Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale

by Ibn Tufail

His strategy for survival was a kind of spiritual withdrawal, similar to what his hero, Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, chooses once he understands the limitations of ordinary society. Ibn Tufayl’s choice was not heroic. In a way, it was escapist. But a more outspoken philosopher might never have lived to write a book at all. Ibn Tufayl’s modus vivendi was neither isolation nor self-immolation, but accommodation. He could not take many others with him, but he did not travel entirely alone, and the book he left behind was his invitation to others, including many whom he never met, to join him on the flights that took him beyond the realm Plotinus so tellingly had called “this blood-drenched life.”

Plotinus was wrong about at least one thing: Our lives are not a “flight of the alone to the Alone.”

I remain convinced as well by what I called the point zero argument: Those who would dismiss our human power to initiate actions have denied many of the very actions and effects to which they appeal when seeking to lay individual responsibility at the feet of others. They both assume and deny personal agency.

All the world lies before him, the stars, like limbs of some great dissected animal symmetrically displayed for his examination.16 Every being is unique—yet in species, genus, Kingdom, all are one. Pervading Hayy’s thought is that strange Platonic logic which identifies souls with forms and, in the unity of forms and functions shared by all living and even non-living things, finds a higher unity of which all objects participate like parts of the same body; and all forms and souls, like scattered drops from a single bowl of water.

Wisdom seeks more than knowledge: it seeks an active relationship of love with the beloved, and with God.

Hayy’s wisdom begins as he approaches thirty-five,24 when he begins to relate to God not merely by knowledge, but by love.

all that has gone before is a “ladder of love” to union with God; for, at the end of his seventh set of seven years,27 Hayy attains the beatific experience.

Like object and image—or more exactly, object and idea or a man and his soul—the two are somehow at once the same and different. And the Active Intellect at the base of the hierarchy of sphere-minds is the source of all the world’s diversity, at once the world-soul and the form of forms. Thus neo-Platonism solves the knotty problem of God’s relationship to the world not by calling Him its creator ex nihilo, but by seeing in Him the ontological fountain from which all creation springs; and in concrete being, ripples in the ocean of God’s mind.

To the Platonist-radical monotheist, whatever exists, inasmuch as it does exist, is an emanation of the divine. All being can reflect, to one degree or another, the splendor of God. The more brilliantly He shows up in it, the higher its ontological status, and accordingly its value. Evil is ontological weakness, a lack, non-being. To the extent that a thing is whole or good or sound or fulfilled, it is a mode of the divine Being. And thus it is that Hayy’s soul itself is “breathed” into him by God, that is to say the endowment of his fitra is a mode of the divine, and man is made “in the image of God.”

wherever ontological hierarchy becomes the basis of value, the concept of more perfect essence must be fused with that of superior rank in the chain of existence.

Thus Hayy’s education is just that, the leading out of tendrils from seeds that have been planted in his soul not by a human teacher, but by God. But this brings us face to face with the old, old problem of free-will. If Hayy—and with him the whole species he represents—is granted faculties that are no less, but still no more, than emanations of the Godhead, and if those faculties are activated by the spirit of God himself, surely there is no room for human freedom. Can radical monotheism answer such a question? It might be valuable to see how it can.

In place of the confinement of the infinitesimal, beneath the weight of the Infinite is found the limitlessness or a humanly bearable share in the limitlessness which is the freedom of God. For Ibn Tufayl, at least, this was the meaning of Islam: the progressive assimilation of self to God (so far as lies in human power). This entails acceptance of the divine will, but not as something alien. The transmuting of selfish purpose to the will of God need not imply a surrender of will because the assimilation of self to God does not imply a surrender of self.

For Ibn Tufayl, as for the Platonist, to know oneself was to see in oneself affinities to the divine and to accept the obligation implied by such recognition to develop these affinities—to become, in as much as was in human power, like God.

To be sure, the key of grace, transference of man’s human purpose to the transcendent purpose of the divine, was to be obtained, in Muhammad’s radical monotheism, only from the hand of God. But that key at least, if no other, opened the door to freedom. Grace, if nothing else, could bring recognition of the necessity of moral choice, and with it the necessity of freedom.

“Behold I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.”45 Is it inconsistent that such words should be spoken by an omnipresent God? By no means. An infusion of God’s essence into the soul of man carries no imputation of passivity or impotence. Quite the reverse, if human fulfillment is assimilation to God and if the drives that bring a man to fulfillment are implanted by God, then the fostering by God of those drives and the realization of the potentials they represent will make a man more perfect, more himself. This is the meaning, Ibn Tufayl tells us, of the dictum accepted by Muslim, Christian, and Jew that man is created in the image of God.

The remarkable thing about human beings at their most human is not how consistently and uniformly they react, but the fact that they can create their own values. Human beings do not just weigh and measure, accept and reject, but assess and decide, and can decide for themselves what matters, what is worthwhile.

A concerted effort is made to reduce action to behavior and behavior to standardized, mechanical response. Often we oblige by living the weak analogy, acting the part of machines and treating each other the same way. But is this really how we act at our most human, when we consider? Is this what we mean by choosing? Granted the past is out of reach; for us at least, who have become, the question at issue is the future. If we feel a tug of aesthetic or moral revulsion at the reduction of human hopes and dreams to automatic responses in the dialectic of some unseen game or excrescences of long suppressed, perhaps pre-natal traumas, then it may be worthwhile to find in Ibn Tufayl a non-Pavlovian alternative.

Education is, for Ibn Tufayl, a process of molding? Perhaps. But the molder is God Himself, the being molded is filled with God’s being, and the mold is no determinate pattern but the cast of humanity: to use human choice, to invoke human values, to be, at times, surprising.

In confronting the diversity apparently inherent in religion the mind may be led to seek an underlying unity by which, in conception if not in manifestation, the seemingly disparate phenomena are bound together. If generously conducted, such a confrontation will grow into toleration, the realization that men’s approaches to God differ but are motivated by the same drive towards a certain kind of higher truth; this is intellectual toleration, not merely living and letting live, but active seeking to understand the beliefs of others and a principled refusal to attribute these to prejudice, superstition or moral laxity—refusal to treat the religion of others as a heresy of one’s own. For the citizen toleration is sufficient. But for the thinker, the analytical and synthetic activity of the mind refuses to confine itself to differentiating among historically defined sects and discovering a unity in their outlook, but seeks deeper, for unities that transcend cultural categories and divisions that cut across historical continuities.

Thought comes alive in religion with the realization that anthropomorphism is idolatry: when the first glimmer crosses the soul that meaningful religion is possible without giving God a long white beard or stationing angels on His right hand and grandmother on His left, rational religion has begun.

Reason must either discover the necessity of an active human involvement with the world’s life from which it sought to free itself, towards which its only relation was dispassionate contemplation, or else risk sinking into the deep, sweet, dull slumber of self-satisfaction that bears no resemblance to the active seeking and subduing that is the vitality of reason, and out of which a terrified scream from the human world will awaken it too late. Thus the religious activity of reason, while it remains reasonable, is not confined to contemplation. The search, by reason, for a purely contemplative life is condemned to futility. For just as action without thought is directionless and inept, thought without active involvement soon loses its content and its meaning.

Now mass religion, like rational religion, claims universality; and doesn’t the claim seem more justified, for mass religion preaches to high and low, rich and poor, wise and foolish? There is no intellectual élite here, no ignoring of the needs and passions of the people. The evangelist brings his tidings to all men of good will. Yet because allowing choice among revelations will only restore rational religion, tradition has been introduced, and precisely because the “needs” and passions of the people are not ignored but fed by the emotional appeals of the evangelist that tradition will be particular, not universal. Through a sense of ethnic identity, through common bonds of history, through common needs and common passions, and even through the religious tradition itself, the people will become this people, the Chosen People, God’s children, the People of the Only true Way, the Children of Light. If a prophet discovers the force behind the drive to peoplehood, how can he avoid calling that force to the service of God? Just as traditions help single-out peoples, evangelists have a way of particularizing traditions, popularizing them. It seems hardly necessary to cite Gerald L. K. Smith, Stokeley Carmichael, or Adolf Hitler to demonstrate the tremendous forces particularism can unleash in behalf of its Cause.

For a perfect mystic, paradox is the ultimate test of courage, the heart of the mystery is to love God enough to cry “Credo quia absurdum”—to bear the cross of self-contradiction.

reason is not merely a less perfect way of knowing God than intuition; it is and—except in the case of rare prophetic individuals—must be our first means of knowing Him. Reason does not merely precede intuition, but prepares the way for it. Thus, it is by the use of reason that Hayy, Ibn Tufayl’s paradigm of mankind, reaches his first knowledge of God’s nature; he would remain ignorant even of God’s existence were it not for reason.

What Eastern wisdom could achieve that had been so rare in Andalusia and in Peripatetic thought was a philosophical approach to God and the mystic experience. Ibn Tufayl’s complaint is that, up to his own time, almost all the intelligence in his part of the world had been devoted to logic and mathematics. The possible objects of intellectual endeavor seemed to be divided, as one of his predecessors put it, between unattainable truths and readily available trivia.75 Such a position cannot destroy religion if there is a dominant tradition of faith to oppose it; but it suffocates rational religion by isolating the religious sphere from the intellectual. It was an escape from the stifling positivism of these rigid dichotomies—fact and tautology, reason and religion—that Ibn Tufayl sought in his oriental philosophy.

The religion of Ibn Tufayl is a hybrid, a synthesis of mystical and rational religion. God is known first and most safely by reason, ultimately and most intensely by intuition, but calmly and constantly by a philosophical mind that seems to find no phenomenological distinction between the two. The relationship of man to God, in which the “oriental philosopher” wraps himself, wilāya, combines the intimate, intuitive understanding of friendship with the passion and immediacy of love; this uniting of reason and emotion marks the union of rational and mystic religion.

the rational-mystic asks ‘Why see God through a glass darkly, when you can see Him now face to face, if your mind has eyes to see? Why darken the glass with positive dogma and positive law, a law that prevents searching and a dogma of representations purposely placed by tradition between the mind and the truth? Clear all this out of your mind and seek the Truth!’ But tradition is a cultural force more powerful in molding minds, perhaps, than minds are to mold themselves. Is it possible for man to void his mind of all the myths, conscious and unconscious, which society has instilled in him since birth? Should he even try? How can the mind possibly transcend cultural categories of thought and value by which its own nature has been formed? How safe is man’s soul outside society?

Such metaphors as these five have more than a rhetorical and instructive function. They do help put across a point and promote learning by allowing reïfication, the mental equivalent to audio-visual aids. But in addition, perhaps because they serve at the pleasure of the imagination, these metaphors bring a good deal of color into the black and white world of abstraction. Even if they were not necessary or useful, they would probably remain as luxuries in conversation because they stand at the juncture between metaphysics and poetry. And yet, like many luxuries, these metaphors are dangerous. There is a great danger in taking literally what was meant as a figure; and, although we confidently feel the danger is easily avoided, history has proved the opposite. It is one thing to associate metaphor and concept, another to identify them.

Essences cannot be distilled in any ordinary device, but the thought-experiment is one means of capturing them. In science, a thought-experiment postulates a hypothetical situation and then tries to “predict” the natural outcome. The same technique has been used for centuries by philosophers grasping for the intangible. If you want to reveal the essence of man, postulate a situation in which that essence is thought to be most able to develop purely, unimpeded by foreign influences. Make the environment natural, make it primitive and simple, fill it with all the concrete conditions we associate with essentiality. Then let the imagination go to work to discover what will follow, what seems most reasonable, what seems most likely. The poetry is no longer a collection of images but has become drama: symbolic figures have taken roles as active, even causal factors; and they can work out for themselves the dialectic of the action. The philosopher’s hope is that if any intellectual process can capture any fraction of the essence of man, the resolution of this dialectic can.

For Golding, to give the basic is to give the bottom, to strip man down to the brute soul that lies beneath the civilized veneer: sluggishness, aggression, lust to kill: let these go into action and the drama of the thought-experiment will resolve itself into a dénouement quite different from that of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān. What of Hayy’s painstaking progress step-by-step out of the low and toward the Most High? Golding writes “. . . they ignored the miraculous throbbing stars,” and in a single telling and credible sentence explodes the illusion of a castaway child having the least concern for the precession of the equinoxes or the finitude of the heavens and eliminates the possibility among his islanders of any spiritual or emotional advance. How does Golding win his credibility? Surely this is the realism of a shared assumption. We find it easy to believe the island castaways ignored the stars for the same reason we find it hard to believe Hayy studied them: we rarely look on a passion for truth as a fundamental urge from deep underneath; we are more inclined to accept lassitude as lying beneath the social accretions of art and intellect. Likewise, shared experience of the blindness of competitive emulation and especially of children’s eagerness to find a scapegoat and a butt makes the boys’ cruelty to Piggy not merely a real-seeming portrayal but an emotive lever supporting Golding’s given: the basicness of aggression. But if we share these assumptions and experiences with Gol...

what is balanced, Ibn Tufayl tells us, has no opposite to overturn it.

Ibn Tufayl is stopped at the postulation of the first item of his premiss: there is no “basis,” say the psychologists, out of which any essence could arise. Man’s given to begin with is a tabula rasa, a blank slate. What he will be depends on the circumstances of his life. The pessimism of Golding and the optimism of Ibn Tufayl are both set aside. It is as wrong to say man is essentially evil as it is to say he’s essentially good—man is essentially nothing.

What then is left of man? Bundles of data? One trait, at least, remains: the blankness of the state itself! Adaptability, flexibility, a chameleon power of reflecting the surroundings, the protean, protozoan capacity to assimilate. And one trait more: man’s social desire and social capacity to modify himself as well as his environment. Given flexibility and the communal power of control, nullity is left behind; there is a new basis from which to build; optimism again becomes the mood. Of that mood Robert Owen wrote the shibboleth: Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.

We are at the heart of the meaning of Ibn Tufayl’s book: can we let ourselves forget the metaphorical structuring of the thought-experiment’s premiss and Ibn Tufayl’s explicit warning against taking his words literally, and superficially? Ibn Tufayl does not want us to expose our infants—he did not expose his own; he wants to show us what we can achieve if we extricate ourselves from society. The exposure is not a project of primitive science, but a symbol of the completeness of Hayy’s independence. The point is not to live on an island—that too is imagery—the point is merely to achieve independence from social myth, civil coercion, and cultural blindness.

If we have seen that to be a moral adult is to have attained a point of “take-off”, after which no analysis of “input”, no matter how complete the data, is a sure guide in predicting the outcome of human choice, then certainly we can learn here that to be imaginatively free is to achieve a certain power to choose what is not given but taken, what lies outside the hidebound volumes in which one culture lists what is past, not what is possible; to seek and find the truth and value that lie beyond the tables of the law and the scrolls of social ritual. It is this seeking and finding, of course, which Hayy is meant to symbolize.

The limitations of Ibn Tufayl are the limitations of any man. We are not perfect, we are not even remarkably self-reliant. But the universality of such imperfections in beings that are admittedly finite does not constitute an argument against the desirability of an extra-cultural search for truth or value.

claims are made for the crucial effect of language, an allegedly social product, on thought. It is remembered, one hopes, that this causality works both ways; but it takes the thought-experiment to remind us which of the two is essential: one can easily conceive, as Ibn Tufayl does, a man filled with thoughts, but never blessed by the “social gift” of language. It is thought that creates language; not language, thought. Likewise, one is logically and ontologically prior to many: no group has an idea or composes a refrain to the exclusion of its members. By the same token, it was man who created society, not society which created man.

he knew that influence is not greatness and success is not fulfillment, that knowledge is not wisdom, and benevolence is not holiness.

There is something blotted out in man when society devours his every waking moment: the apotheosis of society is the death of the transcendent soul. There are times when a man must draw back a bit and meditate—a moment of withdrawal to balance with the rest of life, a moment in which reason and the power of the soul can find a truth tradition can never impart. It was the ideal of that withdrawal embodied in the peaceful soul of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān which Ibn Tafayl singled out for praise.

Your request set off a stream of ideas in me—praise God—which lifted me to a state of sublimity I had never known before, a state so wonderful “the tongue cannot describe” or explain it, for it belongs to another order of being, a different world. But the joy, delight and bliss of this ecstasy4 are such that no one who has reached it or even come near it can keep the secret or conceal the mystery.5 The lightheadedness, expansiveness,6 and joy which seize him force him to blurt it out in some sweeping generality, for to capture it precisely is impossible. If he be the sort whose mind has not been sharpened by intellectual pursuits, he may speak unwisely.7 Thus in this state one said “Praise be to me, great am I!”8 Another said “I am the Truth”;9 another, “There is within this robe nothing but God!”

Those [9] who merely think and have not reached the level of love31 are like the blind. The colors, at that stage known only by accounts of their names, are those experiences which Ibn Bājja said are “too splendid to arise in the physical world”, which “God grants to those of his worshippers whom He chooses.” But to those who reach love, God grants what I purely metaphorically call another faculty. This corresponds to the restoration of sight. And sometimes, rarely, there comes a man whose eyes, as it were, are always open, whose glance is always piercing, who does not need to search.

“If my words have done no more than to shake you in the faith of your fathers, that would have been reason enough to write them. For he who does not doubt does not look; and he who does not look will not see, but must remain in blindness and confusion.” He illustrates the point with this couplet: Forget all you’ve heard and clutch what you see— At sunrise what use is Saturn to thee?

The most reflective body, far outshining all others, is the one that mirrors in itself the image and pattern of the sun.

He could restrict the action of his other organs—hands, feet, eyes, nose, and ears; he could lose these parts and conceivably get along without them. Conceivably he could get along without his head.100 But when he thought of whatever it was he could feel in his breast he could not conceive of living for an instant without it. For this reason, in fact, when fighting with animals, he had always been especially careful to protect his breast from their [41] horns—because he could feel that there was something there.

Realizing that whatever had lived in that chamber had left while its house was intact, before it had been ruined, Hayy saw that it was hardly likely to return after all the cutting [45] and destruction. The body now seemed something low and worthless compared to the being he was convinced had lived in it for a time and then departed.

inasmuch as things differ they are many, but inasmuch as they correspond they are one.

Since Hayy’s home, as I mentioned at the outset, was on the equator, the orbital planes of all the stars were perpendicular to his horizon and their orbits equally large at a given deflection north and south. What is more, both polar axes [79] were visible to him. He observed that when a star with a large orbit and one with a small one rose together, they also set together; and seeing this repeated constantly with all stars, he realized that the firmament must be spherical.

Hayy understood that the heavens and all that is in them are, as it were, one being whose parts are all interconnected. All the bodies he had known before such as earth, water, air, plants and animals were enclosed within this being and never left it. The whole was like an animal.139 The light-giving stars were its senses. The spheres, articulated one to the next, were its limbs. And the world of generation and decay within was like the juices and wastes in the beast’s belly, where smaller animals often breed, as in the macrocosm.

Disintegration and decay are, he knew, predicates of physical things indicating simply that they have taken off one form and put on another, as when water turns to air, or air to water, or when plants [93] become soil or ashes, or soil becomes a plant. This is the meaning of breakdown.