Research on the possibility of aesthetic communication in Platon’s Symposium

Abstract

This study tried to analyze Plato’s 『Symposium』 as ‘aesthetic communication’. In fact, it goes without saying that most of Plato’s writings consist of dialogue, and that the form of discussion itself is communication. In communication studies, there is an example where Plato was studied as a pioneer of communication. Michael Deuce, Mary Brown, 『Plato’s Shadow』, Communication Books, 2012. However, the research is a communication study from the level of rhetoric. However, there are few examples of philosophical analysis of the dialogue form and content of texts in Plato’s studies so far. Not all Plato’s texts have a correlation between dialogue form and content. However, at least as far as 『Symposium』, dialogue and content have a close correlation. The author tried to approach it with the concept of ‘aesthetic communication’. The idea of aesthetic communication, which started from Kant’s aesthetics, is based on ‘common sense’. All human beings feel and admire beauty through the operation of reason and imagination in front of a beautiful object. However, the wonder and wonder of this beauty wants to share it with the people around it through the medium of ‘common sense’, and they actually do share to form a community. Hannah Arendt, who inherited this common sense of Kant as her own philosophy, develops Kantian aesthetics into a political philosophy. The author tried to read Kant's mechanism of aesthetic communication in Plato’s 『Symposium』. Plato cannot be Kant. However, in Plato’s 『Symposium』, both the personal eros of ancient Greek society, aphrodisia (sexual pleasure), and the political life, the eros of truth, are embodied. According to the author’s analysis, the communication of 『Symposium』 has the same historical tradition as Kant’s aesthetic communication about beauty. Therefore, in this study, I tried to analyze what conditions Plato’s 『Symposium』 have as an aesthetic communication and to reveal the possible reasons.