RIDDLE EARLY ACADEMY

by Harold F. Cherniss

Harold Fredrik Cherniss (1904–6/18/87), ancient Greek philosophy professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, wrote many books & articles in his field & was an editor & translator of Plutarch's Moralia for the Loeb Classical Library. His books included works on Aristotle's criticism of Plato & pre-Platonic philosophy.
He was born in St. Joseph, MO, & graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his doctorate in Greek, Latin & Sanskrit at Berkeley in 1930. That year, he became an instructor in Greek at Cornell University. He later moved to Johns Hopkins & held a professorship at the University of California before joining the Institute in Princeton in 1948.
Delivered 4/42 as lectures at Berkeley:
Contents:
Plato's lectures: a hypothesis for an enigma
Speusippus, Xenocrates & the polemical method of Aristotle
The Academy: orthodoxy, heresy or philosophical interpretation?

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction

121 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Harold Fredrik Cherniss (March 11, 1904 – June 18, 1987) was an American classical scholar. He was an expert on the philosophy of Ancient Greece. He wrote several books in the field, and edited and translated works by Plutarch.

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

ARISTOTLE’S PLATO

Cherniss’ book is a compilation of lectures focused on the conflict arising from the existence of a clear and fundamental discrepancy, between the theory of ideas as it appears in Plato's Dialogues and what Aristotle rep­resents as being Plato's theory of ideas. Cherniss uses his investigation into this discrepancy to shed new light on the nature and working of the early Academy.

He says that Aristotle’s representations, such as the identification of the ideas with ‘nonmathematical’ numbers, and the derivation of these idea-numbers from two ultimate principles, (the One and the dyad of the great and the small), which principles are at the same time the causes of good and of evil respectively — of all this there is not a word in the Platonic dialogues

Cherniss’ lectures are not merely attacks on Aristotle’s misrepresentation of Plato however. He also shows that much of the fault lies in modern commentators for one is likely to find it stated in modern treatises that Aristotle "constantly" attributes the doctrine of idea­ numbers to Plato and even that he knows of but one Platonic philosophy, that which identifies the ideas with numbers. This, he says, is clearly an exaggeration and is does no justice to the complexity of the Aristotelian evidence. But despite this concession, we have to accept that Aristotle does in fact ascribe to Plato the doctrine of idea-numbers.

This disconnect between Plato and Aristotle forces the scholars into uncomfortable arguments. Two options stand open to them:

1. They can allow the dialogues to stand as expressions of Plato's own thought and admit that the theory of ideas in the dialogues is Plato's own doctrine — thus reject Aristotle’s testimony on Plato.

This would imply that:

a. Aristotle either deliberately misrepresented Plato

or

b. Did not understand Plato

Clearly both of these were anathema to scholars for much of modern history.

Thus they chose the second argument.

2. Accepting Aristotle's testimony concerning the idea-numbers.

This would imply that:

a. They have to assert (and strive to prove) that the theory of ideas underwent at Plato's hands a radical alteration or a radical de­velopment

b. This new form of the Theory was never committed to writing by Plato and can be recovered only from the reports of Aristotle and the fragmentary references which seem to derive from the writings of Plato's students.

Cherniss claims that to preserve the integrity of Aristotle, these scholars have used fragmentary evidence of one lecture given by an elderly Plato to construct an elaborate story of how Plato used to give lectures on the more esoteric subjects that were never committed to writing and hence is not available to us. Contrary to popular understanding, Cherniss shows very clearly that only ONE lecture of Plato is ever alluded to and there is no reason to extend that evidence to attribute an entire teaching style and alien philosophy to Plato, especially when contemporary commentaries never attribute any extra philosophies, lectures or extant works to Plato. Nor is the required reconstruction supported even by the remaining accounts of Plato's one attested lecture, for what credible ancient testimony there is for that lecture on the Good indicates that in it there was no specific identification of ideas and numbers.

The hy­pothesis of an oral Platonic doctrine thus rests on very shaky ground.

Cherniss continues his investigation by examining Plato and Aristotle side by side and concludes that Aristotle’s reports have discrepancies. Aristotle's evidence itself, he shows us, are testifying against itself, by attributing different versions of the theory to Plato. Cherniss, disdaining this creation of such an elaborate insubstantial doctrine for plato, proposes the alternative hypothesis, that the identification of ideas and numbers was not a theory of Plato's at all but the result of Aristotle's own interpreta­tion.

Unravelling the Riddle

By elaborate comparative analyses, Cherniss shows us that not only was Aristotle’s conception o the Thoery of Ideas and idea-numbers different from Palto, but so were those of Plato’s other successors and students — Speusippus (Plato’s nephew) and Xenocrates, among others, developed their own contending versions of Plato’s theories, just like Aristotle did.

This examination leads Cherniss to speculate on the nature of the early Academy itself — upon the question of Plato's activity there, and of his relation to these men who are usually called his "pupils."

How could they have misinterpreted the master's writings when he was there to explain his meaning to them ? Did he think it unimportant to teach his pupils to understand and accept the doctrine of ideas? If he did not teach them this, of which he wrote with such fervor, what did he teach them ? And if he taught them something else, why did he not write that which he taught?

What, then, did Plato really do in his Academy?

After further brilliant analyses, Cherniss concludes that: Plato’s role ap­pears to have been not that of a "master" or even of a seminar director distributing subjects for research reports or prize essays, but that of an individual thinker whose insight and skill in the formulation of a problem enables him to offer general advice and methodical criticism to other individual thinkers who re­spect his wisdom and who may be dominated by his personality but who consider themselves at least as competent as they con­sider him in dealing with the details of special subjects.

Cherniss also uses a powerful, but in my opinion weak, argument — that extrapolates the educational system laid out in The Republic onto the possible structure of the Academy — to show why it was that Aristotle was never really a ‘philosophical’ student of Plato. After all, Plato would not have imparted real philosophical training to anyone under 50 year of age under his own scheme in The Republic, and Aristotle was around 38 years of age when Plato died. This is a remarkably clever argument, and I enjoyed it immensely but there is unfortunately no evidence to make such a claim about the structure of the Academy.

In the end Cherniss musters all the evidence and shows us how they all point unmistakably to the same conclusion: The Academy was not a school in which an orthodox meta­physical doctrine was taught, or an association the members of which were expected to subscribe to the theory of ideas. 

If this was so, then it was only natural for Aristotle to develop his own theories. Thus, while Plato gets a very favorable, almost laudatory, conclusion, Cherniss leaves us with an Aristotle who either distorted or misunderstood the works of Plato, though the distortion was much more subtle than it has been portrayed by popular treatises and commentaries.

The only consolation is that Plato probably would not have minded the bold explorations of his student, even when occasionally at the expense of his pet ideas, which he always knew were ‘difficult to accept, and difficult to reject.’

I would like to move away from Cherniss in this conclusion to take a less extreme view and entertain the possibility that perhaps Aristotle was talking of the Academy in general when he talked of ‘Platonist’ ideas and not of Plato in particular — maybe he could take this liberty of expression because his audience would have understood what he was referring to better than we do now.

This is a valuable work to read while transitioning from study of Plato to Aristotle. It provides perspective and understanding about Aristotle’s positions and keeps the reader from getting lost, or worse, questioning his own understanding of Plato.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent set of lectures, like the peak of a mountain, about the central problem in Plato's philosophy: how the abstract forms of things like the One and the Good connect to the concrete things of experience in the world, the many, the imperfect etc. This "transition problem" appeared to occupy Plato obsessively in his later dialogues like the Sophist and the Parmenides. Here Cherniss examines Aristotle's contention that the forms were numbers or that ideas of number constituted some kind of a transition between the One and the Good to the specific forms of all things, perhaps beginning with number, then ideas of spatial notions, then a transition to material geometric atoms like those of the Timaeus and thence to things. This interpretation is strongly rejected by Cherniss and attributed instead to Aristotle (the villain of this tale apparently) who had his own theory of matter and form, potentia and dynamis, to oppose to Plato and the Academy and who uses Plato and the other Academicians Speusippus and Xenocrates as set up men. It is possible that Plato had no secure doctrine but wrote different things at different times and left the question open for future investigation, and that Plato never discussed any physical doctrine as part of his talks at the Academy. Cherniss claims, I think, that there was no "deduction" at all from the form of the Good and the One to everything else, but that each form is an individual on its own, making Plato a kind of a dualist who doesn't need to explain the relation at all? This seems wrong, but I am a contemporary philosopher and no expert on Plato by any means. Suffice it then to admire the tough old-school classics scholarship of Cherniss and take a lesson for our own work?

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is the text: libgen.info/view.php?id=788336



http://books.google.com/books?id=k3-_...

There is also a reprint by Garland Press, 1980

[I-kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cherniss is so polemical and thus very entertaining. He argues that apart from geometry, there was no "teaching" in the usual sense (a knower imparting a field of knowledge systematically to those who do not know) while Plato was in charge of the Academy and thus the usual scholarly assumption that there is a set of "unwritten teachings" only partially visible in the (public) dialogues and confined to a select group of people such as Aristotle and Speusippus, is completely mistaken: what they say about Plato, in C.'s view, is solely from the dialogues - i.e. there is no privileged source that we lack access to and they did not. It's quite wonderful in my opinion because regardless of the historical fact, this forces us to really focus on the texts that we do have (the insights in which are to be constantly renewed) and stop thinking about what we might otherwise have. It also paints a picture of Plato that is dearer to me than other pictures: Plato as the quintessential Socratic.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as a supplement to Reginald Allen's course on Plato's Parmenides at Loyola University Chicago during the first semester of 1981/82.