Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale by Ibn Tufayl

Author:Ibn Tufayl [Tufayl, Ibn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-05-13T23:00:00+00:00

Notes to the Text

(Numbers in italics refer to pages of Gauthier’s edition of the Arabic text of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān and correspond to the numbers shown marginally in the present translation.)

1. Just what is meant by ‘oriental philosophy’ has been a minor cause célèbre among the students of that philosophy. See Nallino “Filosofia orientale ed illuminative” Rivista degli Studi Orientali X pp. 433 ff. Henri Corbin in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, New York and London, 1960, and S. H. Nasr in Three Muslim Sages, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964, make a strong case for fluidity in the shift from ‘orient’ in Avicenna to ‘illuminative’ in Suhrawardī, but they cannot surmount the fact of a shift. Initially and primarily Avicenna and with him Ibn Tufayl give the word a literal geographical sense. Ibn Tufayl’s expressions of a sense of isolation from the eastern centers of learning, and his contrasting of oriental with Peripatetic philosophy are sufficient evidence of this. Léon Gauthier, then, would seem to be mistaken in choosing the reading ‘illuminative’—see his French translation of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, Beirut, 1936, p. 1 note 3 and Ibn Thofail sa vie, ses œuvres, Paris, 1909, p. 59 note 1. He does, however call attention to a passage in The Incoherence of the Incoherence where Ibn Rushd seems to confirm the drift of the internal evidence. In the context of a discussion of the difficulties in Avicenna’s contingency argument for the existence of God, Ibn Rushd writes: “In our own time I have seen many followers of Ibn Sīnā who interpret him in this way on account of this difficulty. They say . . . that this is the meaning he gave to ‘oriental philosophy.’ He called it oriental, they argue, only because it was the view of people in the east . . .” Tahāfut at-Tahāfut X ed. Bouyges p. 421, ed. S. Dunya pp. 639–40, tr. S. van den Bergh p. 254 and van den Bergh’s notes ad loc.

Ibn Tufayl’s consistent reliance on the light imagery of neo-Platonism and his repeated warnings that his words are not to be taken literally show that the term is not without overtones in the direction Gauthier senses. But one crucial premiss of illuminism, the divinity of the soul of the aware, is vehemently denied by Ibn Tufayl and the imagery of light associated with this is explicitly rejected by him, see pp. 122–124.

What we have here seems less a play on words than a particularly playful word. The cause of the difficulty is the natural expectation or hope that what comes from the east will be something more than another day. The goods of the orient will be something finer and better than our domestic product. The hope of “western man” is that the east will somehow provide a sort of intellectual sunrise that will clear the mind and vitalize the drowsy academic air that seems to shroud the powers of our thought. This hope was not born with Ibn Tufayl’s Sūfī and Platonic antecedents and did not die with the Enlightenment in the West.

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