Plato, Obama, and Peters on the Question of Mighty Pens

by Micah Tillman

Last week, Sally wouldn’t believe my incontrovertible evidence that Plato was a (bad) libertarian. So this week I shall attempt to please by trying another approach:

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

That’s right. It’s finally happened.

Allow me to explain.

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.

So, Ralph Peters’ recent argument that intellectuals never did a thing for the world severely underestimates the enabling and motivating context which thinkers create for men of action.

After all, would so many of our fellow citizens have accepted Obama as their personal lord and savior (i.e., messiah) were it not for the pervasive cultural beliefs which Platonic philosophy created?

And isn’t Peters wrong when he claims that “our glorious Declaration of Independence and our Constitution would be no more than bizarre artifacts had they not been defended by patriots willing to fight”? Isn’t he ignoring the role which the rise of modernist philosophy had in giving the truth that all men are created equal the weight of self-evidence?

That truth — which makes all humans worthy of respect and physical defense — would have been “bizarre” before the rise of Renaissance humanism was reinforced by the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and then sealed by the spread of Descartes’ assumption that reason was not a human potential we all may actualize (as classical philosophy taught), but an automatic possession of each individual which some merely “conduct” improperly.

But after Renaissance, Reformation, and René, “all men are created equal” was something the Signers could reasonably believe everyone in Euro-America would agree on. So it wasn’t, contra Peters, the Wars of Independence and 1812 which kept the Declaration and Constitution from being bizarre. It was the intellectual culture which motivated the documents in the first place.

Furthermore, the only reason anyone thought of fighting for independence — the only reason anyone thought the myriad injustices listed in the Declaration were reason enough to kill — was that Locke bought Descartes’ arguments, and the Signers bought Locke’s.

Read the Second Treatise (especially ch. 19), then read the Declaration. The Signers weren’t saying anything everyone hadn’t already been taught by Locke in school.

Without the philosophical edifice of modernist philosophy created by Descartes and Locke, therefore, modern democracy would be at best a curiosity, and at worst an absurdity. But with it, equality and freedom, democracy and human rights are worth fighting and dying for.

So, despite Peters’ insistence that it is warriors who create the space for writers, the truth is the other way around. The pen is mightier than the sword, because it tells the sword when, where, and why it should (not) be drawn.

It is the pen which wrote the speeches whereby Obama captured enough hearts to become our next President. (It’s inevitable now, isn’t it?) And it was the pen which convinced our next President to keep the sword sheathed, to be a healer and talker.

It is the pen which convinced people that it makes sense to talk about “us,” about “the People,” about a collective “will” and “voice” of which they are a part — even when they are “willing” and “saying” exactly the opposite of everyone else.

And thus, it is the pen which keeps the masses compliant (or at least complacent), allowing the current trends in government to continue.

The pen and sword may form a mutually-reinforcing circle. But everything starts with the pen.

And for Obama, everything started with the Platonic and Apostolic pens, thousands of years ago.

Micah Tillman (micahtillman.com) is a lecturer in philosophy at The Catholic University of America.