An Unknown-ish Translation of Ibn Tufayl's Self-Taught Philosopher
As my regular readers know, Ibn Tufayl's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (حي بن يقظان, lit. 'Alive son of Awake') is one of my favorite works in the history of philosophy. I love teaching it, I love reading it, I love talking about it, and I love blogging about it. While the work was known to and discussed by Jewish scholars, it is generally assumed that Europeans only became familiar with it through the joint (1671) Latin-Arabic edition of Pocock. I tend to use the relatively modern Lenn Goodman translation with many helpful notes. But thanks to the online Gutenberg edition, I have long been intrigued by the fact that Simon Ockley -- one of the original villains in Said's Orientalism -- also translated it (in 1708), something Said doesn't mention.
Recently, I got a chance to acquire a copy of a 1686 (!) English translation, The History of Hai Eb'n Yockdan and Indian Prince: or the Self-Taught Philosopher. and I assumed I was getting my hands on an earlier version by Ockley. When I opened the copy, much to my surprise, when I read the dedication, I realized it was by George Ashwell. (This translation is not listed on Wikipedia.) Now, I knew an Ashwell translation existed because in the preface to his translation, Ockley writes:
I was not willing ('though importun'd) to undertake the translating it into English, because I was inform'd that it had been done twice already; once by Dr. Ashwell, another time by the Quakers, who imagin'd that there was something in, it that favoured their Enthusiastick Notions. However, taking it for granted, that both these Translations we're not made out of the Original Arabick, but out of the Latin; I did not question but they had mistaken the Sense of the Author in many places.
What I want to call attention to in Ockley's justification here is that he assumes that a translation from a translation is always going to fail to understand the intended meaning of a text "in many places," and so going to be inferior than a translation from an original all other things (like sufficient linguistic and technical competence) being equal. Unfortunately, Ockley doesn't put it that cautiously. Without the ceteris paribus condition Ockley's claim is obviously false. If the original involves some technical or esoteric expertise and vocabulary then working with the original is of little help to a translator who simply doesn't grasp the technical details of the original. (I could offer highfaluting examples of translations in astronomy, but the situation is familiar enough to Europeans who have to deal with unintelligible user manuals in their own language, and so end up relying on the diagrams or on youtube videos.)
In his preface, Ashwell anticipates the objection (and even my response to it). He implies that Pocock's original Latin translation from the Arabic is too literal (like the common complaint about Bloom's translation of the Republic), and Ashwell opts not to "ty" himself to the "letter of the" Arabic. He suggests that he is thereby better capable of sticking to the intended "sense" of the original. (He doesn't admit he lacks knowledge of Arabic, so a reader may come away thinking his translation is from the Arabic.) He would not be the first to claim such purported attunement between reader/translator and original. (It's often said Kant had not read Hume in English and often reconstructs Hume's point better than those who have.)
I had never heard of George Ashwell before, but I assume it is this one (1612 – 1694) not the least because this entry does mention this particular translation. But scholar.google suggests that this translation is not unknown to other scholars. In fact, I quote one such study by Ferlier and Gallien to set up the issues I want to explore today: "in his 1686 version, cut out most philosophical elements from the narrative to create an Orientalist easy-read. But by adding after the text a theological pamphlet entitled “The Book of Nature,” Ashwell also turned Ibn Tufayl’s discourse into a defence of “natural religion.”* I don't think it's quite right to say that Ashwell "cut most philosophical elements," -- if by 'philosophy' we include what Ibn Tuyfayl and his Platonic/Aristotelian and Islamic sources would have called 'philosophy' --, but Ashwell did cut some bits interesting to philosophers then and now. After all, he promotes his own translation in virtue of the fact that Ibn Tufayl gives an instructive example of how by the use of 'human reason' we can infer god and providence from the study of nature. As Ferlier and Gallien suggest, Ibn Tufayl’s work is being used to promote natural religion.
As it happens, Ashwell doesn't use 'natural religion' in his translation or supplementary material, but the bookseller has added an advertisement for a book by John Wilkins (yes that one) on the Principles and Duties of Natural religion. An Ngram nicely shows that the publication of the translations of Ibn Tufayl (and Wilkins' work) anticipates, as I suspected, the eighteenth century relative popularity of the project. (Remember that Hume's science of man was intended to improve natural religion, especially.)
It is worth asking somebody like Peter Adamson or Stephen Menn whether the category of writing, 'natural religion,' existed in Ibn Tufayl's age (other than his own work). If not then Ockley could have added anachronism to his list of complaints about Ashwell's translation. But I actually think that it is fair to say that Al-Farabi, Ibn Sinna, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufayl, and Ibn Rushd all practiced the genre in some ways (and even offer arguments, no different in spirit than Augustine's or Al-Ghazali's, for the legitimacy of such a project within Islam), and that Plato strongly implies that the genre would have existed in the healthy city-(despite the absence of philosophy). Ibn Tufayl clearly thinks this, too.
I don't mean to suggest that there isn't some anachronism in Ashwell's project in virtue of the fact that by 1686, Ibn Tufayl's science is dated in various ways five hundred years after publication. Part of the 18th century spike in natural religion is that the new science(s) and discoveries are being deployed and hyped as a tool in natural religion. Some of the best of these -- by Nieuwentyt, Durham, Rey, and Wilkins -- integrate a lot of different sciences into a comprehensive world-view or system of nature, and they do non-trivial philosophy of science and epistemology along the way (including non-trivial enduring innovations).+ Some of this is well known from Jonathan Israel's account of (what he deems) the moderate Enlightenment, but their works are very much worth reading.
Ashwell recognizes the objection, but he addresses it in two steps: first, he makes the point of noting the originality "a new unbeaten path" of Ibn Tufayl's work because of the "set and orderly degrees" and "such gentle steps in an easy and familiar way of reasoning" the reader goes almost insensibly from knowledge of nature to knowledge of God. By this, second, Ibn Tufayl avoids the jargon and perplexity that modern authors generate because they are "too subtle, sublime, and metaphysical for common understanding." Even many of my political science undergraduates (who often object to ‘philosophy’) agree.
Ashwell's editorial decisions then are informed by this aim. And so he cuts Ibn Tufayl's prefatory material which situate the narrative in a complex reception of Islamic philosophy and epistemology of mystical truths. Ashwell makes no effort to convey what's in that prefatory material (except that Ibn Tufayl disagrees with some of his predecessors). But there is no mention of Ibn Tufayl's marvelous thought experiment that I discuss in Helen de Cruz's collection. Oddly, Ashwell leaves the later half of the frame story at the end of his translation. It turns out to be quite natural there, but the references in it to "hidden knowledge" and the "slight view of secrets" are a bit (more) obscure now to the unsuspecting reader. Of course, by adding his own work to Ibn Tufayl as an appendix, Ashwell also may shape the interpretation of some readers of his translation.
However, he does alert his reader that he kept some material that may cause "offense" and that might also be thought to undercut his basic stated aims. He lists many of these in his preface, including the fact that in the narrative a naturalistic origin of mankind (indebted to Ibn Sinna) of man's development out of earthly elements is offered as a speculation, In Ashwell's edition of the translation that's now the first thing one encounters. This strongly undermines the project of gaining knowledge of God since God is dispensable in this version of the narrative.
Ashwell also alerts the reader to some of the potentially offensive material in the text, including Hayy's perplexity about the origin of the world, which is grounded in Aristotle (whose science is now dated), and Ashwell adds for good measure that "now it is generally known, that he held the world to have been from all eternity." (Ashwell also warns his readers that there are passages quoted from the Koran, and that Hayy suspects the stars are living agents.)
One important explicit aim for Ashwell is that he thinks that his translation may be able to combat the moral and spiritual corruption and licentiousness of his age. It is not impossible that this is actually also one of Ibn Tufayl's aims. His student/mentee, Ibn Rushd, actually alerts the reader to the bad state in social affairs in his own time in his commentary on Plato's Republic. While presumably not exactly contemporary with the writing of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān the situation was already moving in bad direction. Although I should say that on my own reading of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān Ibn Tufayl kind of warns his reader not to expect much social benefit from the project of natural religion. This is not an esoteric reading of the text because it is pretty much the explicit conclusion of the main protagonist. Of course, Ashwell may well think that this is true in the context depicted by Ibn Tufayl, but not in his own social reality.
And this raises challenges to the art of philosophical translation (a scholarly interest of mine). For, a translator mediates not just between different languages and different social, literary, and religious contexts (etc.), but also between the implied aims of an author and one's own, and the implied (political) teachings of a text (which may be subtly different than the author's), and the translator's own (political) understanding. But now I have let myself (recall) re-enter the comedy and hall of mirrors of Borges' La Busca de Averroes.
*Ferlier, Louisiane, and Claire Gallien. "“Enthusiastick” Uses of an Oriental Tale: The English Translations of Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan in the Eighteenth Century." Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England: Receptions and Transformations from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period (2019): 93-114.
+Some may wish to call them the synthetic philosophers of their age.