The political dimension of the contemplative life : engagement and disengagement in Plato, Seneca and Gandhi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation provides a detailed study of an unusual approach to the opposition between contemplative and active lives. The approach that I focus on argues, first, for withdrawal from conventional forms of political action on the grounds that the political life is ineffective in accomplishing good in conditions of injustice. This position is supported by presenting a moral critique of existing politics, positing an underlying moral failure among the citizens and their leaders as the cause of our political shortcomings. Any effective attempt to address these shortcomings must therefore be able to contribute to a moral re-orientation. Ordinary political methods fail to do this, however, because they must adopt and appeal to the prevailing moral outlook in achieving and exercising power. Secondly, then, the approach suggests that under existing circumstances of injustice, the contemplative life, a life devoted to attaining personal spiritual perfection through pursuing knowledge of one's real good, is better suited to achieving the good ideally sought through politics. In motivating the contemplative life as a model of political action, the approach draws on an ideal extra-political entity, a normative cosmology, to serve as an alternative context for action, in contrast to the world of political competition. I trace this line of thought through the writings of three rather different thinkers, Plato, Seneca and Gandhi. In the case of each author, I study a particular dialogue in the context of their thought more broadly: Plato's Gorgias, Seneca's De Otio, and Gandhi's Hind Swaraj. The thesis takes up some of the key problems that arise from their similar approaches to the contemplative life as a model of the political life in order to evaluate its relevance from a contemporary perspective. These include the claim that political discourse should be directed towards a correct understanding of our own real good, the view that there exists a real good for each of us that we do not often perceive, the notion that a normative cosmology can play a role in motivating our political engagements, and the question of whether the contemplative life can be relevant to a participatory politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".