the author is tied to Noble savage in the knowledge graph.
The Reserved, who depreciate their own qualities, have the appearance of being more refined in their characters, because they are not thought to speak with a view to gain but to avoid grandeur: one very common trait in such characters is their denying common current opinions, as Socrates used to do. There are people who lay claim falsely to small things and things the falsity of their pretensions to which is…
Aristotle, The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
States what Noble savage is; the author is tied to Noble savage in the knowledge graph.
But customs are simply the traditional way of acting and valuing. Where there is no tradition there is no morality; and the less life is governed by tradition, the narrower the circle of morality. The free man is immoral, because it is his _will_ to depend upon himself and not upon tradition: in all the primitive states of humanity “evil” is equivalent to “individual,” “free,” “arbitrary,” “unaccustomed,”…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
States what Noble savage is.
Philosophers who discussed Noble savage
Related ideas
- Egalitarianism
- Ibn Tufayl
- Moral sense theory
- Social stratification
- Western philosophy
- French Wars of Religion
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
- Byzantine Empire
- Harvard University
- Archaeology
- Columbia University Press
- Tacitus
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Professor
- Natural theology
- UNESCO
- Nature
- University of California Press
- Myth
- Roman Empire
- Narrative
- Race (human categorization)
- Romanticism
Place in the tradition
Part of Romanticism.