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The tendency that contributed to the discontinuity of the traditional culture and to the emergence of the primitive was the process of individualization mani-fested most clearly in the Renaissance villa. In its early history the Renaissance villa represents a flight from the city to the country and nature but at the same time it aims to provide a perfect equivalent of the city. This apparent contradic-tion is the very essence of the modernity of the villa. The origin of the modern villa is associated with a deep sense of political crisis sensed in the villa literature of the period. Giuseppe Falcone writes:

It seems to me that the city, if I am not mistaken, for the most part today is nothing other than a patent theatre of misery and filled with every infelicity, and so it happens in those persons in which the good and blessed life because of sloth [otio] lapses and languishes.¹

The primitive as modern problem

The desire to move closer to the country can best be understood on cultural and religious grounds, as part of the historicism and naturalism of the period of the Reformation. ‘The life in the country is much older and therefore much more noble than that of the city’.²This is a typical argument legitimizing the villa and the whole movement known as villeggiatura, by the authority of history.

The Reformation and the villa movement shared a similar aim: to abolish all mediating links and institutions that might influence the direct communication with God and ‘divine’ nature. As a result:

The villa is a world at rest with itself. Evil has been banished to the distant city. It was precisely because of this, that the domain of the villa could become a paradise. The paradise is now founded on the trust in the stability of the moral individual.³

It is in this context that we can understand the references to villa as ‘locus amoenus’ or ‘paradiso terrestris’ which appear so often in contemporary litera-ture. What is meant by such references is a place where man can cultivate his humanity and find his salvation. The goal of the solitary life – vita solitaria – in the villa is not asceticism but the consistent cultivation of one’s self. Cultural crisis, solitary life and the turn to the primitive belong together.

The next important contribution to the emergence of the primitive was the idea of progress, closely linked with the new historical awareness in which the present generation was seen as different and potentially better than the previous or ancient. This new confidence was most explicitly manifested in the famous battle of the ancients and moderns. The major disputants in the quarrel used usually one of three arguments: that knowledge is cumulative and therefore the moderns superseded the ancients; that modern men are the real ancients and in many ways better than them; or that the human race is like a single man, a giant with a dwarf on his shoulders. The last argument was expressed most clearly by Pascal in one of his Pensées:

The whole sequence of mankind during so many centuries should be considered as a single man continually existing and continually learning. At each stage of his life this universal man profited by the knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages, and he is now in his old age.⁴

This opened the question we can ask even today: if the earlier civilizations in their childhood were younger or older than we are. The debate between the old and new created a duality that would soon be seen as a duality between the modern as cultivated and progressive and the ancient as primitive and regressive. This vision was based on the assumption that all experience and

Dalibor Vesely

knowledge are cumulative. The fact that they are not was expressed later in the eighteenth century in new terms, familiar to us as ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’.

The distinction between these two terms is made commonly in reference to their modes of development, according to which civilization, defined most often as ‘techniques’, is a continuous and cumulative process, susceptible to generalizing methods of natural science and capable of universal diffusion. Culture on the other hand, defined most often as ‘creativity’, occurring as unique, is not susceptible to these methods and is not transferable. The qual-itatively different development of culture can follow the progressive develop-ment of civilization only to a limited extent. Culture then appears very often as anachronism, stagnation or even regress. It was in this, not always well-under-stood, discrepancy between the development of civilization and culture that the modern notion of the primitive was finally formed. In the new situation the cultural and the chronological meaning of the primitive became practically iden-tical, and the primitive could be used as an antithesis to civilization, either as a confirmation of the superiority of civilization or as a critique of its malaise. The close link between the primitive and the natural or Nature may explain the vast amount of literature devoted to the subject during the eighteenth century.

However, in spite of its complexity and extent, the content of the literature was dominated mostly by two characteristic attitudes to the primitive – one, based on the assumption that the primitive state of the society is close to the golden age and speaks therefore about the unspoiled truth of reality and the natural goodness of man; the second attitude can be described as anti-primitive, in which the primitive is seen as a brutal and miserable form of existence with no sign of civilization; in fact it is seen as the other side of civilization (Figure 2.2).

This polarization of the primitive is reflected in the romantic construct of the natural man and society, exemplified in the appeal of a simple life in far-away places, which may be termed exotic, and which may be characterized by the praise of ‘the noble savage’. This phrase was introduced into the English language, probably for the first time, by Dryden in his ‘Conquest of Granada’, where we find the following lines:

I am as free as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.⁵

In the description of the famous journey of the Bougainville around the world, the author de Fréville described the South Sea islands as ‘a happy land’, with

‘the best built and most handsome inhabitants one could ever see. The women especially seemed to have been embellished with all the graces’. More impor-tant, de Fréville also found among these islanders ‘humanity, rectitude, and the frankness of the Golden Age’.⁶Lord Monboddo, similarly, observed in his Of the

The primitive as modern problem

Origin and Progress of Language that the ‘golden age may be said yet to exist

… in the South Sea, where the inhabitants live, without toil or labour, upon the bounty of nature in those fine climates’.⁷

The anti-primitive attitude can be illustrated with similar quotations but for the sake of space and time I shall mention only one example. Apologists of the slave trade used a brutish stereotype of a slave to argue that the blacks were better off as slaves in the New World than in the cruel environment of their native Africa.⁸A former governor of Jamaica, Philip Thicknesse, based racism upon biology. In his Memoirs and Anecdotes he admitted that Negroes are ‘a species of the human race …[but of] … an inferior and very different order’.

Their bile, he observed, is black; that of the white man, yellow, ‘proof their being of a very distinct race of the human kind’.⁹This attitude was reinforced by social Darwinism, which led through the unfortunate link of the primitive with race to the monstrous consequences of the modern totalitarian regimes. The critical steps in this development were the slave trade, the colonial mentality and expe-rience, the biological interpretation of culture and the general tendency towards a scientistic understanding of life. This development, together with the positive attitude to the primitive was reflected in the problematic nature of the newly created collections and museums of primitive art, the foundation of ethnographic and anthropological institutions and university departments.

Dalibor Vesely

2.2

The Kanaka Village, New Caledonia, Exposition Universelle, Paris 1889 Source: Le Monde Illustré, 27 June 1889