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El Banquete de Platón
El Banquete de Platón
The following text has the purpose of alluding to one of the books, considered by many as the
Banquet, a book written approximately in 385-370 B.C. in the Ancient Greece. What is the
banquet about, why does it have so high an appreciation? These are the questions that we will try
to answer in this essay, in order that the answers may guide us to answer in a conclusive tone this
other question: what can we learn from Plato's Banquet in our days? The thesis that is tried to be
maintained in the text is that: reflecting on the Banquet permits us to consider love from a deeper
perspective. Because it is considered associated with spiritual desire, with knowledge and with
the supreme value of the good, instead of ordinary considerations of love, which understands it
as a simple biological act. At the same time, the Banquet invites us to reflect on the fact that
What is the banquet about? The banquet is a book by Plato whose main theme is love. The
main argument is that a group of illustrious Greek characters meet at a banquet, but instead of
drinking and overeating as they used to do, they make speeches praising the god Eros, the god of
love. Various characters give their discourses about him, but the most important is the speech of
Socrates (the main character in all of Plato's books) who gives us the most beautiful speech about
love. Eros," Plato tells us on Socrates' lips, "is the son of Poros, the god of eternal riches. But, at
the same time, he is the son of Penia, the personification of poverty. Therefore, love, being in an
intermediate state, is a desire, a desire that tends to the most beautiful riches, but it does so in the
lack and poverty that characterizes it, for this reason its development is eternal, because it will
always need something. In other words, love is a desire for beauty. In the sense that beauty for
Plato means a transcendence of particular bodily beauty, to the general beauty of the body as
form and from there to the beauty of noble norms, to finally reach the beauty of Good, of the
Good in general. Thus, the love proposed by Socrates is a transcendent love that abandons the
world of appearances and centres on conceiving beauty in the noble ideal of the supreme Good.
Although it will always be recognized that this is an arduous, difficult and unfinished process,
because the Eros has poverty, although it aspires to the richness of thinking of beauty related to
Bearing in mind what the Banquet alludes to, we can answer that its high esteem is due to the
fact that in this book love is understood in a profound and intellectual sense disassociated from
immediate experiences. Love understood as the beauty that is conceived in the noble ideal of
doing good, and that all thoughts conduct to it. In short, the value of this book is due to the fact
that it helps us to think that love, far from being a simple biological act, is a spiritual act that
guides us to become better people and at the same time to make better people and better actions.
In conclusion, the thing that a book such as Plato's Banquet teaches us in our days and why it
is important to read it is because it gives us a lesson in the comprehension of love far from
immediate sensitive experiences, something that appears frequent in our society so occupied with
appearance and so indifferent to the spiritual interior. What Plato's Banquet proposes to us
instead is to cultivate our being, to do good deeds, to be good, to do good. All this through the
exercise of thought and bearing in mind that on the way we will always find difficulties that we
cannot evade, because they are part of our existence, but that love will always be a desire to do