in Christian teaching until the seventeenth century (1974: 29–30); some evidence for a different interpretation will be advanced in the section on biblical and Christian attitudes.
But the Platonic dialogue that has proved most influential has been Timaeus, with its claim that the world is a living creature (Timaeus, 30c), and with Plato’s account of its ordering by the Demiurge, or cosmic architect (Timaeus, 29a). These themes were later taken up by Renaissance Platonists such as Paracelsus (1493/4–1541) and others, who maintained that the universe was to be viewed ‘as a vast organism, everywhere quick and vital, its body, soul and spirit … held tightly together’ (Merchant 1990 [1980]: 104; Whitney 2006: 40). They also contributed to the later (widely influential) belief in the balance of nature (Egerton 2012: 3).
These perspectives can also be understood as contributory factors in the eventual development during the twentieth century of holistic environmental theories of the Earth (see Chapter 8), such as the Gaia theory of James Lovelock (1979), the holistic ethic of Aldo Leopold (1966 [1949]), the holistic views of Deep Ecologists (Naess 1973) and those of eco-holists such as J. Baird Callicott. Callicott also sought at one stage to appeal to and reinterpret Plato’s ethical holism, in which the good of the whole is what matters, rather than the good or the suffering of the individual, in support of Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ (Republic, 462a–d; Callicott 1980), but he later retracted these claims. The goddess Gaia is actually mentioned passingly in Plato’s Timaeus (Goldin 1997: 198); maybe this was known to the novelist William Golding, who suggested this name to Lovelock to epitomize his theory of the Earth as a self-regulating superorganism.
According to Alfred North Whitehead, ‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’ (1979 [1929]: 39). This claim has proved more than controversial, even construed strictly about European philosophy. Yet if someone were to apply it to environmental thought, while their claim could be seen as even more controversial, it would not be obvious that they would be wrong. However, another view is possible: the critical insights and the curiosity of the early Greek philosophers (including Empedocles), of historians such as Herodotus (who discusses the distinctive reproductive capacities of hares), of Hippocrates and of Plato himself, derive much of their importance from their supplying the foundations for the original studies of Aristotle and Theophrastus, the founders of several disciplines including biology (Egerton 2012: 4).
Aristotle and Theophrastus
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) studied at Athens in Plato’s Academy, but set off in new directions, founding biology and spending long periods studying, together with his follower Theophrastus, the creatures of a lagoon on the island of Lesbos. He also founded the study of logic. Eventually he founded his own school, the Lyceum. In place of Plato’s theory of forms, for which the highest reality consisted in goodness itself and other such abstractions, Aristotle located reality in observable particulars (an approach much more congenial to most modern environmentalists).
For Aristotle, it is not only human beings who have souls, but other creatures as well; their ‘psyche’ is what makes them the living creatures that they are. One problem passage (in the Politics) claims that all other living creatures exist for the sake of humanity; but Aristotle’s usual view is that all living creatures have a good of their own, which should be respected where possible. Aristotle paid detailed attention to the study of animals in his books Generation of Animals, History of Animals and Parts of Animals, and found some animals to display virtues such as wisdom. (Some of his biological works were translated and studied by medieval Arabic scholars: see Egerton 2012: 20–1.) As he says in Parts of Animals in response to students reluctant to participate in such study, ‘[i]f there is anyone who thinks it is base to study animals, he should have the same thought about himself’ (Nussbaum 2006: 348).
Aristotle’s tenets that all kinds of living creatures shade into one another, and that all creatures can be ordered in a scale of comparative greatness, have been regarded by Arthur O. Lovejoy as contributions (in conjunction with others from Plato) to belief in ‘the great chain of being’, adhered to subsequently by the Neoplatonists and widely held across Europe until its rejection by the German Romantic writer von Schelling (Lovejoy 1936). But Aristotle actually rejected key components of this (later prevalent) ‘chain’, such as the principle that all possibilities are fulfilled. Nor probably did he adhere to the view that the implicit goal of everything is human benefit; animals aside, it is implausible that the sun and the stars have such a goal. Some of the Stoics may later have adhered to such an anthropocentric view; but their ideas should not be read back into Aristotle. Aristotle’s own views enjoyed a revival in Europe in the late Middle Ages, having earlier been cherished in such Islamic centres as
Baghdad and Córdoba. But by that time, being an Aristotelian usually meant deferring to his authority, and not, as in his own day, basing theories on empirical fieldwork. (For a more detailed account of Aristotle’s zoology, see Egerton 2012: 4–7.)
As for Theophrastus, who took over the leadership of the Lyceum after Aristotle’s death, he recognized that humanmade change (such as deforestation) can have impacts on the local climate. Theophrastus here departs from Aristotle’s view (expressed in the Meteorologica) that the world is permanent and ultimately unchanging. We find here the first glimmering of awareness of the systemic vulnerability of the natural world to human influence. But Theophrastus (despite his impact on Pliny the Elder) did not exercise sufficient influence for such awareness to prevail for over two thousand years; after the first century CE, his ideas seem to have been largely forgotten, despite translations during the sixteenth century (Egerton 2012: 33), at least until the time of von Humboldt (eighteenth century: see the above section on Hippocrates, and also Chapter 2).
Lucretius
One other Roman poet is too important to omit. Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 BCE) was the first Roman poet to write philosophy in Latin, and was thus a predecessor of Virgil in composing didactic Latin verse. He was an adherent of Epicureanism, a philosophical stance which adopted (and adapted) the atomism of Democritus, and which advocated the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Besides writing on physics, Lucretius also wrote on the development of life on Earth as well as on the rise of human culture. His account of the development of living creatures embodied an adjusted version of the relatively crude account of natural selection pioneered by Empedocles, a poet on whom he also modelled his verse.
Lucretius includes a passage (towards the end of his De Rerum Natura, Book II) about the Earth being past its prime and in a state of decline (rather as had Hesiod). But he also extols, in Book V, the development of human culture (agriculture and navigation included), and supplies one of few ancient examples of belief in progress. Coates (1998: 27) aligns this passage with the widespread ancient belief in a cosmic purpose to be found in all creatures, and even with belief in a purposive great chain of being, with each creature serving a higher stage in the chain, and with humanity as its apex. However, these were not remotely the views of the Epicureans, but rather those of their rival philosophical school, the Stoics. Lucretius, by contrast, rejected belief in cosmic purpose, holding that the gods were exemplars of tranquil indifference, which human beings should imitate. It is important to avoid stereotyping ancient attitudes, which were as varied as those of the modern world.
Yet Lucretius also had an eye for natural beauty, whether in landscape, streams or clouds, and presents many similes drawn from nature to illustrate his message about atoms and molecules. This part of his message (his atomism, that is) remained influential when, after his works were rediscovered during the Renaissance, many seventeenth-century scientists adopted his atomism, albeit adjusted to fit their belief in divine creation. Later still, the poet Thomas Gray (1716–71)
