KANT ’ S CONFRONTATION WITH PLATO AND THE GREEK WORLD IN THE INAUGURAL

The discussion concerning Kant’s knowledge of the Greek world has long been a subject of debate. Our contribution is intended to show that in the Dissertation of 1770 Kant is measured against some currents of Greek thought, and above all with Plato, on topics which will become very important in the articulated development of criticism in the 1770s. One aspect of our analysis deals with the texts that could have filtered Kant’s knowledge of ancient Greek tradition. We will then pore over some crucial features of the Dissertation, such as the distinction between sensible and intelligible knowledge and the ambiguous nature of the intellectualia, in order to assess how Kant’s understanding of certain issues of Greek classicism may have contributed to the outline of some still problematic theses in the text of 1770.

view are articulated according to the object of rational knowledge, its origin and the method followed by the philosophers who have contributed most to the renewal of metaphysics. This approach allows Kant to count Plato among the "intellectual philosophers" as far as the object of rational knowledge is concerned, and among the "noologists" as far as its origin is concerned .
Finally, and this is the third feature that we aim to outline, in the Löse Blätter on the late writing concerning the Progress of Metaphysics, Kant speaks of a "Philosophizing History of Philosophy" and, in accordance with the pronouncements that we have just analyzed, he states that a historical presentation of philosophy recounts how philosophizing has been done hitherto, and in what order. But philosophizing is a gradual development of human reason, and this cannot have set forth, or even have begun, upon the empirical path, and that by mere concepts. There must have been a need of reason (theoretical or practical) which obliged it to ascend from its judgments about things to the grounds thereof, up to the first, initially through common reason (FM/Lose Blätter, AA 20: 340-341, tr. 417).
Therefore, Kant adds that although a philosophical history of reason "establishes facts of reason, it does not borrow them from historical narrative, but draws them from the nature of human reason, as philosophical archaeology" (FM/Lose Blätter, AA 20: 341, tr. 417).
Accordingly, the only "archaeology" allowed in the history of philosophy is a philosophical archaeology, that is, an approach shaped by the life of reason itself, which is neither exhausted by nor resolved in its contingent manifestation. This premise is necessary in order to understand both the meaning, the limits and also the potentialities of the way Kant relates to Greek thought, in particular to Plato, in the somehow enigmatic and challenging Dissertation of 1770. It will therefore now be a question of trying to understand what problems Kant was dealing with at this crucial moment in his theoretical path and how the Greek world, or rather the image that Kant himself had formed of it, plays a role in the outline of these problems and in Kant's attempt to solve them.

KANT'S "PLATONISM" IN THE DISSERTATION AND ITS LIMITS
According to the current interpretation -which from Wundt and Reich reaches Vieillard-Baron and Nuzzo 6 (to confine ourselves to a few names) -Kant's Dissertation of 1770 Estudos Kantianos, Marília, v. 8, n. 2, p. 107-126, Jul./Dez., 2020 constitutes the crucial moment of his (indirect, as we have just shown) "encounter" with Plato.
Wundt goes so far as to suggest that Kant refers to his discovery of Plato in the famous Reflexion 5037 (1776)(1777)(1778), where he talks about the "great light" that invested him in 1769. 7 . On the other hand, Reich rather sees in M. Mendelssohn's Phaedon (1767) the text that would have provoked the "awakening" of Platonic echoes in Kant during these crucial years for the determination of critical issues 8 .
The decisive reason for the emergence of these interpretations is represented by the conceptual structure underlying the main division that Kant illustrates already in the title of the work, namely that between the sensible and the intelligible world. Since § 3 of the Dissertation -devoted precisely to De sensibilium atque intelligibilium discrimine generatimthis division reveals to be linked to that between phenomena and noumena: The object of sensibility is sensible; that which contains nothing but what is to be cognized through the intelligence is intelligible. In the schools of the ancients, the former was called phenomenon and the latter noumenon (MSI, AA 02: 392, tr. 384).
However, in this passage, as in the subsequent elaboration of this distinction, not only is Plato not mentioned, but no ancient author or ancient school is explicitly addressed. Yet Kant's reference to antiquity is clear, so the question about his ideal interlocutor or interlocutors is quite legitimately raised. First of all, we have to observe that the Kantian reference in these lines cannot be Plato, which we can argue by considering how he places the sensible and intelligible worlds in relation to each other. As early as the first paragraph, devoted to the notion of the world in general, Kant states that he examined the "two-fold genesis" of this concept as it arises "e mentis natura" (MSI, AA 02: 387, tr. 377): Thus, it is one thing, given the parts, to conceive for oneself the composition of the whole, using an abstract concept of the understanding, and it is another thing to follow up this general concept, as one might do with some problem of reason, by the sensitive 9 faculty of cognition, that is to say, to represent the same concept to oneself in the concrete by a distinct intuition. The former is done […] by means of ideas of the understanding which are universal. The latter case rests upon the conditions of time, in so far as it is possible, by the successive addition of part to part, to arrive genetically, that is to say, by SYNTHESIS, at the concept of a compound; this case falls under the laws of intuition (MSI,AA 02: 387, On the other hand, by means of the real use of the understanding "the concepts themselves, whether of things or relations, are given" (MSI, AA 02: 393, tr. 385). This usage, which -unlike logical usage -is not common to all sciences, concerns the "intellectualia stricte talia": "such concepts, whether of objects or of relations, are given by the very nature of the understanding: they contain no form of sensitive cognition and they have been abstracted from no use of the senses", since -as Kant points out -"to abstract from something" presupposes an original mixture of the two elements, whereas the intellectual concept "abstracts" and is not "abstracted from" everything sensible, so that "perhaps a concept of the understanding would more rightly be called abstracting than abstracted" (MSI, AA 02: 394, tr. 386). Furthermore, in order to dispel any doubts about a subordinate position of sensible knowledge, at the beginning of § 11 Kant expressly declares: "Now, although phenomena, properly speaking are aspects of things [rerum species] and not ideas, and although they do not express the internal and absolute quality of objects, nonetheless cognition of them is in the highest degree true" (MSI, AA 02: 397, tr. 389). Estudos Kantianos, Marília, v. 8, n. 2, p. 107-126, Jul./Dez., 2020 To sum up, we have, on the one hand, the intelligible world, obtained per notionem abstractam intellectus. This is the world of analysis, characterized by a totality of simple parts, known in themselves by means of the real use of understanding and coordinated with each other. The peculiarity of this world consists in its abstracting character in relation to the sensible world, a character essentially linked to its universal and ideal nature. Next to the intelligible world, but not subordinated to it, there is the sensible world, namely the world of synthesis, a concrete world grounded upon intuition. Here the simple parts as such are never given, but are rather always and only placed into relations enabled by space and time. Such a state of affairs allows room for the logical use of understanding to subordinate sensible knowledges to other sensible knowledges. This has led various interpreters -such as Tonelli, Popkin and Laursen, Patt, Höffe 12 and above all Ferrari -to contrast with those, mentioned above, who believed the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal world to represent a reference to Plato. Ferrari is quite clear in this respect: "yet whereas, for the tradition stemming from Plato, the sensible is a source of errors and illusions, for Kant it becomes, through its a priori form, a place of truth with its own clarity and distinction: space and time make it possible to account for the existence of geometry and the development of mathematics" (Ferrari 1989: 67).
To be sure, given Kant's indirect knowledge of Plato, he may have had a distorted view of the Platonic perspective to the extent that he could have ignored the fundamental hierarchy between the intelligible and the sensible dimension placed at the basis of Plato's thought. This would lead us to believe that Kant's model, in this conception of the distinction between the two worlds, as well as of the resulting distinction between phenomena and noumena, is indeed Plato, albeit an apocryphal Plato. Yet this does not seem to be the case for at least two reasons: Firstly, already in those years Kant was well aware of the pre-eminence of the intelligible element over the sensible element in Plato. This emerges, for example, in the Reflexion 1636, which we have mentioned above, in which he refers of the Ionic, Eleatic and Italian schools, respectively, as advocates of pure rationalism, whose «Magnus defensor» would be Plato. In a context which undoubtedly recalls the theory of ideas, Kant claims about Plato that "Intelligibile oppositum sensibili" (see: Refl 1636, AA 16: 60).
Secondly, U. Santozki, among others, has convincingly shown that, as far as the nonhierarchical consideration of the two worlds is concerned, Kant's ancient source would probably be the Sceptics, whom Kant knew indirectly through the mediation of J. Regius 13 , J. Carpov 14 , J. J. Brucker and A. G. Baumgarten. Santozki suggests that Baumgarten in particular provided a decisive contribution to accrediting Sextus Empiricus' Platonism. This latter transmitted indeed to modernity an image of Plato for whom sensible and intelligible knowledges were not situated on clearly distinguished hierarchical levels 15 . Actually, in his reading of Plato, Sextus Empiricus attributes to the perceptive plane of the aisthesis a primitive representative capacity able to produce a complete knowledge. The objects of this knowledge are the aisthetà (the sensibilia), which, as products of a representation, can be considered as phenomena. Sensible knowledges characterized in this way would therefore not be sharply subordinate to intelligible knowledges (the noetà), but rather, between aisthetà and noetà there would be a path of progressive clarification, namely that of the doxa. By accrediting this interpretation, Baumgarten would thus have established an undue affinity between Plato and the Leibniz-Wolffian school, an affinity that would be functional to the conceptual framework of his Aesthetics.
We do not know whether Kant was familiar with Baumgarten's texts in which this interpretation is explicit -it is indeed matter of a lecture-course 16 and a dissertation published by a pupil of Baumgarten after the master's death. 17 In any case, one cannot avoid observing that a connection between Leibniz and Plato, stated with polemical accents, is still present in Kant's Anthropology. 18 Furthermore, Kant could certainly have found the Baumgartenian distinction between aisthetà and noetà, very well expressed and in reference to unspecified "ancient philosophers", in Baumgarten's Meditationes de nunnullis ad poema pertinentibus (1735): Already the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the Church always carefully distinguished between αἰσθητά and νοητά, and it is quite clear that the αἰσθητά for them were not equivalent only to sensible things, because also things perceived as absent (and therefore images) deserve this name. Let νοητά, then, which have to be known by the higher faculty, be the object of logic; and let the αἰσθητά be the object of ἐπιστήμης αἰσθητικῆς, that is, of aesthetics. 19 It goes without saying that the terms in which the distinction is made here echoes not only what is set out in the Dissertation, but also, and perhaps even more explicitly, what Kant will contend in the first Critique by openly rejecting what Baumgarten understands with the term "aesthetics". 20 Even assuming, therefore, that the model for the separation between the two worlds in Estudos Kantianos, Marília, v. 8, n. 2, p. 107-126, Jul./Dez., 2020 the Dissertation is not Plato but the Skeptics, one must in any case examine those passages of the text in which Kant doubtless thinks of Plato, a Plato not so far from the original. There are two passages in this regard: the first and most significant is located in § 9, where Kant, in defining the "dogmatic" aim of intellectual knowledge -which consists in drawing the exemplary model represented by the "noumenic perfection" -identifies two meanings of this perfection: the first, theoretical, coincides with "the Supreme Being, God", whereas the second is practical and consists in the perfectio moralis (MSI, AA 02: 396, tr. 388). Epicurus and Shaftesbury are criticized here for identifying the principia diiudicandi of moral philosophy with sensible elements such as "the sense of pleasure or pain" (MSI, AA 02: 396, tr. 388). With regard to the second interlocutor, Kant reconsiders at least partially the favorable opinion he had expressed with regard to these moral theories -also in relation to Hutcheson and Hume -in the Deutlichkeit and Nachricht of 1765-66 21 . In these lines Plato is clearly evoked in relation to the maximum of moral perfection: In any genus of things, the quantity of which is variable, the maximum is the common measure and principle of cognizing. The maximum of perfection is nowadays called the ideal, while for Plato it was called the idea (as in the case of his idea of the state). It is the principle of all things which are contained under the general concept of some perfection (MSI, AA 02: 396, tr. 388).
Here, the reference to Plato is motivated by Kant's aim to stress that moral principles must be completely detached from experience. Kant looks for principia diiudicandi, i.e., criteria for establishing the morality of action: in other words, criteria that make it possible to "measure" the value of action from a horizon that is by definition inaccessible. Kant qualifies such a horizon as ideal and openly superimposes this concept on the Platonic idea, but in the critical phase the relation between ideal and idea will be more accurately outlined.
The Platonic idea so understood is, of course, inaccessible for a finite subject, and in its most extreme form it will later be criticized because of the mystical drifts it is exposed to.
However, what counts for Kant in this context is not its character of intellectual intuitionevoked en passant in § 25 22 -, but rather its non-empirical character -which makes it still potentially knowable, although only by a divine understanding. Such a non-empirical character makes a so conceived idea an adequate instrument of "moral measurement". Accordingly, one may conclude with Jean Ferrari that: "The Platonic theory of ideas, freed of its metaphysical illusions, opens the way and calls for the critical solution that defines the idea as a concept of reason, that is to say, a representation that arises from the application of a demand for unconditioned to a notion of understanding" (Ferrari 1989: 70).

THE COMPOSITION OF THE TWO WORLDS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
The Kantian conception of the history of philosophy that we set out at the beginning of this paper can now help us to scrutinize how the Platonic influences, or supposedly such, From the perspective sketched out in the Dissertation, the problem of the adequacy of representations is reflected in the need to find a composition between the two worlds, a composition which, without generating confusion between them, can guarantee the legitimacy by which it can be defended that the "faculty of the understanding" [Verstandesvermögen] conforms to those, which in the letter to Herz are still defined as "Dinge selbst" (Br, AA 10: 131, tr. 134). Yet this composition can only be reached by overcoming the clear dichotomy that still separates the two types of knowledge of each world in the Dissertation: intuitive knowledge for the mundus sensibilis and symbolic knowledge for the mundus intelligibilis. 23 Here we cannot reconstruct all the passages of the path that leads Kant to identify the discursive character of conceptual knowledge and, consequently, to oppose symbolic knowledge no more to intuitive knowledge, but to discursive knowledge itself. It suffices to recall that this path certainly begins in the 1770s, at the time of the anthropology-and metaphysics-lectures carried out by Kant on the basis of Baumgarten's Metaphysica. 24 On the one hand, Kant follows Baumgarten in considering intuitive knowledge and symbolic knowledge as two different levels of adherence of the sign to the signatum, and on the other, he emphasizes the special character of discursive knowledge. Indeed, against the practice, diffused in the Leibniz-Wolffian school, of defining as "symbolic" the knowledge employing signs, which relies on words 25 , Kant claims that "Intuition is not opposed to the symbolic, but to the cognition through concepts. The symbolic representation rather serves to intuition.
[…] Words are not symbola, for they do not provide any image". 26 As is well known, this is a decisive position for the critical turn, i.e., for the determination of the nature of the categories conceived of as discursive Verstandesbegriffe -a position which will have significant echoes also in the Third Critique 27 and which, still in polemics with the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition, will be strongly recalled in the writing against Eberhard. 28 However, in order to assess Kant's relationship with Plato, we need to orient our attention elsewhere. Indeed, once established the legitimacy by which discursive knowledge can, or better yet, cannot but transcendentally refer to sensibility, without being determined by it, Kant can recover the positive value of the Platonic perspective not only at the practical but also at the theoretical level. The ambiguous nature of the 1770 intellectualia is certainly resolved in the sense of the conceptuality of categories, but the requirement of an unconditioned dimension, totally detached from the sensible level, survives in the form of ideas as Kant describes them at the beginning of the Transcendental Dialectic, in the paragraph devoted to the Ideas in General: Plato made use of the expression idea in such a way that we can readily see that he understood by it something that not only could never be borrowed from the senses, but that even goes far beyond the concepts of the understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), since nothing encountered in experience could ever be congruent to it. Ideas for him are archetypes [Urbilder] of things themselves, and not, like the categories, merely the key to possible experiences (KrV, A 313/B 370, tr. 395).
These archetypes express the need for a higher-level unity, targeted to determine "the use of the understanding according to principles in the whole of an entire experience" (KrV, A 321/B 378, tr. 399), as Kant will argue later in the paragraph on Transcendental Ideas, thereby introducing the distinction between concepts of understanding -categories -and concepts of reason [Vernunftbegriffe], the latter corresponding precisely to the transcendental ideas. In contrast to the letter to Herz, in which the Vernunftbegriffe also had a general meaning, this expression now assumes a specifically technical meaning thanks to the internal articulation of the Transcendental Logic into Analytics and Dialectics.
An effective element of comparison in this sense is represented by the Metaphysik Dohna (a metaphysics lecture-course from the early 1790s), where we can appreciate the distinction between pure intellectual concepts [reine Verstandesbegriffe], to which an object of experience can correspond, and the Ideen "for which no object of experience can be adequate". 29 The pure concepts of understanding and the ideas are associated, respectively, to an immanent use of understanding and to a transcendent use of reason 30 . However, in spite of this distinction, both pure concepts of understanding and ideas fall under the Notionen 31 , as Kant calls them in this course by borrowing the Latin word notio, a technical term used by the Schulmetaphysik in order to designate the "concept". The Notionen that express Ideas are nothing more than those particular concepts of reason that in the above-mentioned section entitled On Ideas in general Kant designated through the only two occurrences of the German term Notion in the entire Critique of Pure Reason. 32 Thus, looking back to the problematic framework of the Dissertation, we can claim that with the critical turn Kant established a new systematic articulation between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis, and that this articulation is represented by discursive conceptuality. This conceptuality cooperates with the sensible dimension to determine possible experience and is delimited in its application by transcendental ideas. However, in this modified framework, the "top-down" delimitation is not simply negative. Indeed, alongside the resumption of the polemic against "moral empiricism", which was already well defined in the Dissertation, Kant strongly claims the non-chimeric but positive nature of the idea conceived of in Plato's fashion: Plato noted very well that our power of cognition feels a far higher need than that of merely spelling out appearances according to a synthetic unity in order to be able to read them as experience, and that our reason naturally exalts itself to cognitions that go much too far for any object that experience can give ever to be congruent, but that nonetheless have their reality and are by no means merely figments of the brain (KrV, A 314/B 370-371, tr. 396).
In this sense, Kant goes even further, by claiming that "But Plato was right to see clear Estudos Kantianos, Marília, v. 8, n. 2, p. 107-126, Jul./Dez., 2020 proofs of an origin in ideas not only where human reason shows true causality, and where ideas become efficient causes (of actions and their objects), namely in morality, but also in regard to nature itself" (KrV, A 317/B 374, tr. 397). Hence some considerations stem, which closely allude to the criticism of teleological judgment as set out in the third Critique: "A plant, an animal, the regular arrangement of the world's structure […] these show clearly that they are possible only according to ideas" (KrV, A 317-318/B 374, tr. 397). And, even if no individual creature is suitable for this idea, in the highest understanding each idea is unique, immutable, completely determined and holds as the original cause of things, so that: "only the whole of their combination in the totality of a world is fully adequate to that idea" (KrV, A 317-318/B 374-375, tr. 398 slightly modified).
Kant further explains that the Platonic idea, in his interpretation, could concretely and positively serve as a principle for the knowledge of nature, even if it fulfils an essentially regulatory task. To this end, Kant refers to another concept already mentioned in the Dissertation, namely that of the ideal, which is taken up here in terms close to but more precise than those of 1770: What I call the ideal, by which I understand the idea not merely in concreto but in individuo, i.e., as an individual thing which is determinable, or even determined, by the thing alone (KrV, A 568/B 596, tr. 551).
With respect to the Dissertation, we no longer have a substitution of the Platonic idea with the ideal, but rather Kant elaborates a distinction between these two concepts. In the words of Alberto Siani: "The idea […] constitutes the foundation for the determination of the ideal, which in turn represents the complete and perfect model -precisely because it is an 'individualized' entity -for the determination of what is possible or can be evaluated on the basis of it" (Siani 2007: 83). In this regard, Kant points out that: What is an ideal to us, was to Plato an idea in the divine understanding, an individual object in that understanding's pure intuition, the most perfect thing of each species of possible beings and the original ground of all copies in appearance.
[…] Thus just as the idea gives the rule, so the ideal in such a case serves as the original image [Urbilde] for the thoroughgoing determination of the copy (KrV,. It is hard not to recognize in this characterization of the ideal the measuring function that in 1770 Kant had already ascribed to it in relation to moral action. rather as an explorer who has taken certain paths, along which Kant watches at every occasion whether the footsteps are heading in the right direction. In this sense, Jean Ferrari's words seem once again enlightening, and the best way to conclude: "Kant has a real interest in Plato only insofar either as he believes to discover in the latter's philosophy the premises of his own doctrine, or because Plato, even by his very errors, is part of a history of reason which shows 'the critical step' as the accomplishment of philosophy" (Ferrari 1989: 74).
In support of this, one can mention a remark, made almost en passant, but which renders very effectively Kant