The Governance of the Solitary

An unfinished treatise by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bājja, known in Latin as Avempace. Its title uses 'governance' in the sense of the ordered conduct of one's own life. Building on al-Fārābī, Ibn Bājja accepts that happiness would be reached most easily in a perfect city, but notes that no such city exists. The philosopher who lives in an imperfect city is like a weed, a plant growing where it was not sown, and must govern himself toward the end that his city fails to provide. Ibn Bājja analyses human acts, separating those that merely serve the body from those done by choice and for the sake of reason. He ranks the 'spiritual forms' the mind can hold, from images in sense and imagination up to pure intelligibles, and argues that the highest human goal is conjunction with the Active Intellect. To reach it, the solitary may need to keep apart from the people around him.

It is one of the earliest philosophical defences of the thinker who lives apart from a flawed society, and a key link between al-Fārābī, Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn Rushd.