In a move that is quintessentially Aristotelian,  Ibn Tufayl sets out to investigate the telos (end goal) of oriental philosophy and wisdom in the experience of communion with God; the affective experience that can only be attended to in the actual instance of the lives of those who earned its matchless joy and rejoiced in its ineffable splendor. In a manner similar to Aristotle's characterization of happiness in the Nichomachean Ethics,  Ibn Tufayl asserts that his (quite corresponding) being-in-communion-with-God is conceptually irreducible; ideally, then, it is to be sought in actual sphere of experience. Further, such exalted mode of being is posited as the necessary culmination of any inquiry into the dynamics and character of being. To demonstrate this claim, Ibn Tufayl constructs the literary imagery of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan to portray the actuality of what he envisioned the natural dialectical development towards truth. This path is systematically delineated as Hayy advances from the initial child wander through the accumulation of empirical knowledge by trial and error, the discovery of the faculty of reason, the rationally deduced proof of the necessary existence of the divine, and the investigation of the attributes exclusively specific to Him until the concluding recognition of the limitations of reason vis-à-vis the irreducible affective wholeness of the one. All of his intermittent moments of intellectual frustration (vis-à-vis those of ecstatic enlightenment, existential anxieties and crises, bewildered inquiries, emotional ambivalences and affective repressions and paroxysms) correspond quite stunningly to different moments in the history of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics down to him. Commencing with a recounting of the decisive infliction points and the momentous transformations of Hayy’s life, our undertaking will endeavor to explore and interrogate the philosophical foundations of Hayy’s propositions. 

Demonstrating his profound understanding of the structure of reason and its essentially negative mode of knowing, Ibn Tufayl aptly chooses Hayy’s first experience of absolute negation and existentially imposing anxiety at the death of his doe-mother to mark the initation of Hayy’s lifetime inquiry. Starting with the dissection and the observation of the dynamics of the elements of his immediate experience, Hayy begins to develop his own cosmogony—model of origin of the world. In his description of such an undertaking, Ibn Tufayl critically surveys most of the philosophical propositions of ancient Greek antiquity, starting with the Pre-Socratic idea of the four primeval elements and down to the matter-form primacy debate between Aristotle and Plato. As time elapses, Hayy’s understanding of the world progresses in a dialectical process in which his inductively formulated theses either cancel or reinforce each other, up to the point at which he arrives at the principle of causality.   By that time Hayy has already found out two important ontological facts; first, that despite the plurality of things an underlying oneness always seems to ground being; and second, that there is always something, namely the soul, that transcends sheer physicality. As he traced the chain of causes, Hayy eventually came to realize that there must be a cause that is prior to the world and that it can’t exist within the sphere of space and time. Such cause is God, the necessarily existent. At this moment he realizes that consciousness, the investigative tool he has used to recognize the existence of God is, like Stoics, the divine manifestation in man. Further, he came to the conclusion that the only way to reach happiness in life and experience a proper death is to always be in the presence of such all-powerful necessarily existent. To achieve that, he embraces his three modes of existence, namely, as an animal, a heavenly body—which he deemed higher than animals and more devoted to the divine—and as in communion with the necessarily existent. As for the first one, as an animal, Ibn Tufayl, seems to espouse the stoic prescription to eat only what is sufficient to sustain you, and to always try to add to the cycle of life by replacing whatever you consume by means of prudent use and cultivation. The perfection of the second mode, that of a heavenly body, was, to Hayy, to spend the longest time possible in a detached meditative state to free himself of all distractions, disturbances of desires and animal temptations. To achieve the third and highest mode of being, the communion with the divine, Hayy decided that since transcendence of physicality is the constitutive feature of God he should relentlessly try to die to himself, to always experience his nothingness. Regarding this as the highest possible form of communion with God, Hayy was quite disappointed when he left his island to see how ordinary religious communities worship God. He thought that there way was quite reductive and unsatisfactory to the necessarily existent.