The method of Hayy bin Yaqzan

Hayy bin Yaqzan is a philosophical allegory, not a novel. It does not offer a realistic narrative or expect to be popular. The author even wonders if he should have written it at all, fearing that he has touched on profound matters of belief which might confuse (perhaps mislead) an unlearned public (p.61). But the book is not a straightforward philosophical treatise either. It uses narrative elements to represent to the mind what could not be conveyed either by pictures or by conventional realistic narrative.

How Hayy comes to be on the island

Ibn Tufayl offers two explanations. In the first, he says: some people claim that there are certain places on the earth which by virtue of their position relatively to the equator, enjoy a climate so perfect that living beings can be generated there without parents. Hayy was one of these beings. Ibn Tufayl questions the scientific accuracy of the claims made about climatic conditions, but does not dismiss them. The second explanation is as follows:

A nearby island was ruled by a proud, jealous king who had a beautiful sister for whom he wished to appoint a husband of his choosing. But she married Yaqzan, one of the kings courtiers, lawfully but secretly. Needing to keep the secret of the marriage when a son was born, the king’s sister placed the child in a wooden casket and set it upon the sea with the prayer (p.5): ‘0 God Who has created this child from nothing, sustained him in the darkness of the womb and looked after him till he was completely formed, to You I surrender him now, praying that He may receive Your bounty, because of my fear [of] this stubborn, mighty and unjust king. Be with him and abandon him not, 0 Most Merciful.’ The casket is thrown to shore with sufficient force to become wedged between some trees, and for the planks of the casket to loosen. The baby’s cries are heard by a doe which has just lost its kid to a preying eagle and she suckles the human infant as a substitute. Thus the mother’s prayer for her son’s survival, and the doe’s frustrated maternal instinct, are satisfied by the same means.

Ibn Tufayl now returns to the first account of Hayy’s being on the island. He explains, in the manner of a scientific hypothesis, how the life force (likened to a gaseous entity or vapour) might be infused into the clay/mud of the island, how, starting with the cavities of the heart and to support the functioning of the heart, the life force might be urged to form brain, liver, lungs, arteries and veins, etc. Evidently, this hypothesis must have seemed more plausible then than it does now. The point is that it is offered as an account of a biological process unfolding in particular conditions, a process which, in principle, is intelligible and, if one had appropriate instruments, would be observable and observation would confirm or correct the hypothesis. However, while affirming the importance of thinking which utilises hypothesis and observation, Ibn Tufayl leaves his mind open to that which is beyond the reach of direct observation or reasoning. We are allowed to imagine, though we have never seen it, that there could be a perfect island garden where a human life grows without the mediation of human parents. In the world as we actually know it, the fable of the mother who resigns her child to Divine Care in a casket upon the sea, is simply easier to accept.

As the mother’s prayer makes clear, human life is already a miracle, a gift from the Most Merciful. Its happening in the world is at the same time an entry into a conditioned existence. By conditioned existence is meant an existence such that, if one event occurs, a second connected with it normally follows, and that if we have witnessed only the second, we may infer the first. In this case. if the doe cannot hear the baby’s cries, it cannot go to his assistance. But the cries could not be heard if the planks had not first been loosened by the buffeting of the sea; nor could the doe have been drawn to the baby’s plight if its maternal instinct had not been frustrated by the loss of its own kid. The reliability of the sequences of events in conditioned existence is the means whereby reason can conceptualize and theorize about the natural world. This, in turn, enables reason to picture in the mind both what has happened and what could happen. Then, when the picture is clear enough, reason can conceive of and design tools that will make events (experienced or merely possible) happen more easily and quickly.

What is Hayy bin Yaqzan about?

The fact that I-law is parted from his parents after birth is essential to the argument of the book. Ibn Tufayl demonstrates that a human being, not influenced by parents or by their society and culture, is nevertheless fully human in that he seeks the meaning of his being alive and exerts himself until his quest is satisfied by intuitions of the Divine Unity. The natural world sustains Hayy physically. It also feeds his quest for understanding until he comes to the realisation that it, the natural world, cannot satisfy him: the object of his quest lies beyond nature. Nature is not man’s enemy nor, though he is a part of it, is it man’s ultimate end. Instead, nature is presented as the means whereby the One Who created human life also nurtures and trains and encourages it to its perfection. Culture (all that man does with nature, all of science and technology, arts and civilisation) is a part of the training process, not its goal. The only goal fully worthy of man is understanding the Divine Unity.

The progress of Hayy

The earliest spur to Haw’s efforts is the need to survive. Once his mother, the doe, is dead, Hayy has no protector or provider, and so he must fend for himself. He was already aware that, unlike the doe, he is a bi-pedal creature who walks upright with his hands free. Hayy uses those free hands to make and use tools. He covers his nakedness with leaves and skins, not for shame but to protect himself from the climate. With more offensive tools he defends himself against animals that might harm him. Much later, he learns to hunt; later still, to domesticate plants and animals to ensure his food supply. In between, he discovers the potency of fire: whereas all other creatures run from it in terror, Hayy overcomes his fear and uses fire to warm himself, to cook his food and to perfect his artefacts. We may describe this energetic, vigorous surviving as Hayy’s physical mastery of the island. The decisive image of it is when he learns to tame animals for use as transport so that he can compensate for his slowness when hunting. Seen astride a horse, Hayy looks the image of the master of his domain.

Physical mastery is accompanied, from the outset, by Hayy’s growing conceptual mastery of his world. Although he does not know any human language, he deploys the power (unique to humans) of building in his mind models of everything around him. Thus he is able to compare and distinguish animal species against one another, to distinguish each animal’s different parts from the individual whole, and so on. He does the same for the plants on the island, and again for all the non-living things, and he distinguishes the elements composing them. His thinking ranges between and across the classes it makes, recognizing that plants and animals are alike in having “life”, while non-living things, though incapable of growth, are like living matter in being subject to decay, as he has witnessed in the erosion of rocks. He observes the differences between solid, liquid and gaseous forms, and most fundamentally, the difference between formed and unformed substance, and of simple and compound substances and forms. He is aware of the rhythms of day and night and associates them with the movements of the points of light in the sky he sees as heavenly bodies. The regularity of the position and movements of the heavenly bodies prompt in him rudimentary intuitions of number and calendar. Necessarily, because they are so remote, the heavenly bodies appear to Hayy, in contrast to all that is on the island, as permanent (not perishing), as reliable in their courses (not unpredictable), and as pure in their substance and form (not mixed).

But what drives Hayy’s intellectual efforts? In part, the need to survive. But the principal motive is his need to achieve self-transcendence. This is the core of lbn Tufayl’s purpose and we should follow his argument closely.

The meaning of Hayys experiences

Neither in Hayy bin Yaqzan, nor in Robinson Crusoe, do we find much reflection upon the psychological or emotional dimensions of solitude. Crusoe’s solitude worries him because he has to work harder to meet his needs, or because he is more vulnerable being alone, or because he alone cannot exploit the island’s full economic potential. To some extent, Crusoe’s solitude is relieved by finding a slave.

Hayy’s sense of solitude is altogether more profound: it as an onto- logical craving, a deep yearning to know who and what being he is. This craving begins from the moment of the doe’s death. He is suddenly aware that no creature nor thing upon the island is like himself. He tries to revive the doe, but cannot do so by any means. He operates upon her corpse in a vain attempt to find and hold the life force which, he hopes, has only temporarily left her body. He continues this quest by other means, operating upon other animals, even upon a living animal, only to realize that when he operates the life force evaporates. Thus he comes to understand that the origin of the life force, the means of its entry into any substance, is of a transcendent character. After careful observation he grasps that all the beings in the world, living or non-living, are subject to change, to beginning and end, all are caused or conditioned. And yet the cause of all of them he cannot see or imagine. Even the relative permanence of the heavenly bodies and their consistency of movement implies a cause anterior to their existence. Their orderliness is an obedience to a high, invisible power.

Because the diverse and abundant elements are mutually related and dependent in a single world or universe-all are (for example) dependent upon light and air-he infers that the high, invisible power is One. For, otherwise, the world would be ‘multi- verse’ i.e. conflicted and disorderly. Again, having witnessed that the diverse, abundant elements are co-operatively arranged so that the living forms which experience needs have their needs supplied, Hayy infers that the One is Benevolent and Caring. He then feels an intense desire to know Him, to express gratitude to Him, Who is His Creator and Sustainer.

In this way, the instinct to worship is awakened in Hayy. He seeks to imitate the heavenly bodies in their apparent perfection of obedience and purity as sources of light by keeping himself washed and clean; and by tracing circles in his walks so as to imitate their orbiting movements. He imitates the Benevolent by doing good: he frees plants from choking vines, he assists or feeds animals in distress, unblocks streams, etc. He accepts the animal dimensions of his nature as a limiting condition of his life but, in the effort to emulate the stars’ purity, he restricts his own interference in nature to the barest minimum, and endeavours to transcend his needs. He eats as little and as infrequently as possible, and devotes all his energy to contemplation of the One.

Hayy’s contemplation and yearning are rewarded by experiences of a supra-natural order which, as lbn Tufayl indicates, are beyond the reach of language. Hayy’s loneliness ends not by finding a servant but by himself becoming a servant, wholly committed to his Lord and enjoying some measure of communion with Him. Physical and conceptual mastery of the world ripen into a self-mastery through self-transcendence in worship of the One and in service of others (on Hayy’s island, the others are animals and plants and water courses).

The saintly sage and human society

Like Robinson Crusoe, Hayy bin Yaqzan also ends with the solitary being reconnected to the ‘normal’ human world. lbn Tufayl tackles the daunting question of why and how the saintly sage should relate to other human beings. In himself, Hayy can progress no further: he has transcended his own needs to the extent physically possible, he awaits ‘certainty’, that is, the transition to a higher plane of existence. At just this point, a man (Asal) from a nearby island, seeking a religious retreat, comes to Hayy’s island. After the two meet and get over their mutual astonishment, Asal teaches Hayy his language and, through ensuing conversations, realizes how far beyond himself Hayy has progressed on the mystic’s path. Hayy acknowledges that the Divinely revealed religion and law to which Asal’s people adhere is indeed the Truth conveyed from God by a truthful Messenger, and gladly witnesses to that Truth. As Asal describes the moral and spiritual decay of his people, Hayy is touched by compassion and desires to rescue them from that state. Asal knows from experience that the mass of people do not want to be rescued, but out of respect for Hayy agrees that they should go to the people and serve them as teachers of the mystic’s path. They draw the attention of a passing ship which conveys them to the other island.

There, Hayy is received with great reverence and much acclaim. He is dismayed by the people’s preoccupation with worldly commerce, their shallowness and lack of perseverance in worship, and their neglect of the Law. He finds that they are willing only to observe, more or less passively, the externals of the religion but not to seek the inward meanings of the rites and recitations they practise outwardly. He does not therefore abandon them; on the contrary: he ‘persevered in teaching them day and night and showing them the way of Truth both openly and secretly. But although they were a people who loved the good and wanted the truth, [his] teaching seemed only to induce more and more discord among them. Owing to their lack of native good sense, they did not want to seek the Truth in the way [God] had indicated nor by experiencing Him nor entering by the door He had provided’.

After a time, therefore, Hayy resigns from the task of teaching. He advises the people to stay within the bounds of the religious law as they understand it, to not venture into dimensions of meaning that do not concern them, to follow the traditions of their righteous ancestors and avoid innovations, above all to observe their religious duties with religious seriousness and by no means neglect them for the sake of worldly affairs. Then he and Asal return to their island retreat. Hayy ‘sought his holy station through the methods he had used before and was able to return to it. Asal imitated him until he came very close to the same. Both worshipped Allah until certainty came to them.’

The contrasts between Hayy and Crusoe

Crusoe is an adventurer in quest of a fortune who suffers the misfortune of a shipwreck. The island (figuratively, nature) is a hostile environment which he must survive and conquer; an unprofitable wilderness which he must make yield profit. He bends himself to the task and is proved a hero in the strength of his body and will, the will to conquer his situation and turn survival into profit. He does not belong to the island, to nature; he holds himself separate from the other creatures in nature, living or non-living; any people he finds there belong with nature, not with him, they are only ‘natives’. He hopes always to get away and take with him the profits from the energy he has invested: that is why, though it is of no use to him for survival on the island, he keeps safe the money he found on the wrecked ship.

When reconnected to the normal human world, Crusoe joins it as a capital-rich entrepreneur. His religious experiences and moral reflections on the island serve, perhaps, to improve his civility and humility in individual personal contacts, but they do not in any way modify his behaviour or expectations with respect to collective affairs. He still desires to make his fortune and considers (again) entering the slave trade to do so. Neither Crusoe’s years of solitude nor his companionship with Friday challenge the assumption that European economic expansion and ‘improvement’ of non-European peoples and their resources is an inevitability and, overall, a good thing.

Hayy is, from the outset, an innocent cherished by nature: the doe cares for and nurtures him. He both belongs and does not belong among the other creatures of the island, living or non-living. His physical composition and structure, his biological needs, identify him as adapted to living with and in the midst of nature. But his physical weaknesses set him apart as one who must live over against nature to survive. His reasoning powers compensate for his weaknesses and he uses his intelligence, as he must, to secure his place at the top of the food chain. But the gift of reason matures into reflection and contemplation. His physical mastery gives him the space and time to survey the whole of his world as a whole. He then realizes that it is an ordered universe reflecting the attributes of its transcendent Creator, among them power within benevolence, individualized beauty within prolific abundance. Hayy’s survival and conquest of nature rapidly matures into stewardship as he surrenders himself to worship, to imitating in his being and his actions (as far as he can) the attributes of His Creator. He feels and exercises responsibility over the island, rather than feeling and exercising ownership. In the same way-whereas Crusoe’s moral reflections improve him in self-composure and self-restraint so that he is less rash, more prudent, in assessing and taking risks-Hayy’s reflections lead him to relinquish self-ownership in favour of self-surrender which is a form of self-transcendence.

When re-joined to the normal human world, Hayy tests that self-transcendence in the role of teacher. The idealised Islamic temperament which Hayy represents cannot be content with responsibility for private, personal conscience. A Muslim is responsible also for the ethos in which other individuals will achieve their consciences. A Muslim is responsible for the whole moral climate, for all the constraints which legal, political and economic structures place upon the aspirations and actions of individuals. The individual must, in the process of perfecting or after perfecting his individual will, venture into the realm of collective life so that all spheres of human action and relationship are, and remain, connected with responsibility to God. That is why, spurred by compassion, Hayy leaves the island to do his wider duty as far as the prevailing conditions will permit it. Ultimately, of course, people are not saved collectively but individually. Therefore, ultimately, having done his best, Hayy leaves human society. He leaves the people with the warning that they should adhere to their religious duties in preference to sectarianism and worldly preoccupations. He then returns to his solitary attendance upon ‘certainty’.

In summary form, we may say that Crusoe (for all that he is the energetic European adventurer) lives in his life and in the natural world; he does not get beyond himself or the natural world. Hayy lives through his life, and through the natural world, and he passes beyond both. Robinson Crusoe is a realistic narrative, an early modern romance whose highest reward for the reader is understanding of the individual self, the emotional or psychological persona achieved through the story. Hayy bin Yaqzan is an allegory, a medieval philosophical fable whose highest reward for the reader is understanding the Divine Compassion in the creation of human life in all its vicissitudes and triumphs. It must also be noted that Crusoe is in this world, famous rich and relatively powerful; Hayy in this world is absolutely poor, indeed he has all but left this world behind before his death.

The popularity of Crusoe

Excepting the Gospel narrative, no story has so dominated the imagination of Europe as Robinson Crusoe. First published in London in 1719, it went through an unprecedented six editions the same year. Over the next century or so, it saw 700 editions and innumerable translations into every major European language. Since then, it has undergone adaptation and abridgement into other media – opera, pantomime, film, serial, cartoon, and so on. For over 250 years Crusoe has been a part of the self-image of every schoolboy with a European education. The author, Daniel Defoe, to cash in on the instant success of Crusoe, had a sequel ready for the press within four months (The Farther Adventures), and later wrote a more philosophical and contemplative third volume of Crusoe’s ‘Serious Reflections’. These sequels never caught on. What holds the imagination is the original situation: how a quite ordinary man, stranded for about 25 years on an uninhabited island, retains his sanity and dignity through every hardship and even emerges from this ‘trial’ with a modest fortune. The novel is a working up of the actual experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor marooned five years on an island off Chile (subsequently named Isla Robinson Crusoe) who got back to England in 1708 and recounted his experiences to an eager public.

Crusoe: the myth derived from the novel

A book so widely read for over ten generations during which the world has undergone remarkable transformations cannot be un-connected to those transformations. The novel has in fact become a modern European myth, and the myth varies from the novel in important ways.

The transformation of Crusoe began very early, through the status accorded to it by the French philosopher Rousseau in Emile (first English trans. 1762). In this treatise on ‘natural education’ (i.e. education without the religious/cultural preconceptions used to adapt children to their future role in society), Rousseau wrote:

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don’t understand… Since we must have books, there is already one which, in my opinion, affords a complete treatise on natural education…. Emile [the boy whose education is being planned] will need no other book in his library for many years. It will afford us the text to which all our conversations on the objects of natural science will serve only as a comment. It will serve as our guide during our progress to a state of reason…. You ask impatiently what is the title of this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle, Pliny….? No. It is Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe, cast ashore on a desolate island, destitute of human assistance, and of mechanical implements, providing, nevertheless, for his subsistence, for self-preservation, and even procuring for himself a kind of competency …The most certain method for [Emile] to raise himself above vulgar prejudices and to form his judgement on the actual relations of things, is to take on himself the character of such a solitary adventurer, and to judge of everything about him, as a man in such circumstances would, by its real utility. This romance beginning with his [Crusoe’s] shipwreck on the island, and ending with the arrival of the vessel that brought him away, would, if cleared of its rubbish, afford Emile…. both instruction and amusement …. The practise of simple manual arts, to the exercise of which the abilities of the individual are equal, leads to the invention of the arts of industry the exercise of which requires the concurrence of the many. The former may be practised by hermits and savages; but the latter can be exercised only in a state of society.

This account of Robinson Crusoe the novel is inaccurate and unfair. But it is a near perfect account of the myth. The explicit contents of that myth are: a man can enter upon an unknown land with nothing and, by applying his native energies without inhibition, learn the arts and crafts necessary for survival and economic success; later, he can improve this success by using the labour of others as well as his own to exploit resources in a more organised way. The implicit elements of the myth are less attractive: the adventurer is a white man (not a woman), a European. He never enters into abstract speculations about the moral worth or ultimate purpose or far consequences of particular actions; instead, he calculates their present utility and applies the necessary means to secure himself and make economic surpluses. The land is there for him to subdue and use to his present advantage. Ideally, the land should be uninhabited, but if it happens to be inhabited, he must act as if it were in fact empty. For reasons never uttered, the European adventurer has a right to eliminate any competition: the natives will eventually understand that it is better for them to be ruled by the adventurer.

Crusoe: the novel vs. the myth

The reason is that the myth is still carried by the novel and the novel, being better and greater than the myth, saves the myth. Among several inaccuracies of the myth vis A vis the novel, one is the notion that Crusoe enters upon the island unequipped. In fact, though he lacks needle and thread and a metal spade (for which he improvises with characteristic resolve), Crusoe has pretty well everything else – some food, rice and barley seed, cloth and clothing, an axe and other tools, guns and gunpowder, pen ink and paper, the Bible, a dog and two cats, also his comfort drugs: tobacco and the pipe to put it in and rum. He is not, as the myth pretends, humanly unassisted: the assistance of others is available to him in the compacted form of the ‘capital of all that he salvages from the shipwreck. Without this capital’, Crusoe could not have begun, let alone succeeded, as an entrepreneur. Similarly, on the land itself, he has no rivals – neither predatory animals nor fellow- Europeans nor, until he is relatively securely established, natives. In sum, the Europeans complete self- sufficiency is a fabrication. It has been added to what is there in the novel, namely his resourcefulness with his capital.

Most significantly of all, the myth has wiped from the novel its religious dimension: this is probably what Rousseau meant by the phrase: ‘if the romance were cleared of all its rubbish’. But the religious dimension is not rubbish, it shapes the character and temperament of Robinson Crusoe. The novel has pretensions to spiritual autobiography, in the tradition of Pilgrim’s Progress, but without overtly allegorical characters or plot: the events and the central character are meant to be believed as literally true, not figuratively true. Defoe, it is worth noting, was the author of a very popular book of moral guidance, The Family Instructor, first published the year before Crusoe, and often reprinted.

Crusoe is a first-person diary of events told, as they were experienced at the time, by the wise Christian the narrator has become. Crusoe tells us that his ‘original sin’ was to disobey his father’s instruction to make a career as a lawyer; he could not resist the urge to wander, and ran away to make a fortune in the slave-trade; though he had opportunities to learn the skills of a sailor, he disdained to do so, dressing instead as a ‘gentleman’ (one who does not need to labour with his hands). Through the vicissitudes of storms and capture by pirates, Crusoe tells us, he hardly ever looked upward to heaven or inward to the condition of his own soul. But alone on the island, an earth-tremor that destroys much of his painstaking handiwork, and the sight of seeds sprouting, and his own near death by fever, lead Crusoe to recover his spiritual senses. His life thereafter is one of steady, solitary labour in a state of constant fear – fear of want, of hunger, of attacks by unknown animals or persons. But he maintains a gritty composure, looking regularly for signs of Divine Providence in whatever occurs, expressing gratitude for God’s care of him, in particular of his soul. There are constant references to the patriarchs and prophets of the Bible, so that Crusoe is, as it were, in a state of continual dialogue with his own soul. It is by dint of these inward as well as his outward labours to secure the necessities of life that, little by little, he comes to regard his island not as his prison but as his garden. He accepts his fate by choosing it as his destiny and, till the day he finds a human footprint on the sand, he imagines that he could live there alone and content until Providence decreed his death.

The footprint throws him into turmoil. In part he is afraid of a threat to the security of his person and property. But his chief fear is that the company of men will reintroduce to his life the temptations to sin and forgetfulness of God. Alone, he has no use for money, his needs are minimal; in company, his needs will grow as opportunities for commercial exchange and competition are presented. The ‘state of nature’ (man on his own), conceived as a state of fear, can be relieved by a conscience resigned to Providence; but from the state of society (conceived as a ‘state of conflict’, the war of each against all), there is no relief.

In relation to the natural world, Crusoe is no contemplative or scientist: he sees a tree, not with the eye of botanist or poet but of an entrepreneur, as timber fit for building. He assesses all the islands resources in the same way, and desires to improve them, by which he means quite explicitly ‘to increase their economic value’. His understanding of God does not come through reflection on the natural world as signs of God It comes, instead, through his feeling inwardly that circumstances, and the resources put at his disposal, are all arranged by God to test his faith and actions. His response to the testing is to work hard, resigning success or failure to the wisdom of Providence, and to keep up a stable, steady thankfulness. Once he has attained this peace with himself he can hope that, whatever crisis occurs, he will act in a decent way pleasing to God and his conscience. Thus, for example, when disgusted by the sight of cannibals feasting on the sea-shore, he has an impulse to kill them all in cold blood, but he overcomes the impulse.

Among the resources Crusoe manages and improves is himself.

This aspect of the story is what most delights its young readers: the analysis of how things work or are made, the resort to first principles, the improvisation with inadequate or insufficient materials and tools, the delight in whatever gets made, however clumsy or incompetent. Crusoe is a self-made man, in the moral as well as the economic sense: from the materials provided by Providence, he makes his character – his humility conscience, forbearance, composure, open-mindedness – as well as his outlandish clothes, rickety furniture, leaky bowls, the famous umbrella. Moreover, his religion is not a passive observance, but active personal prayer, personal turning to God, personal reading of the Scripture. What deeper wish does a young boy have, instructed to believe or pray or think in particular ways, and surrounded by things that enter his world ready- made, than to obtain some understanding and mastery of himself and his things through his own effort? Robinson Crusoe is the fulfilment of that wish. It enacts in rich, realistic detail the attainment of economic and moral independence by an individual of ordinary abilities and background, assisted by an omnipresent and benevolent Providence.

Crusoe builds himself a little domain, colonises a little empire. But he did not intend to do so; his empire just came to him by way of economic reward for initiative and effort. On the individual scale, his enterprise involved relatively little cruelty to others, no ugly national or racist pride, no brutal genocide, no violent competition with other colonisers. Crusoe is a decent man, disciplined, humble and, in a typically English way, composed and self-deprecating. It is through this self-achieved moral character and temperament that the novel saves the myth: it allows the English in particular to delude themselves that they did not mean to build a world-wide empire, it just came to them – as if armies and navies, mechanised industries and compelled trade, savage taxation of natives and cynical diplomacy, and the rest, had nothing to do with it. The appeal of the novel rests on this principle: provided an individuals own conscience is clear with respect to his personal actions, whatever evil may be done collectively by the state or society or the nation of which he is a part need not be an additional burden to that conscience. Morally, the individual is independent of the collective: at liberty to protest and to take personal initiatives to help alleviate the consequences of collective actions, he is not charged with moral responsibility for those actions themselves. The evident contradiction may be illustrated from the incident of naming Crusoe’s slave, Man Friday.

Naming the native

This incident was described earlier from the perspective of the myth: as Crusoe names his dog, so he names his slave, Friday, the day he ‘discovers’ him. It is not like that in the novel. At the time Defoe was writing, it had been reported by returning travellers that some of the ‘savages’ they encountered did not have names for each other until the Europeans gave them names. The fact is utterly impossible: there are no human beings who do not use human language, and no human language is conceivable where consciousness of one’s self and the other’s self (which necessitates naming each other) does not exist. But we must allow that such reports were accepted as plausible, even as true, without any particular malice – simply as a mistake – by Defoe’s contemporaries. In this way, giving a name is a positive and indeed kindly act. It is certainly the case that Crusoe sees Friday as a person like himself, a fellow human being with feelings like his own (for example homesickness) and faculties like his own (for example curiosity and dexterity), above all with a past and a mind of his own, to whom he imparts the story of his own life and misfortunes as well as his religion. Crusoe learns from the companionship with Friday, and he says so. Because readers may suspect I am overstating the case, they will allow me an extensive quotation. On spotting his homeland from a hill-top, Friday expresses great delight. Crusoe quickly and wrongly suspects that Friday will now return to his people, come back with them in great numbers and kill and eat him. Here are his reflections on his suspicion:

I wronged the poor honest creature very much, for which I was very sorry afterwards. However, as my jealousy [suspicion] increased, and held me some weeks, I was a little more circumspect, and not so familiar and kind to him as before, in which I was certainly in the wrong too, the honest grateful creature having no thought about it, but what consisted with the best principles, both as a religious Christian, and as a grateful friend, as appeared afterwards to my full satisfaction.

Can there be any doubt that Crusoe means well by his Man Friday? Yet, he is patronising in calling him ‘creature’, even as he praises him and criticises himself. The distance between master and slave is taken as a given; Crusoe never questions its propriety. He contemplates entering the slave- trade and his only negative comment on it is that it is a risky business, that it may be more prudent for him to purchase and pay a traders profit margin than risk the financial perils of capturing and transporting his own slaves. Since Crusoe abhors cannibalism without reserve, we may be sure he is capable of recognising something as an absolute evil; evidently, the slave-trade did not rate as such at that time.

The treatment by Europeans collectively of those natives or imported Negro slaves whose abused lives fuelled their commercial wealth is well known; natives and slaves were not accorded a status much above that of property or livestock, and their mistreatment continued long after such policies were officially condemned and outlawed. At the end of the 20th century, the attitudes behind that abuse have begun to die away, but the economic relations and political structures within which that abuse happened are proving more durable. The individual kindnesses in attitude and practice – and one could give historical as well as fictional examples – were irrelevant to affect or contain the evil done collectively.

The novels relationship with the myth is, in short, that it justifies the secularisation of economic and political life then taking place in Europe. Fifty years after Crusoe, the publication of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, marked the formal and permanent separation of economics/politics from ethics/ jurisprudence.

All of Crusoes moral and religious reflections are now read (outside specialist academic circles) as idiosyncrasies of the individual, a part of the charm of his character. Most modern Christians, and especially Christians of the Dissenting Non-Conformist Protestant tradition to which Defoe belonged, do not, as Crusoe did, rely upon Providence and their own industry, they rely upon their own industry exclusively, appealing to God only when they are unable to help themselves, and after they are helped, they are oblivious again – precisely the loss of grace Crusoe dreaded on seeing the human footprint. That loss was inevitable. For the reality is that the economic surplus that Crusoe achieves on his island in the state of nature (i.e. alone) is an impossibility: it can only be achieved in the ‘state of society’ (the conflict of each against all). This reality is represented in this realistic novel by (1) the ‘capital’ with which Crusoe starts his enterprise, a fact which, as we noted, the myth simply denies; and (2) Crusoe’s re-joining the economic mainland, his returning to England and voyaging Out again to new colonialist ventures, and (3) the revival of his hopes of entering the slave trade.

(Note: Robinson Crusoe Part 2:Economic individualism and secularisation and Part 3: The Muslim castaway: Hayy bin Yaqzan will appear in subsequent issues of The Fountain.