Harold F. Cherniss
Harold Fredrik Cherniss was an American classicist and historian of ancient philosophy. While at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he was said to be "the country's foremost expert on Plato and Aristotle."
According to Leonardo Tarán, Cherniss's "greatest contribution to scholarship is doubtless his two books on Aristotle, supplemented by The Riddle of the Early Academy... his published works on Plato, Aristotle, and the Academy are among the very few publications that revolutionized the field... His significance was recognized all over the world not only by classicists and philosophers but by the learned societies of which he was a member and the various universities that awarded him honorary degrees."
Cherniss's scholarship continues to shape the study of ancient Greek philosophy in several significant ways :
- Cherniss is remembered as a champion of Platonic unitarianism, the contention that Plato's dialogues present a single, consistent and unchanging philosophical system.
- Cherniss "revolutionized the study of Presocratic philosophy" and stimulated revisionist histories of the earliest beginnings of European thought by showing that Aristotle's extensive reports were often unreliable and distorted by his own polemical aims.
- Cherniss attacked Aristotle's claims that Plato had esoteric "unwritten doctrines" and developed a mathematical ontology based on two opposing principles. This esoteric interpretation of Plato was later resurrected by the so-called Tübingen School, which was denounced in an influential review by Gregory Vlastos that repeatedly cited Cherniss. The skepticism of Cherniss and Vlastos towards the esoteric Plato remains dominant among English-speaking scholars, and contributed to the continuing split with much European Plato scholarship.
- Cherniss mocked other scholars' fanciful and aggrandizing reconstructions of the supposed lectures and the curriculum within Plato's Academy, and created an enduring restraint in scholarly images of the early Academy.
Life
Missouri to Berkeley
Harold Cherniss's great-grandfather was Julius Cherniss, who came to Omaha, Nebraska, in 1882 with 160 Jewish immigrants from Vinnytsia in Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian empire. The first pogrom in Russia had occurred in Ukraine the preceding year, at the end of April 1881, and spread through the provinces of Ukraine. The Russian government then adopted a systematic policy of excluding Jews from their economic and public roles, and this provoked a mass emigration of Jewish refugees from Russia to the United States and other countries. There came to be a large, Jewish community in Omaha. Harold Cherniss's father was born in Vinnytsia on May 19, 1872, and ended up a hundred miles down the Missouri River from Omaha in St. Joseph Missouri.Later, during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine in the early 1940s more than a million Ukrainian Jews perished in the Holocaust, including tens of thousands in Vinnytsia.
Harold Cherniss was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, to David B. and Theresa C. Cherniss, and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an A.B. in 1925. In the summer of 1926, he studied with Paul Shorey, a prominent Plato scholar, at the University of Chicago.
A crucial year in Germany
From 1927 to 1928, Cherniss studied with some of the leading classicists in Germany: in Göttingen with Hermann Fränkel and in Berlin with Werner Jaeger and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Cherniss thus arrived in the middle of a period known in Germany as the Golden Era of the left-leaning Weimar Republic during which the economy was growing and there was a consequent decrease in civil unrest. These were relatively uneventful years between the hyperinflation of 1921-24 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The 1920s saw a remarkable cultural renaissance in Germany. Influenced by the brief cultural explosion in the Soviet Union, German literature, cinema, theater, jazz, art, and architecture were in the midst of a phase of great creativity. This was also a revolutionary time in classical studies and philosophy. Jaeger had published his famous work Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development in 1923. Martin Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927.While Cherniss was studying in Germany, a crucial election campaign splintered the moderate and centrist forces. In 1927, the governing coalition that included both the left-wing and the anti-semitic German National People's Party, a precursor to Hitler's National Socialist Party, broke apart and precipitated a new election that the right-wing, democratic parties appeared to win. Although the implications were not all apparent during Cherniss's time in Germany, the election he witnessed proved to be a key turning point that fatally weakened the moderate and democratic forces in Germany and paved the way for the rise of Nazism a few years later.
A visitor to Princeton met with Cherniss many years later and reported that:
… we somehow got around to taking about Wilamowitz … said that Wilamowitz would pepper his lectures with remarks about the political situation in Germany and that his students would applaud by loudly stamping their feet on the floor. The remarks were of such a nature that they caused Cherniss to develop an intense dislike for the man. I don't recall how he characterized the remarks, but Solmsen's description of the antidemocratic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Prussian lens through which Wilamowitz viewed Weimar Germany would explain Cherniss's antipathy.
Pre-War teaching and Arthur O. Lovejoy
Cherniss received his doctorate from Berkeley in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit in 1930. He then taught Greek at Cornell University from 1930 to 1933, followed by ten years teaching at Johns Hopkins University and a return to the University of California before the war. A colleague at Berkeley remarked "He is a Platonist both as scholar and as thinker..." He married Ruth Meyer, who had been a fellow student at Berkeley. Cherniss was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1941–1942.While Cherniss was writing his three monographs at Johns Hopkins, the prominent philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy was promoting an influential "history of ideas" approach to studying philosophical ideas that emphasized tracing their descent through successive historical periods. Lovejoy founded a "History of Ideas Club" at Johns Hopkins that included Cherniss, his friends Ludwig Edelstein and George Boas, and others:
Like the Cambridge Apostles and the Metaphysical Society of the last century, the History of Ideas Club has set itself the threefold aim of intellectual stock-taking, the pursuit of new truth, and the "cross-fertilization" of the various academic departments and disciplines. Specifically, it originated in the need of American thinkers after the First World War to become more conscious of the cultural heritage of which they then began to feel themselves the custodians.
Cherniss delivered papers at its meetings and the preface of Lovejoy's most well-known work, The Great Chain of Being, thanks Cherniss for his contributions.
Service with British military intelligence in Europe
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. In September 1941, groups of Nazi commandos tasked with eliminating the Jewish population of Ukraine massacred some 50,000 people in Vinnytsia, where Cherniss's father was born. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.In April 1942, Cherniss gave the Sather Lectures at Berkeley and soon afterwards volunteered for military service. He entered the United States Army as a private and was abroad by November 1942, where he worked in military intelligence. He was assigned to a British intelligence unit in England, France and Belgium, and rose to the rank of captain in three years. According to George Watt, Cherniss was working in Belgium immediately after the war and sought information from Aline Dumon, who won medals for her clandestine work in the so-called Comet Line resistance network. Cherniss was seeking a young man who had betrayed scores in the Belgian and French undergrounds to the German occupation. In a 1985 interview, she remembered:
After the war, … Lt. Harold Cherniss, the American intelligence officer, telephoned me and said "Michou, you must come quickly." I went to Harold's office and he showed me twelve little pictures of identity cards and asked "Do you know that boy?" I said "Yes, …" He said, "Michou, this is very important. Please look carefully." I said "No problem… the same boy." He laughed. I said "What happened, Harold?" "That boy is working for the Americans in Nuremberg." But not for long… was tried and executed at Lille in 1945.
Cold War anxiety at Berkeley
In 1946, while still in Europe, Cherniss accepted an offer to return to Berkeley as a Professor of Greek. With the Berlin blockade of 1948–1949 and the Communist victory in China and first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, America and Berkeley were soon caught up in Cold War tensions. In the rising anxiety stoked by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, fears grew that communists were infiltrating American universities. These were acute at Berkeley where the Radiation Laboratory situated in the hills above campus had been heavily involved in developing the atomic bomb. In September 1949, McCarthy's committee commenced a hearing on alleged communist infiltration of the "Rad Lab." The University of California soon began requiring its faculty to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath. As these tensions mounted, Cherniss accepted an offer from the Institute of Advanced Study and resigned from his post at Berkeley: "his tenure there was cut short by the controversy which arose from the California Legislature's demand that state employees swear loyalty oaths."Back on the East Coast, Cherniss remained involved in what quickly became a national debate over Berkeley's loyalty oaths and academic Freedom. By 1950, faculty resistance at Berkeley hardened and ultimately some 31 faculty members were fired. Recent immigrants among the faculty were particularly opposed: "persecuted by the Nazis and forced to leave Germany, they were rightly suspicious of the loyalty oath as a cold war demand for conformity or worse, inimical to the freedoms necessary at any institution of higher learning." Cherniss organized a public letter from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in support of academic freedom that was distributed to the faculty at Berkeley and published:
Being aware that the regents have dismissed members of your faculty contrary to the recommendation of your committee on privilege and tenure, and that this action violates the policy of tenure and the principle of the faculty's self-determination and responsibility hitherto recognized by the University of California, we unanimously write to encourage you to unite in defense of your traditional policies and principles against encroachment.
The letter was signed by Oppenheimer, Cherniss, Einstein, Panofsky, and others. Similar letters were sent by the faculty of Princeton University and other universities.
The well-known German-Jewish medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz left Germany in 1939 after the Nazi government required civil servants to swear a loyalty oath to Hitler and became a professor at Berkeley. "With Germany's experience before his eyes," he refused to sign Berkeley's loyalty oath and was among those dismissed. Later, in 1951, Cherniss suggested he apply to the Institute for Advanced Study and he secured a permanent position there. Cherniss's old colleague at Johns Hopkins, the classicist Ludwig Edelstein, had also moved to Berkeley after the war but refused to sign the loyalty oath and lost his job. He later returned to a position at Johns Hopkins. In October 1952 Berkeley's loyalty oath was ruled unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court. The university was ordered to reinstate all dismissed faculty.