Individuals who hold true opinions within a corrupt or false city are called nawabit, meaning weeds: plants that spring up spontaneously amid cultivated crops. The term frames the virtuous person in a flawed society not as a leader or citizen but as an anomaly that grows against the grain of its surroundings.
Human conduct can be ranked by what moves it: purely animal acts driven by appetite, mixed acts guided partly by reason, and purely rational or divine acts aimed at pure intelligible forms. Governance of the self means progressively shifting one's activity up this hierarchy toward the rational, so that lower drives serve higher ends rather than dominating them.
Since the perfect city that would cultivate virtue does not exist, the solitary individual must become his own governor, regulating his own conduct as a statesman would regulate a city. Political science thus collapses inward: the individual supplies for himself the ordering function that an ideal polity would otherwise provide.
What a person apprehends can be ranked by how far it is abstracted from matter: concrete sensed particulars at the bottom, imagined and remembered forms in the middle, and pure universal intelligibles at the top. Viewing one's mental contents along this scale reveals which objects of thought tie a person to matter and which free him toward the purely intellectual.
The highest goal available to a person is to grasp the pure intelligibles and ultimately unite with the Active Intellect, a state in which the knower becomes identical with what is known. This union, not social honor or bodily satisfaction, is the specific perfection toward which the solitary's self-government is directed.
The solitary must remain physically within an imperfect society because he depends on others for material necessities, yet he treats this association as a means only, withholding inner allegiance from its corrupt opinions. His isolation is therefore intellectual and moral rather than geographic: he lives among people while refusing to be formed by them.