The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the Savage: An Enlightenment Problematic

Tony C. Brown examines the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considersincluding the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoeturn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.

In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in ones ability to understand the humans relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidencewhat Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological securitytraces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the humans place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to exotic examples from the New Worldsuch as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practicemaking them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.