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27 The motive for addressing Plato’s work is not simply because of his subsequent philosophical and ideological influence. Even Western philosophy is far from being, as Whitehead (1978, 39) famously suggested, just “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Still less is it to paint him as ultimately responsible for our current ecological crisis. It is not even to argue that metaphysics and myth should (or could) be entirely abandoned because of the political dangers they pose in conjunction with sovereign power. Rather, tracing the ways in which ethics, politics, and ecology are transformed, defined, and made subservient to such an overarching (“totalizing,” and on some readings [e.g., Popper 1969] “totalitarian”) philosophical system can also reveal ways in which they remain and reemerge in its very midst as subversive possibilities. The vicissitudes of temporal existence, the unpredictability of politics , and the ambiguities of ethics lead Plato to formulate a heady mix of myth and metaphysics to justify the sovereign rule of those who, like him, have defined themselves (on the basis of their representing the timeless essence of philosophy and statesmanship) as properly human. Their sovereignty is exemplified in the (self-serving) decision to exclude those deemed improperly human from even practicing either philosophy or politics! This decision is also justified in terms of a biopolitical model of the pastorate—the stewardship and shepherding of state and people for their own protection and welfare. The real world is thereby, at least theoretically, made subservient to a metaphysical realm where everything is ordered according to rational (nonsensuous), overarching, timeless principles: life is reduced to something to be managed and preserved , politics to a matter of and for statesmanship, and perhaps most ironically, ethics is transformed from the irruption of worldly concerns 2 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOOD 28 the sovereignty of good for Others into an otherworldly sovereign principle. The stewardship ideal helps Plato retain an aura of ethical concern even as he seeks to install the Good as the original principle (archē) of political authority and as a sovereign limit on the exercise of politics. Of course, we have still to consider the ecological implications1 of the ways Plato’s subtle admixture of myths and taxonomic exercises connect nature to politics and ethics even as they instantiate an early iteration of the anthropological machine. Indeed, political and philosophical authority is deemed necessary partly to ameliorate the chaotic consequences of our imbricate setting within the flesh of the world, to impose order and regularity through the restricted economy of the dialectic. A rule-directed life, conducted within the bounds of a citystate is, Plato believes, preferable to an undistinguished and indolent life immersed in nature, however pleasurable it might be. Certainly he thinks the philosophically administered life in the polis preferable to the anarchy he associates with the “bodily element” (Plato 1963, 1038 [Statesman, 273b]), that materiality which has been part of the universe’s constitution from primeval times and which he blames for the world’s decay, its mortality, its susceptibility to time’s forward flow. Blaming the materiality of the world for its own demise seems somewhat ironic, ecologically speaking, especially given that, at least occasionally , Plato exhibits awareness of the potentially destructive impacts of certain human interventions in nature. For example, in the Critias, Plato offers what might be taken to be another account of the Golden Age, although one now presented as early history more than timeless myth. Once again the gods are described as shepherds tending their human flocks, using persuasion rather than force to guide them, “so steering the whole mortal fabric” (1215 [Critias, 109c]) in a way more suitable to human intelligence. These gods, we are told, “produced from the soil a race of good men and taught them the order of their polity” (1215 [109d]). But the successors of these ancestral Greeks bring upon themselves what has been regarded as one of the first descriptions of an ecological disaster (see, e.g., Glacken 1967, 121; Coates 1998, 28). At first the soil of Attica “far surpassed all others” (Plato 1963, 1216 [Critias 110d]), so much so that “the remainder now left of it is a match for any soil in the world” (1216 [110e]). But this soil washed away so that “what is left now is, so to say, the skeleton of a body wasted by disease; the rich, soft soil has been carried off and only the bare framework of the district left” (1216 [111b]). [3.129...

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