"Barack Obama is the Platonic philosopher king we’ve been looking for for the past 2,400 years"

Barack Obama is the Platonic philosopher king we’ve been looking for for the past 2,400 years.

Plato argued that without a philosopher king there could be neither happiness (V, 473e, VI, 500d-3) nor personal perfection (VI, 499a-b). Therefore, none of us will attain the four excellences required for true unity — each of our souls will remain internally divided, broken (IV, 441c-d, 443c-e) — until the philosopher king arrives.

Thus, Plato wrote:

[W]e have to fix our souls – our souls are broken in this [city-state]. . . .

. . . [The philosopher king is] the only person in this race who has a chance at healing this [city-state].

Or was that Michelle Obama?

Oh. It was Mrs. Obama. Either way, it works. Mr. Obama will fulfill the Platonic prophecies.

But he’ll do even more. He won’t just heal our city-states and souls. He won’t just bring the Heavenly Kingdom — dreamt of in both Platonism and Christianity — to earth. He will heal the earth itself.

And that, my friends, is taking the philosopher king to the next level. Only a Christian Platonism could predict what Obama will do.

We might say, then, that Obama is not only post-partisan and post-racial, but post-Platonist. The context in which he lives, moves, and has his being may have been first designed in the 300’s B.C.; but it was radically re-designed in the First Century, A.D.

Micah Tillman, July 10, 2008. Tillman is a lecturer in philosophy at The Catholic University of America.

DISCLAIMER: further investigation leads us to suspect that Tillman may not necessarily believe what he claims. Despite his lack of faith, we think his argument sound.