Harold Fredrik Cherniss (11 March 1904 – 18 June 1987) 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."Quoting from IAS histories: Linda G. Arntzenius, 'Institute for Advanced Study' (Images of America Series) (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2011), p. 81.
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 (see Work below):
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"Paul A. Vander Waerdt in Ward W. Briggs, ed., Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (American Philological Association), p. 94. 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.
Before and after World War II, various circumstances intertwined the careers of Cherniss and his friend Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was later suspected of being a Soviet spy and lost his security clearance in the ensuing national scandal. Cherniss played a key role in helping Oppenheimer keep his job as director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
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.Jewish Virtual Library, online, accessed on January 6, 2016, at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/pogroms.html. 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.See, for an example of an eyewitness account, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/bingel.html. Accessed January 6, 2016. 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.Fontenrose, Joseph E, 'Classics at Berkeley: The First Century 1869-1970,' 1982, pp. 29 and 37, online, accessed January 10, 2016, at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5066c75h. In the summer of 1926, he studied with Paul Shorey, a prominent Plato scholar, at the University of Chicago.Tarán (2001), p. 667
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 (1924–1929) known in Germany as the Golden Era (German: Goldene Zwanziger) of the left-leaning Weimar Republic during which the economy was growing and there was a consequent decrease in civil unrest.See Weimar Republic. 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.This paragraph is borrowed from Weimar Republic. 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.Aristoteles: Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung 1923; English trans. by Richard Robinson in 1934. 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.According to Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 76-77: '… towards the end of 1927 the will and the ability to reconcile divergent interests became increasingly weaker in all the parties concerned. This was the basic reason for the break-up of the coalition … the election of 20 May 1928 was a clear success for the left-wing … [the DNVP's] strength in the Reichstag fell from 103 to 73.' 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.According to Eberhard Kolb,The Weimar Republic (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 77: 'Despite the defeat of the right wing, however, it would be very superficial to interpret the election of May 1928 as a victory for democratic and republican forces. In the first place, the drift away from middle-ground parties to splinter groups with narrow interests showed to what an extent the former's integrative power had diminished … many voters who moved away from the middle ground in 1928 … were to vote for the Nazis at the next Reichstag election in 1930, and a great many more in 1932… The right-wing of the DNVP … now went over to the offensive and gained the upper-hand within the party … and the party pursued a course of unremitting opposition and obstruction, its anti-democratic sentiments attaining a hitherto unknown pitch of ferocity.'
A visitor to Princeton met with Cherniss many years later and reported that:
… we somehow got around to taking about Wilamowitz … [Cherniss] 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.D. Keyt, 'My Life in the Academy,' in Georgios Anagnostopoulos, Fred D. Miller, eds., Reason and Analysis in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Essays in Honor of David Keyt (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2013), p. 27-8.
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 ..."Fontenrose, op. cit., p. 37. He married Ruth Meyer, who had been a fellow student at Berkeley.Tarán (2001), p. 669. Cherniss was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1941–1942.See, accessed January 9, 2016, http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/harold-f-cherniss/.
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.Review of English Studies, 1954, v. 20, pp. 432-434.
Cherniss delivered papers at its meetings and the preface of Lovejoy's most well-known work, The Great Chain of Being (1936), 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,Fontenrose, Joseph E, 'Classics at Berkeley: The First Century 1869-1970,' 1982, p. 37, online, accessed January 10, 2016, at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5066c75h. This is confirmed by the prefatory note to Cherniss, Riddle of the Early Academy(below). Cherniss put 'October 1942, Baltimore' at the end of the preface of his Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy(1944). 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.Fontenrose, p. 37, and Obituary, New York Times, July 12, 1987, online, accessed January 10, 2016, at https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/12/obituaries/harold-f-cherniss-an-expert-in-greek-philosophy-is-dead.html. According to George Watt, Cherniss was working in Belgium immediately after the war and sought information from Aline Dumon (nicknamed "Michou"), 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: