Seeking Pleasure and Agression Is Part of Human InstinctName: Mohamed Fakhry A.
WahabBased on Freud concepts of pleasure and aggression, discuses Hay IbnYaqzan and The Island of AnimalsIt is said to be that seeking pleasure and aggression are a part of ourhuman Instinct. We seek pleasure to shorten the time of our unhappiness. Welive in a constant struggle to be always happy, and we use all the ways thattake us to happiness. Aggression, on the otherhand, is a part of our humannature, which can be hidden deep down in our subconcousnes and explodes incertain situations, or it can be on the surface of our behavior and inconstantuse. Sources of happiness may differ from one person to another, but the onesource of our human gratification that we all agree upon, is the happinessderived from sexual pleasure.
Our souls strive for sexual pleasure to beelevated from one degree of human happiness to another. Freud said that whatwe call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the . . . satisfaction ofneeds which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature onlypossible as an episodic phenomenon.
(25). At the sametime, we explore thosehuman instincts in the presence of civilization which set some rules andregulation that are surpassingly acting as guidelines for the survival ofhumanity. Hay Ibn Yaqzan and The Island of animals, are two different humanexperiences that discover our two core human instincts, pleasure and aggression. In Hay, we will find that his journey with his own instincts is different fromour own human instincts, but it is the same when it comes to the roll ofcivilization with dealing with them. On the otherhand, The Island of Animalstends to dig in our human aggression, and shows how humanity uses civilizationas a curtain to hide behind it.
Freud concept of pleasure and happiness is related to Hay in only oneway. It is not in the kind of happiness itself , whether if is sexual orspiritual, but it is similar in the procedure and the definitions of happinessor pleasure. In other words, pleasure to Freud is basically in sexual terms, Sexual gratification is the prototype of all forms of individual happiness. .
. . On the otherhand, Hay Ibn Yaqzan’s happiness or his pleasure is found in totallydifferent kind of human instinct, which is the substitute gratification forsexual pleasure, because religion and science are included in Freud’s lists forintellectual replacements for the lost sexual happiness. So Hay, according toFreud, is someone who favored the substitutes of sexual happiness. But, did notexperience sexual pleasure in the first place. Therefor, we cannot say that Hayis someone who escaped the sexual pleasure to the intellectual replacements,because of civilization.
The concepts of Freud equation does not suit Hay’scase. At the sametime, we can make the link between Hay and Freud’s conceptfrom the civilization point of view. According to Freud, our sexual instinctsare operates by civilization, and it does not serve the requirements ofcivilization. In Hayy’s case civilization oppressed his spiritual happinesswhere he found it on the island.
In this sense civilization stood against hishuman instinct, as civilization is standing against our human desiresrepresented in the sexual form. Opposite, Hay escaped from civilization insearch for his basic human desires. This escape was confirmed by hisreinhabiting the Island with Absal. Hayy found that civilization grab hisdesires from him, actually from his fellow man. Hayy knew that what miserymoreburdeing than recounting all you do from the time you get up to the time yougo to bed without finding a singal action that did not amount to seeking one ofthese vile, sensory aims:.
. . pleasure seeking. . .
venting rage. . . (71) As we cansee pleasure for Salaman and his friends is totally different from Hay’spleasure. The difference between Freud’s concept and Hay, is that in reality wedo not fight or even escape to reach our basic human instinct, but rather wecreate substitute gratification’s.
According to Freud Civilization compensatesthe individual by redirecting his libidinal energies into socially acceptableforms of amusement and diversion. But as we see those acceptable forms aresubstitutes for the real thing, instinctual happiness. But, they are not asubstitute for Hayy, they are his core source of happiness. So he did not staywith Salaman and create for himself substitute kind of pleasure, instead,
