The Enlightenment thinkers and the myth of the noble savage

Question

We can read in Wikipedia (but also elsewhere) that "During the Age of Enlightenment, intellectuals rhetorically used the idealization of indigenous peoples as political criticism of European culture" (Wikipedia, Primitivism).

But as of examples of Enlightenment thinkers using the "noble savage myth" as a rethorical tool, I can think "only" of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Diderot's Addendum to the Journey of Bougainville (1796), and Voltaire's L'Ingénu (1767).

Are there some other authors? Hobbes surely was not one of them (cf. Bellum omnium contra omnes).

Answer 1

A lot depends on how you draw the lines around the Enlightenment and around philosophy. It would seem that the trope was of much more interest in art and literature than in philosophy. This article Noble savage - Wikipedia may help with that. Here's a passage that might interest you:-

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 as example the American Indians as people living in the bellicose state of nature that precedes tribes and clans organizing into the societies that compose a civilization.[5]

The footnote takes you to a reference - Harrison, Ross. Locke, Hobbs, and Confusion's Masterpiece (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 70. If you have access to a good library you might like to track it down.

ADDED THE NEXT DAY

Out of sheer curiosity, I looked Hobbes up and searched for "America" in the text. The references are given below. I also checked on Locke's Essay and Second Treatise; I found three references in the former and no less than fifteen in the latter. Here are the references:-

Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:- 13, 20; 14, 20; 16, 6

The Second Treatise of Government:- 2, 14; 5, 27, 36, 37, 41, 43, 46, 48, 49; 7, 92; 8, 102, 105, 108; 16, 184,

An ancient, vague memory led me to look up his labour theory of value in Second Treatise chapter 5, esp. § 27. He doesn't mention America, but he is clearly thinking of a colonist in an unoccupied territory. So you might like to expand your range to include "state of nature".

HOBBES, Leviathan:-

10, § To Honour and Dishonour; 13, § The Incommodities Of Such A War; 20, § Objection Of Those That Say There Are No Principles Of Reason For Absolute Soveraignty; 46, § Private Interpretation Of Law

Answer 2

One of the motifs of enlightenment thinking was the idea of the 'State of Nature'. This idea was used by a number of people — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, etc — and was meant to imagine how human existence was prior to the higher-level structures of society, politics, economics, culture, and the like. All of those 'State of Nature' arguments (except Hobbes') imagined pre-societal humans as sophisticated and rational people, unsullied by the corruptions inherent in the social world around them.

'State of Nature' arguments were not meant to be realistic; they were intellectual abstractions meant to reimagine how higher-level structures could and should be reconstructed: they framed revolutionary ideals. But less sophisticated readers took them a bit too literally and projected them on to 'natives' — non-Western tribal societies — imbuing those natives with an idealized noble, rational, world-integrated persona that the anthropologists of the day tried to discover and explore. And this then led to the Colonial 'White-Man's Burden' justification where the now 'enlightened' Western societies had an obligation either to keep these 'natives' in their state of noble innocence, or drag them to enlightened understanding without allowing them to pass through the corrupting intermediary stages of ignorant forms of governance.

The idea of the 'noble savage' was a literary and cultural motif that drew on a poor understanding of the philosophical principles. It was never a significant part of the philosophical discussion itself, but (arguably) was used as a moral rationalization for the Colonial project as a whole.