Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale

by Ibn Tufail

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...