Freedom 1/5

On his desert island in the Indian Ocean, Hayy Ibn Yaqzân (‘Alive, Son of the Awake’) discovers life, Nature and the elements, and learns to understand both his destiny and the universe. Brought up by a gazelle, he establishes the stages of knowledge by himself, and sets out, armed only with his reason. Inspired by the work of Ibn Sîna (Avicenna), Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century Hayy ibn Yaqzân is probably one of the first philosophical novels. It deals with access to knowledge and the truth, but also with experience, determinism and human freedom. It was translated into Latin (Philosophus autodidactus) as early as the seventeenth century and then into English (The Improvement of Human Reason). The substance of its argument is immediately clear: who are we when we are alone? What can we know? What is the nature of our relationship with others? To what extent are we free? The novel also asks many other questions. Despite the lacunae of the European memory, the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s work persists in many books produced all over the world, and especially in the West. Defoe with his Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island, al-Ghazâli and Descartes, with their approach to doubt, Locke and Hume with their empiricist theory, and even Marx, Engels and historical materialism all return, directly or indirectly, to the themes of this seminal novel. It is indeed about knowledge and understanding, but it also tries to determine what I can do, what I want . . . and what I am in what I want.

In the heart of Nature, alone and living amongst animals and their instincts, a human being seeks to understand the real powers of his mind and the essence of his freedom (the feeling, or even the illusion, of freedom). The natural laws he discovers, and then the rules he establishes, refer him back to the conditions of his own existence: he is trapped in a body and ruled by needs and by instincts, and they decide for him, within him and before him. It is, paradoxically, external laws that make him aware of both his freedom and its limitations. My nature decides for me, but it is when I am confronted with the external law that I become aware of what I can decide and of what the law reveals about what I can and/or want to undertake. Much later, Rousseau and Kant will assert that there is no such thing as freedom without the establishment of the law . . . and the imaginary experience of Hayy ibn Yaqzân or Robinson tends to demonstrate that the law (of instinct, of Nature, or even of the social order) comes first, and that it is the law that allows us to determine whether or not there is such a thing as freedom. In other words, and in both cases, human freedom exists only in relation to that which limits and/or permits it: it is and exists only if it can be measured. The natural law and the natural order, like instinct, give birth to the substance of freedom in the same way that the need for a law expresses the aspiration towards order and freedom. The novelist Michel Tournier intuitively grasps this seeming paradox in an original way in his Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island: alone and free, Robinson suddenly feels that he is imprisoned in the order of Nature and the great cosmos, and it is his decision to establish laws for himself and his servant Friday (social laws) that gives him access to the meaning of his freedom. Any reflection on freedom thus raises difficult, complex, paradoxical and contradictory questions: every consciousness knows that it is to some extent determined by its body, its instincts, its parents, its past and even its feeling . . . and yet every mind is inspired and driven by a freedom that has the ability to understand the world thanks to the strength of reason, and to repaint it thanks to the power of the imagination. We cannot decide everything, but we know that we can decide so many things . . .