This engaging book is slight in size yet ambitious in scope and innovative in methodology. Its aim is to broaden our understanding of the attraction of autodidacticism among certain intellectuals in medieval and early modern history. It does so by seeking to enhance our knowledge of how this impulse interacted at four different historical points with the related impetus to embrace empiricism as a method for the study of nature. Rather than concentrate on the broad theme of autodidacticism, however, Avner Ben-Zaken, who chairs the humanities program at Ono College in Israel, adopts the method of tracing the origin and intellectual afterlife of the philosophical story of Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive, the Son of Awake), composed by the Andalusian Arab philosopher Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (d. 1185).
Ben-Zaken is a Harvard-trained historian of science. Yet this study reveals him also to be a sophisticated and adroit cultural historian who masterfully delineates the original purpose and later impact of Ibn Tufayl's treatise among select groups of intellectuals not only in 12th-century Arab Andalusia but also in 14th-century Jewish Catalonia-Provence, 15th- to 16th-century Renaissance Italy, and 17th-century Early Modern England. His study elucidates how in each of these diverse periods and separate cultural milieus a particular mix of philosophers, theologians, scientists, and intellectuals were drawn to the concept of autodidacticism and how they in turn found in the treatise Hayy ibn Yaqzan both explication and justification for their belief.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan relates the tale of an infant who grows up on an island uninhabited by humans. Suckled as an infant by a gazelle, he develops by relying only on his innate intellect and his natural ability to observe, understand, and productively make use of the natural world around him. He begins with the study of minerals, moves on to biology and then to physics—including the principles of mathematics and astronomy—and thereafter progresses to the study of metaphysics. At this point he discovers a method of natural mysticism that enables him to achieve communion with the divine. The ability to rely on personal observation and empirical deduction to learn the structure and laws of nature obviates the need for external education and cultural imprint. Hayy ibn Yaqzan is able to teach himself everything that formal education is customarily assumed to provide. It is the portrayal of this autodidactical method that at certain points in history attracted later intellectuals to seek out, translate, compose commentaries on, and circulate the treatise.
Ben-Zaken's book comprises an introduction, a conclusion, and four chapters. The first chapter focuses on the cultural context of Ibn Tufayl's composition of Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Ben-Zaken posits that a major reason that Ibn Tufayl wrote Hayy ibn Yaqzan was to counter and rectify the anti-intellectual mystical impulses that took root in Arab Andalusia under the influence of the writings of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). Chapter 2 discusses a religious and educational controversy prominent in the mid-14th century Jewish communities of Catalonia-Provence. Jewish religious leaders in Barcelona and elsewhere became alarmed by the tendency among certain Provence Jewish communities to teach philosophy to youths. One of the proponents of this later trend was Mose Narbonni (d. circa 1362), a physician and philosopher, who translated Hayy ibn Yaqzan into Hebrew and wrote a commentary on it. The pro-philosophy camp in Jewish Catalonia-Provence eventually lost the battle. Narbonni migrated to Spain, convinced like Ibn Bajja (d. 1138) and Ibn Tufayl that philosophers were fated to live in isolation rather than in communities of like-minded individuals.
Chapter 3 introduces the brilliant and precocious Italian figure Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494), who became acquainted with Hayy ibn Yaqzan through Narbonni's Hebrew translation and commentary. Pico himself was largely self-taught and displayed such brilliance that he was invited to join the illustrious court of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence. An opponent of astrology and the Platonist tendencies of his day, Pico found in the figure of Hayy both an echo of his own experience as an autodidact and a shared belief in empirical observation as the correct means of studying nature. Pico was poisoned amidst the political and cultural tumult that Florence underwent after Lorenzo's death in 1492, and his Latin translation of Ibn Tufayl's treatise was never published. The work, however, was known to and enjoyed repute among Pico's associates in the decades following his death.
Chapter 4 outlines the process that led the British orientalist and biblical scholar Edward Pococke (d. 1691) to produce his own Latin translation of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a version that brought the work to the full attention of European intellectuals during the Enlightenment. Pococke was a protégé of, among others, the British scientist Robert Boyle. He translated Hayy, an Arabic copy of which he had acquired during his years in Aleppo, to support Boyle's scientific empiricism. Here was a work that explained how all of nature could be understood through rational observation. Pococke also taught John Locke, whose concept of the human mind as innately being a tablula rasa may have been influenced in part by exposure to Hayy.
In his preface, Ben-Zaken states that “this project represents a world history of a single book, a cross-cultural account of the reading of one specific text. It plots the many readings of this text through different cultural and historical contexts, each driven by cultural questions specific to that context” (p. xii). Given the complexity of his task, he achieves his goal to an admirable degree. One attraction of his method is that in order to explain the role that the treatise plays in each historical context, Ben-Zaken must address other themes pertinent to the context or figure at hand but less pertinent to the theme of autodidacticism. The reader thus receives brief sketches of brilliant if idiosyncratic individuals and the contemporary issues that confronted them. Nonetheless, Ben-Zaken's method also entails challenges. Given the breadth of his subject, he is forced to give less than full treatment to some themes prominent in Hayy ibn Yaqzan itself since they were of less interest to the later individuals on whom he focuses. Moreover, he is forced on the one hand to expand his perspective to mention the broad range of issues that individuals such as Ibn Tufayl, Narbonni, or Pico della Mirandello faced in their lives, while on the other hand to narrow his range of historical representation so as not to become overly immersed in the cultural complexities of each period. As a result, each chapter is reduced to some extent to a thematic dichotomy: philosophy versus Sufism in the case of Ibn Tufayl, philosophy versus religious authority with Narbonni, natural causality versus astrological determinism in the case of Pico, and the ecumenical neutrality of scientific empiricism versus the partisanship of religious strife for Pococke. Nonetheless, some level of reductionism is perhaps necessary since to do full justice to these figures, Ben-Zaken would have to devote a volume to each.
Despite such challenges, Ben-Zaken's methodology also displays profound strengths. It traces cultural influences and tendencies that cross centuries and regions as each set of intellectuals finds in Hayy ibn Yaqzan partial answers to the questions that they confront. The volume is also timely. Hayy ibn Yaqzan remains relevant in our own times, when the relationship between scientific empiricism and religious belief is still highly contested in much of the world. Overall, this is a splendid and daring book! Avner Ben-Zaken deserves our commendation for writing it.
