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Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics, by Robert Adams, Oxford University Press, 1999, 424 pp.; $45
Alfred North Whitehead memorably described the history of Western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." Perhaps this is even more apt as a description of the history of Christian philosophy. Christian Platonism is a venerable tradition indeed, with St. Augustine himself as its most distinguished exemplar. In the seventeenth century, the Cambridge Platonists, including such stalwarts as Benjamin Whitecote and Ralph Cudworth, used Platonism to defend Christianity against the emerging mechanistic atheism linked to the scientific revolution. "Plato was right all along," exclaims the old professor in C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, when the true Narnia has been discovered and it has been realized that all that was good in the old Narnia was merely a copy of the real thing.
Despite this distinguished heritage, Platonism has not been popular for the last century, since the demise of Absolute Idealism (F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet) at the hands of the "new realists" (Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, though, oddly enough, Moore's own theory of "good" as a "non-natural property" certainly looks like Platonism). I still remember very well one of my graduate seminars at Yale, in which my professor (Casimir Lewy, a Polish logician who had been a student of Moore's) defended the claim that propositions exist as ideal objects, independent of their expression in human languages. (The argument in favor of this of course rests on the fact that it seems we can express the same proposition in different languages.) Another professor of mine who was auditing the class protested incredulously that this position "amounted to Platonism." A more damning indictment could hardly have been made. Lewy's response was equally revealing: "My dear sir, of course no one wants to be a Platonist. It's like believing in God—a great intellectual sin in the eyes of the academic world. But alas, what is one to do when the logical facts drive you to Platonism?"
It is therefore a matter of some note and also a cause for celebration that Robert Adams, one of the most distinguished contemporary Christian philosophers, has offered us a magisterial ethical theory that clearly takes up the mantle of Christian Platonism. In Finite and Infinite Goods, Adams, formerly at UCLA and now chair of the philosophy department at Yale, develops a comprehensive account of ethics that is both deeply Christian and clearly shaped by Platonic inspiration. (In saying the former I mean that the book is Christian in inspiration and consistent with Christianity in its conclusions; Adams nowhere presupposes any Christian doctrines or even argues for any specifically Christian claims.) It is a book that is both deeply original and in critical dialogue with rival contemporary ethical theory.
Adams begins, after a brief introduction, with a quote from Plato's Symposium:
For whoever has been educated to this point in the things of love, beholding the beautiful things in order and rightly, coming now to the completion of the things of love, will suddenly perceive something astonishingly beautiful in its nature. All his previous labors, Socrates, were for the sake of this.
In this passage, Plato has Diotima explain to Socrates that the beautiful things we see in nature and the arts "participate in" or copy a transcendent Beauty: the Beautiful itself. The Beautiful is closely linked to another Platonic ideal: the Good. The Beautiful is in fact simply one aspect of the Good. All that has worth and value does so for Plato because of its link to the Good.
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