Plato, Kant, and the Sun

In Plato's image, the sun is a symbol of the Form of the Good, by which other Ideas are illuminated. It is unclear whether he means such illumination to be intellectual or to be normative, but insofar as Ideas and Ideals are one and the same to him, there is no difference between the two interpretations. For Kant, the sun serves most explicitly as a gravitational metaphor--just as Copernicus shows that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the converse, Kant characterizes his theory of Knowledge as the adaptation of the world to cognitive structures, rather than, as had hitherto been the case, the converse. But Kant's metaphor entails some complications that are rarely explored. First, the status of Humanity is not made explicit, so, insofar as humans are terrestrial beings, the 'Copernican revolution' can also be interpetated as a transition from subjective knowledge to objective knowledge, i. e. from knowledge as it appears, to knowledge as it actually is, which is certainly an important theme in Kant's theory. But, if objective knowledge is knowledge from the perspective of the sun, and the parameters of that knowledge are in the human subject, then the human mind itself has become the 'sun' of knowledge, as a result of the 'Copernican' revolution. Furthermore, apparently unexplored, is the relation between the Platonic and Kantian 'suns', and, in particular, to what extent the latter might be not only an intellectual sun, but a moral one, as well. On that hypothesis, Kant's Principle of Pure Practical Reason too is a 'sun', the criterion of worthy conduct. As such, his Copernican revolution converges with his theory of human autonomy--by internalizing the 'sun', i. e. the Practical Principle, one freely gives the Good to oneself. Granted that hypothesis, since Kant never explicitly explains the relation between the theoretical 'I' and the practical 'I', how many 'suns' are in his System remains unresolved.