Hayy Ibn Yaqzan – A Philosophical Novel

As a child somewhere between the ages of 5-8 years, I remember watching a cartoon dozens of times, so many times in fact that I probably knew every part of it. It was about a boy named Hayy who grew up on a deserted island. Hay was raised by deers and as he grew up, he explored the island, imitated and learned from different animals, developed own tools and eventually gained knowledge in natural sciences such as astrology and anatomy (he dissected his mother-deer’s heart after her death, to find and fix what was broken, to bring her back). Hayy’s encounter with his environment and natural phenomenon left him with questions that he tried to answer throughout his life: how did he come into existence? what was his purpose? who created him? Starting as a tabula rasa, Hayy developed his own beliefs trough wonder and reasoning, without the help of others or society.

Two decades later, after intensifying my study in philosophy, I came to realize that my favorite cartoon as a child was inspired by the philosophical novel “Hayy Ibn Yaqzan”, written by the Andalusian physician-philosopher Ibn Tufayl in 1175. This novel is Ibn Tufayl’s thought experiment to answer philosophical questions such as: can the existence of God or the existence of an afterlife be proven with human intellect? Ibn Tufayl thinks that this is possible and goes even further. Hayy not only concludes that a Creator must exists, or that He can be worshipped trough supplication; Hayy even explores his own psychospiritual dynamics and tries to tame his lower self trough a vegetarian diet (although a Sufi tradition, also performed by others such as Pythagoras to tame the lower self). I firmly believe that the human intellect indeed has the capacity to conclude the former (especially if the human will wills) or even general laws that hold in every moral system (killing the innocent is wrong, independent of time-space), but Ibn Tufayl is overestimating the capacity of the intellect when he argues for the latter. Without revelation, the discovery of such specific details on a particular moral system (Islamic laws in this case) might be impossible. Ibn Tufayl struggles at this point to strip his Andalusian-Sufi influences of his society in his own thought experiment. Indeed, we, even in thought experiments, are in some degree trapped in time-space and society.

Note: this philosophical novel quickly drew the interest of many thinkers outside Andalusia.[1] It is known that the novel was translated into Dutch by friends of Spinoza already in 1672, which can be read as an e-book here.[2]  The novel is very accurately animated and can be watched here.

[1] It is said that novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Jungle Book and Rousseau’s Emile was inspired by this novel

[2] Probably translated by Johannes Bouwmeester and published by Jan Rieuwertsz