Are philosophers to rationalize the political, or are they to rationalize their own lives against the irrationality of the political?  Can the philosopher defend the limited rationality of political life and at the same time encourage the unusually gifted to transcend those limits?  I explore these very Platonic questions in three medieval philosophers: Alfarabi, Ibn Bajjah, and Ibn Tufayl.  I examine their understanding of political imagination, and their use of the image of philosophic natures as weeds growing up toward the sun of being through the dark lies of politics.  Alfarabi maintains that the philosopher must both study and create political images, while Ibn Bajjah counsels withdrawal from the city and its lies.  Ibn Tufayl argues against Ibn Bajjah that such a solitary life is philosophically and humanly inadequate.  Philosophy itself, Ibn Tufayl shows, forces the philosopher to craft and inculcate images.