Harold F. Cherniss

In a 2014 article entitled "Harold Cherniss and the Study of Plato Today," the leading Plato scholar Lloyd Gerson argued that the approaches to Plato shaped by the work of Cherniss and Vlastos have come to dominate contemporary Plato scholarship in the English-speaking world and (wrongly, he argues) led to the dismissal of the Tübingen approach that dominates in continental Europe:

In 2012, Ausland said that Owen's thesis had not won the support of the majority of scholars.

Cherniss's landmark monograph transformed studies of Pre-Socratic philosophy by forcing scholars to re-evaluate their sources and raise the rigor of their arguments. This contributed to a wave of creative revisionism about the origins of European thought. Aristotle's treatises contain more quotations from and reports about Pre-Socratic philosophy than any other early source. After these, historians must rely on commentators and Neo-Platonists who often come half a millennium later. Until Cherniss, therefore, Aristotle was thought our best and most reliable guide to Pre-Socratic philosophy because he was so early. Cherniss demonstrated "in detail how much of the conceptual apparatus often attributed to Presocratic thinkers in fact represents Aristotle's own reformulation of their theories in terms of his own philosophy." This created skepticism about Aristotle's reports and forced later historians to be more selective and to justify their use of them deliberately and rigorously. Writing in the 2008 Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Patricia Curd and Daniel W. Graham said that Cherniss

Ruth Cherniss had been a childhood friend and schoolmate of Robert Oppenheimer at the Ethical Cultural School in New York City. She was a student at Berkeley with Cherniss and received her A.B. in 1926. Cornell University awarded her a doctorate in 1933–4. Thus she was finishing her doctorate while Harold Cherniss was an instructor at Cornell. In 1939, Ruth Cherniss published an article entitled "The Ancients as Authority in Seventeenth-Century France," in The Greek Tradition, edited by G. Boas. In 1980, she wrote a book about her father, Max Meyer. Ruth Cherniss was a friend of Oppenheimer's wife Kitty. In 1956, Ruth Cherniss was president of the Princeton chapter of the League of Women Voters. Harold and Ruth Cherniss resided at 98 Battle Road near the Institute for Advanced Study. Ruth Cherniss died on April 11, 2000.

Cherniss served at the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1987. According to a notice in the local paper, he died "after a long illness" in the Princeton Medical Center and "... was preparing the second volume [of Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy] when illness overtook him." In a memoir, Tarán said "this country has lost one of its greatest Hellenists and the history of ancient Greek philosophy one of its foremost scholars in the last two centuries."

David Keyt spent a year at the Institute in 1983–4, when Cherniss was nearly eighty years old, and recalled that:

He has an honorary degree from Brown University (L.H.D.) in 1976.

This well-known article was first published in The American Journal of Philology and gives a positive overview of Plato's system. It was reprinted in Vlastos' 1971 anthology Plato I: Metaphysics and Epistemology and Allen's 1965 anthology Studies in Plato's Metaphysics. Here Cherniss argues that Plato's Theory of Forms at once served as the foundation of Plato's ethics, epistemology, and ontology, and resolved skeptical problems in all three areas:

Cherniss's edition of some of Plutarch's works, Stoic and Platonic Works (1967), won the Charles J. Goodwin award from the American Philological Society.

After von Neumann's death in 1957, the faculty organized a committee to terminate the project. All the permanent faculty met in Oppenheimer's living room. As Cherniss explained, "This was back when we used to do things right. Everything was informal." After the final decision was made, Cherniss elaborated "But we passed a more general motion. It was a declaration to have no experimental science, no laboratories of any kind at the Institute." In his history, Regis remarked "And so it has been ever since. The Platonic-heavenly fathers [i.e., advocates of the Institute's abstract and theoretical approach] had triumphed." Another faculty member, the physicist Freeman Dyson, said simply "The snobs took revenge."

Cherniss and other faculty members of the Institute for Advanced Study published an open letter affirming his loyalty on Thursday July 1, 1954 in both The New York Times and The Herald Tribune and in the September Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The most well-known of Cherniss's post-war publications was his rebuttal of a new attack on Platonic unitarianism that arose in 1953. In a famous paper that explicitly criticized Cherniss, the Oxford philosopher G. E. L. Owen argued that Plato's Parmenides marked a radical change in the Theory of Forms. He claimed that Plato did not entirely reject his own theory but instead rejected a symmetrical resemblance relation between particulars and Forms (paradeigmata) as well as the sharp dichotomy between being and becoming. These two doctrines are propounded in the Timaeus, which was then widely considered one of Plato's latest dialogues. Owen, therefore, "sought to make his view plausible by proposing to remove the Timaeus from the late group and place it among the middle dialogues, after the Republic but before the Parmenides. Owen launched a many-pronged attack on the traditional late dating of the Timaeus… [and] attempted to undermine the credibility of the stylometric evidence for the late date of the Timaeus …" Cherniss's magisterial reply appeared in 1957 and provoked a large and controversial literature on the question. According to William J. Prior in 1985,

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:

Despite his fame, Oppenheimer had made many enemies who suspected he was a communist sympathizer or even a spy. These included Lewis Strauss who was both a commissioner on the new Atomic Energy Commission, which had control of the plants and personnel assembled during the war to produce the atomic bomb, and chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of Advanced Study. Oppenheimer was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. Strauss and others pushed President Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. A hearing followed in April–May 1954 and Oppenheimer lost his security clearance. This national scandal produced a lasting rift between American scientists and the military. Historians with access to the American and Russian evidence have since concluded Oppenheimer was never involved in espionage for the Soviet Union and did not betray the United States, though in the late 1930s he had been a supporter of the Communist Party.

In 1948 Cherniss resigned from Berkeley and was appointed as a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Anti-semitism was still widespread at this time in America even at universities like Princeton, but the Institute "employed scholars with absolutely no regard to religious persuasion or ethnicity." Cherniss was appointed by his old friend Robert Oppenheimer who is sometimes known as the "father of the atomic bomb."

In 1947, Oppenheimer accepted an offer to take up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study. Cherniss was the first member of faculty Oppenheimer appointed to the institute.

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."

In July, 1945, when the world's first atomic bomb was exploded in the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer was famously supposed to have quoted a saying from the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Oppenheimer had studied Sanskrit at Berkeley and it was Cherniss who introduced Oppenheimer to his Sanskrit teacher, Arthur W. Ryder. Oppenheimer later claimed to have said those words but there is no contemporary evidence. In 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Oppenheimer had become one of the world's most famous scientists, Cherniss saw him at Berkeley.

One of Cherniss's most lasting influences has been in the debates over the evidence in Aristotle for esoteric interpretations of Plato. Cherniss attacked this evidence directly in his Riddle and broadly aimed to discredit Aristotle's interpretations of Plato in his 1945 book. In the Fifties, however, the so-called Tübingen School, initiated by the German scholars Hans Krämer and Konrad Gaiser, resurrected esoteric interpretations of Plato. The Tübingen School was famously denounced by Gregory Vlastos in a 1963 review that repeatedly cited Cherniss's earlier work. English-speaking scholars thereafter tended to be skeptical about esoteric interpretations of Plato. Adherents of the Tübingen School are common in Germany and Italy but in 2012 Nikulin remarked "... the majority of the scholars in the Anglo-American world remain unconvinced that the Tübingen interpretation offered a glimpse into the historical Plato."

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 (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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cherniss first met Oppenheimer at Berkeley in 1929. Cherniss had just married Ruth Meyer who had been in high school with Oppenheimer at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. (Oppenheimer studied in Göttingen until July 1927 and Cherniss studied there in 1927–28.) After the war, there was a national scandal over suspicions that Oppenheimer was secretly a communist sympathizer. Cherniss recalled in a later interview there was some pre-war evidence of Oppenheimer's interest in Marxism but made light of it:

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 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. 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 the left-wing and 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.

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.

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."

Harold Cherniss married Ruth Meyer Cherniss in 1929. Her father was Max Meyer (March 29, 1876 – January 31, 1953). In 1944, together with M. C. Ritter, he founded the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. He was born in Wissembourg, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France and became a prominent lawyer, clothing manufacturer, and labor leader in New York City. In 1931, he was named by the then Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to a commission to study workers' compensation. In 1937, he became Chairman of the Millinery Stabilization Commission. In 1951, he became Chairman of the Board of Trustees and in 1952 President of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Ruth Cherniss's mother was Eugenia Grace Meyer (Goodkuid), who was born in New York on June 1, 1878.

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's father, David Benjamin Cherniss was born on May 19, 1872 in Vinnytsia, and died on December 19, 1936 in Los Angeles. His second wife was Millie B. Cherniss. Harold Cherniss's mother Theresa Cherniss (née Hart) was born on August 19, 1878, in Iowa. Harold Cherniss's grandfather Benjamin Cherniss and grandmother Bosheva Cherniss were born in Vinnytsia circa 1845. Harold Cherniss had a brother named Edward Hart Cherniss (1909–1993) and a sister named Lillian Blanche Cherniss.