Dialogues of Plato - MobileReference [6]
Socrates says in the Republic that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do, not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule.
According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.
The allegory of the cave (often said by scholars to represent Plato's own epistemology and metaphysics) is intimately connected to his political ideology (often said to also be Plato's own), that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplations and compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the Republic, that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler.
The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconciliable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.
Socrates on educating women
In two dialogues, the Menexenus and the Symposium, Socrates claims to have been tutored by a woman. In the Menexenus, Socrates says that he was a student of Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, who taught him the art of rhetoric, and that the Earth is the "true mother" of men. Women who give birth, she taught him, only imitate the Earth, in whose bosom dead soldiers comfortably rest. The Menexenus is thought to mock the Athenian custom of giving a funeral oration for soldiers who had died in battle. Aspasia's speech pretends that the land of Athens gives life to its citizens/soldiers/sons, and that they "belong" to the Earth rather than to their human parents.
In the Symposium, Socrates tells a company of his friends that he learned everything he knows about love from the sorceress Diotima. Diotima taught him that ideas, which are the offspring of the intellectual intercourse between men and boys, are superior to the offspring of the bodies of women. Socrates says that he learned that those who consider physical intercourse to be the highest form of love are misguided, searching for immortality through children. Ideas, Diotima told him, are more likely to make one famous.