From: Roy Porter, "Enlightenment and Beyond," The Enlightenment, (Humanities Press International, 1990), pp. 61-3.
© Roy Porter 1990

In 1768, Louis Bougainville was the first French naval commander to set foot upon the newly discovered Pacific island of Tahiti. A cultured man, he quickly published an account which praised it for its similarities to the Isles of the Blessed as evoked by the writers of Antiquity, a land of ease, peace and plenty, where Nature spontaneously met all of man's wants. Above all, he stressed that these happy islanders held no private property, and that they were free of the stringent sexual taboos upheld in Christian Europe.

On reading Bougainville's account of this paradise, the French philosophe, Denis Diderot, turned armchair anthropologist, penning a Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage. Diderot went beyond Bougainville, in imagining Tahitian society as essentially free from all the curses of despotism and private property ('no king, no magistrate, no priest, no laws, no "mine" and "thine"'). All things were held in common, including women, for this happy island (wrote Diderot) celebrated free love. The outcome was far from the degrading sensuality which Christian preachers would have predicted. The absence of fearsome prohibitions upon natural desires rather produced a nation tranquil, gentle and psychologically well-balanced. Diderot praised these 'noble savages', while denouncing the warped and negative sexual attitudes of supposedly civilised Europe.

On his own second voyage to Tahiti, Captain Cook took issue with what he reckoned to be the falsely sentimental picture of Polynesian life given by the French. It was an insult to the Tahitians, he contended, to portray them as wallowing in a form of communism: they were not so primitive at all. The careful observer, not dazzled by these fanciful preconceptions, would note (recorded the down-to-earth Yorkshireman) that almost every tree upon the islands was the property of one of the natives.

The same went for the supposed sexual permissiveness of the Tahitians. Polynesian sexual morality, far from permitting unbridled passion, was in truth much the same as that actually practised in England or France. True, Cook admitted, when his ship had first landed, it was surrounded by loose women eager to sell their sexual favours. But would not a Tahitian find exactly the same practices if he sailed into Portsmouth or Chatham?

This vignette offers a fascinating window onto the play of Enlightenment values. The imaginative Parisian philosophe, Diderot, dragooned his Tahitians into service as a device for deriding the Catholic Church's morbid obsession with chastity and its killjoy attitudes towards eroticism. Captain Cook, the practical Englishman on the spot, would, by contrast, have no truck with such romances about 'noble savages'. Here, one might conclude, the philosophes (for all their fine talk about a 'science of man') seem caught red-handed spinning fantasies, whereas the no-nonsense English sailor was the true upholder of hard facts.

But the contrast just implied between Enlightenment ideology and sturdy empiricism is far too crude. For Cook's own perception of the Tahitians was itself profoundly shaped by theories and preconceptions of an Enlightenment nature. His 'defence' (as he saw it) of the sexual morality of the islanders stemmed from the widely held 'uniformitarian' and 'cosmopolitan' conviction-endorsed by philosophes such as Voltaire and Hume- that human nature and behaviour were inevitably much the same the whole world over. Moreover, Cook accepted the assumptions, spelt out most explicitly by the Scottish economists, that private property and social stratification were intrinsic features in any complex and flourishing society. Unlike the Australian aborigines, who had hardly a stitch to hide their nakedness, the Tahitians formed a thriving people; therefore they must, thought Cook, have a system of social rank and private property. Possibly Diderot the armchair philosophe was more of a myth-maker than Cook the observer; but Cook himself also subscribed to fundamental Enlightenment values. Not for a moment would he interpret Polynesian sensuality as proof that those people were sunk in original sin. The mere fact that they possessed different customs and life-styles from the Europeans did not automatically make them inferior, still less provide a justification for treating them unjustly, exploiting them, or selling them into slavery. For they were human, and Cook, along with all other philosophes, would undoubtedly have endorsed the dictum of Terence, the Roman playwright: 'homo sum, et nihil humanum alienum a me puto' (I am a man, and I think nothing human alien to myself). Cook put into practice the Enlightenment maxim, best expressed by Montesquieu, that one should not sit in judgement upon the ways of other peoples, but rather seek to understand them in the context of their circumstances, and then use one's knowledge of them to improve understanding of oneself.

Notes:

Roy Porter works at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, England --which is why he uses the British spelling of many words. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Denis Diderot are among the more famous philosophes (these people are so famous, they are usually recognized by just their last names). Note also that foreign language terms are italicized (but not all italicized words are foreign).

"philosophe": French for "philosopher," usually referring to the intellectuals of the European Enlightenment.