It’s a metaphor for the out right objective truth that no one wants to admit. People are not created equal. Some people are smarter than others, some people are stronger, some people are smarter and stronger than others. Because of this. If TV stopped selling all these lies to children about how they can be what they want to be, then they’d know at an early age who they were even capable of being and they’d act out that role for the better of society.
Simply this Plato was a class/caste/rank snob of a most extreme nature!
People give out about poor Nietzsche but it was The Republic that contained the first carefully worked out scheme of Eugenics right down to the slaughter of “brass” babies born to “gold” parents - in order that his bizarre meritocratic city would thrive.
We are not machines, we ought not try to be. Every human is entitled to follow their own interests, not just their own strengths. Society is meant to protect the individual, not enslave his mind!
After two milennia the name of Jesus still is remembered. Plato was not a moron. His philosophy, plus whatever he stold from Socrates, directly influenced Western culture. It gave Christianity a philosophic logic for its tenets. See Clement of Alexandria or Augustine! If endurance could be a claim for truth, the Goddess deserves our consideration.
Ironically knowledge and information is supposed to describe who shall be superior or inferior in society all the while claiming to be a relative proposition.
Between groundless claims of absolutes, weak logic about the certainty of other worlds and their superiority to this one, and the fact that Plato/Socrates actually manufacture the evidence for their claims by offering self-written fictions as proof, I have a lot less awe for Plato and Socrates than is considered mandatory.
Thanks, APR. It seems few, out of their need to respect what others say as authoritative (a good tit to suck on), a respect even Socrates denies, can see the harm religious intolerance has caused over the centuries. The Plato/Paul concepts of absolutes existing in some otherworld have given us an attitude about this world that fails to address the ecological necessity of our existence, the reverence for this life, this world, these immediate relationships. There are no other criteria for morality than these considerations which so much of religion and philosophy would claim to be irrelevant.