The Story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan

Overview

Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is about a hundred and seventy pages including the translator’s apparatus, and the tale itself is shorter than that. Ibn Tufayl was an Andalusian physician, astronomer and vizier at the Almohad court in Marrakesh, and he is the man who introduced Ibn Rushd, known in Europe as Averroes, to the ruler who commissioned the Aristotle commentaries. This is the only work of his that survives complete.

The title means Alive, son of Awake, and Ibn Tufayl took the names from a short allegory by Avicenna, though the story is entirely his own.

It is framed as a response to a question. A friend has asked what the Eastern philosophy of Avicenna amounts to, and Ibn Tufayl replies with an introduction surveying the Islamic philosophical tradition, al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and then says he will answer by telling a story.

Its European career is remarkable. Edward Pococke the younger published a Latin translation at Oxford in 1671 under the title Philosophus Autodidactus, with the Arabic facing; Dutch and English versions followed. Locke’s circle knew it. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719. The Quakers took an interest, because a man reaching God without church or scripture suited them.

What happens

The beginning. Ibn Tufayl gives two versions and refuses to choose. In one, Hayy is generated spontaneously from fermenting clay on an equatorial island where conditions are perfectly balanced. In the other, he is the child of a secret marriage on a neighbouring island, set adrift by his mother in a box to save him from her brother the king, and washed ashore. The doubling is deliberate: nothing in the argument depends on which is true.

He is found by a doe that has lost her fawn and raised as one of her own.

The first stage, to seven. He notices he is different: the other animals have horns, hooves, fur, speed. He compensates by covering himself with leaves and feathers, weaving, making a stick. The first use of his hands leads him to understand that his deficiency is also his advantage.

The second stage, to fourteen. The doe grows old and dies. This is the hinge of the book. Hayy, grieving, wants to find what has gone wrong with her and repair it, and reasons that since she had no visible injury the fault must be internal. He dissects her, examines every organ, and finds them all present and intact. He concludes that whatever made her his mother was not any of these parts, that it has departed, and that the body he is looking at is not her.

Shortly after he discovers fire, from a spark in a reed bed, feeds it, and learns what it does. He cooks. He dissects a living animal and finds heat concentrated in the left chamber of the heart, and connects the two.

The third and fourth stages, to twenty-eight and thirty-five. Systematic investigation. He works through plants and animals and finds that beneath their variety there is unity: they are alike in nutrition, growth, and what animates them. He extends this to minerals, to the elements, to the heavens. He arrives at form and matter, at the distinction between what is essential and what is accidental, and at the conclusion that every body has something beyond its extension that makes it what it is.

Then the metaphysics. Everything that comes into being needs a cause. An infinite regress of causes is impossible. The heavens, whether eternal or created, require a being that is not itself caused. He works out both cases, that the world had a beginning and that it did not, and finds that a necessary existent follows either way, which is a deliberate refusal to make the argument depend on a contested cosmological claim.

The fifth stage, to fifty. Having established that the necessary being exists, Hayy asks how a creature like himself should live in relation to it. He works out an ethics from the three aspects of his own nature: he resembles the animals, and must feed himself with the minimum that keeps him alive; he resembles the heavenly bodies, whose motion is regular and whose activity is to contemplate, and so he should keep himself clean, care for the plants and animals around him, and circle; and he resembles the necessary being itself in the part of him that knows, and so should withdraw from sense altogether into pure contemplation.

The practice succeeds. Ibn Tufayl describes the resulting experience carefully and with a warning: what follows cannot be conveyed in words, the terms he is about to use are borrowed and misleading, and a reader who takes the description for the thing has misunderstood.

The ending. On a neighbouring island lives a community with a revealed religion. Two men there disagree about it: Salaman, who governs and holds to the literal sense and to social observance, and Absal, who is drawn to inner meanings and contemplation. Absal retreats to Hayy’s island for solitude, meets him, teaches him language, and discovers with astonishment that everything their scripture says, Hayy has worked out unaided, and that the images in the religious law correspond to what Hayy knows directly.

They go back together so that Hayy can teach. It does not work. He explains, and people become uncomfortable, then hostile. He concludes that most people are incapable of the kind of understanding he has, that they need the law in its literal form with its promises and threats, and that pressing them further does them harm rather than good. He advises them to keep to their tradition, and he and Absal return to the island and live out their lives in contemplation.

How to read it

Read the tale itself and treat the prefatory survey of Islamic philosophy as optional; it is useful context and it is not the book.

Read the dissection of the doe slowly. It is the moment the whole argument starts and it is a piece of writing that would not be out of place three hundred years later.

Notice how carefully the chain is built. Ibn Tufayl is not claiming that Hayy has intuitions; he is claiming each step follows from an observation and the one before it, and the argument only works if the steps hold.

Read the ending as the thesis rather than as an appendix. A book that has spent a hundred pages showing that reason alone reaches the truth ends by concluding that this route is unavailable to almost everyone and that they should be left alone with the version they have. Whether that is elitism, realism or prudence under a regime that burned books is the central question.

Read it against Locke, if you know the Essay. The mind as white paper furnished by experience is the same starting point, put to a very different use.

And read Goodman’s introduction, which is the best account in English of where the book sits between al-Ghazali, who had attacked the philosophers, and Ibn Rushd, who defended them.

Questions it raises

• Could anyone actually do this? The thought experiment assumes a great deal: a temperate island, no predators, and a mind that reasons without ever having had language.
• If reason unaided reaches the same conclusions as revelation, what is revelation for?
• Hayy arrives at a necessary being by argument and at union with it by practice. Are those two achievements or one?
• The ending says most people cannot follow this and should keep the literal religion. Is that contempt, compassion, or an accurate assessment?
• The book was written under a regime that was not tolerant. How much of its caution is philosophical and how much is prudence?
• Locke, Defoe and the Quakers all read it. What did each of them take, and does the book support what they took?