Ibn Tufayl

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl

Nine hundred years ago an Andalusian philosopher ran a thought experiment so audacious it reads like science fiction. Take a human infant, he proposed, and set him utterly alone on a desert island, with no parents, no people, no language, no books, no religion, nothing taught and no one to teach. Suppose a doe finds him and nurses him among the animals. Now let him grow up, with only his senses and his own mind to work from, and ask the deepest question you can ask about a human being: how far can he get? Can a mind with no culture at all, starting from absolute zero, reason its way to science, to philosophy, even to the knowledge of God? Ibn Tufayl wrote a whole novel to answer it, the story of the boy Hayy, "Alive, son of Awake," and it was the first philosophical novel ever written in Arabic and one of the boldest wagers on reason anyone has ever made. His answer is yes. Given nothing but the world and his own intelligence, the solitary mind can climb all the way to the top.

The climb. The genius of the book is that it makes the climb feel inevitable, step by patient step. Hayy begins like any animal, copying the creatures around him, learning to find food and to make crude tools. Then the doe that raised him dies, and grief drives him to his first act of science: he opens her body to find what has left it, reasons that the missing thing is no organ he can hold but some animating principle, and so discovers, entirely alone, the difference between a body and the life that fills it. From there he cannot stop. He dissects and compares and classifies, building a whole natural history of his island; he notices that beneath the endless variety of living things runs a deeper unity; he turns his eyes to the night sky and, tracking the wheeling stars, reasons that their motion must point to something that moves without being moved. Each stage grows out of the last by sheer force of curiosity and inference, until this man who has never heard a single human word has reconstructed, on his own, the better part of Greek science and philosophy. Tufayl is making a quiet and radical point with every step: none of this required a teacher. It required only a world to observe and a mind willing to think.

A truth that belongs to no one. At the summit, Hayy reasons his way to God. Everything around him, he sees, is contingent, it exists but did not have to, and leans for its being on something else; and a whole universe of such dependent things must finally rest on something that does not depend, a necessary being that is the source of all the rest. Then, refining his attention through a contemplative discipline he invents for himself, he passes beyond even argument into a direct, wordless awareness of that being, a mystical union reached with no scripture, no prophet, and no church to guide him. This is the radical core of Tufayl's book, and it was a daring thing to set down in a deeply religious age: the claim that the highest truths, the ones religions guard and revelation delivers, are not the private property of any tradition at all. They are written into the structure of reality itself, available to any mind anywhere that looks honestly and thinks hard enough. A boy who never heard the name of God, reasoning alone on an empty island, arrives at the same God the prophets preached. Truth, for Tufayl, is universal, and reason is the birthright by which any human being can reach it.

When reason meets the crowd. And then Tufayl does something unexpected and wise, which keeps the book from being a naive hymn to reason. Onto Hayy's island comes a second man, Absal, a sincere believer from a society with a revealed religion, who has rowed out in search of solitude. The two slowly learn to understand one another, and they make a discovery that delights them both: they have arrived at exactly the same truths by completely different roads, Hayy through naked reason, Absal through the symbols and rituals and stories of his faith. The religion, it turns out, had been teaching the people, in pictures they could grasp, the very things Hayy had proven in the abstract. Encouraged, the two sail back to Absal's homeland to share the pure, unveiled truth directly. And they fail. The crowd cannot take it; stripped of its familiar images, the higher truth only confuses and unsettles them, and Hayy realizes, with sorrow, that for most people the symbolic veils of religion are not a defect to be torn away but a necessary form, the only vessel in which such truths can safely be carried. He blesses the people in their own idiom and withdraws. It is a strikingly mature conclusion: reason can reach the summit alone, but it cannot simply hand that summit to everyone, and the social forms it is tempted to despise may be doing indispensable work.

The island that drifted into Europe. Centuries later the little book did something its hero could not: it crossed the water and changed minds in bulk. Translated into Latin in 1671 under the title The Self-Taught Philosopher, Hayy ibn Yaqzan landed in a Europe hungry for precisely its question. John Locke, who owned a copy, was at that very moment building his theory of the mind as a blank slate written on entirely by experience, and here was a four-hundred-year-old novel dramatizing exactly that: a mind beginning empty and assembling all its knowledge from the raw material of the senses. The English Quakers seized on the book as proof of their "inner light," the idea that every person carries access to the truth with no need of an external church. And eleven years after the popular English version appeared, an Englishman named Defoe published a story about a man building a life alone on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe, whose debt to Hayy scholars have argued over ever since. The whole modern image of the self-made, self-educating individual, reasoning its way up from nothing, owes something to a doe-nursed boy dreamed up in twelfth-century Marrakesh.

Everyone has to climb. The room reads Hayy ibn Yaqzan in an old English translation, cited by its short numbered sections; it is brief, strange, and surprisingly gripping, a philosophical argument that reads like an adventure story. What keeps it alive is the question it refuses to let go of, which is really a question about you. Tufayl is wagering that the capacity to reach the deepest truths is not handed down by a culture or a church but built into the human mind as such, waiting in anyone who will observe the world patiently and follow the argument without flinching. It is an enormously hopeful idea, and a demanding one, because it sets the responsibility for understanding squarely on the individual: no tradition can think for you, and no authority can do your seeing. Hayy had nothing but a world and a working mind, which, Tufayl insists, is finally all any of us has. The island is a thought experiment, but the solitude at its core is real. Each of us, in the end, has to make the climb alone.