For some reason, the past is coming back. Not to haunt me so much as to nip at my heels. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the weather.
I've been thinking about Aristotle recently, and as a result, I picked up the Nicomachean Ethics, a book I remember tackling briefly in Greek back in my undergraduate days on the Berkeley campus, under the tutelage of W.G. Rabinowitz, a wonderful crusty old chain smoking associate professor of Greek. He wasn’t the writing type, so he didn’t have much to his name that would have made him a full professor, but he loved Greek and teaching it and reading it. He taught a seminar on Aristotle. Translating the Greek was difficult but making sense of the philosophy even more so. A woman, she must have been a graduate student, leaned over during a class and offered this critique, “He (Rabinowitz) doesn’t say if you can have a thought without having words to express the thought?” It stuck in my head all these many years because I had never considered it before.
I also remember seeing Rabinowitz crossing the street in Berkeley – it must have been Bancroft Way, the street that bordered the south side of campus. At least that is where I believe it was, it’s the only place it makes any sense to have this memory. It was a striped crosswalk without any traffic lights, so the cars were expected to stop for pedestrians. These were uncommon in American cities in the 1980s. Without even a pause at curb’s edge, he just strode out confidently or recklessly into the flow of traffic without even a hitch in his step and sure enough, the cars did stop for him.
And finally, he once told a story that brought him great amusement about a professor of his, Harold Cherniss. Cherniss said that at a graduation speech many years ago someone quoted a line from the Nicomachean Ethics. It was probably an effort to prove how smart they were, but they got it spectacularly wrong. You see, it all depends on understanding of the definite article in ancient Greek. Properly translated, the sentence reads, “Man is a political animal." But if you put the article “ho” in the wrong place, you get a very different translation, “Political man is an animal.” Both statements are true, but Aristotle can claim the first one only, not the second.
That was Gerson Rabinowitz, his old gray herringbone sports jacket just reeking of cigarette smoke and his weird Buddy Holly glasses. I suppose in that way he was straight out of the 1950s although it was the 1980s by the time I interacted with him. He didn’t care what you thought about him and he let you know it. Rabinowitz died in 1989.
Here is a more poignant reflection on the man written by A.A. Long, a retired professor of ancient philosophy at Berkeley and a former colleague of Rabinowitz's. Long's themes aren't very different from mine, but they are more melodically put:
Gerson Rabinowitz was one of the Berkeley Classics Department’s most memorable characters and devoted teachers. Though he had retired at age 70 he continued to hold unofficial tutorials every week, reading Greek with a select number of students, especially Plato’s Republic, which he venerated as the source of timelessly valuable insight into the human condition. As a student at Johns Hopkins and Berkeley, he was inspired by Harold Cherniss, the country’s most eminent expert on ancient philosophy and a devoted Platonist, who instilled in Rabinowitz a passionate attachment to Plato. At the time of his appointment at Berkeley, Rabinowitz’s promise as a research scholar was widely acknowledged. His dissertation was published as a University of California monograph and he published a number of significant articles on Plato. He had plans of extending his work on Aristotle’s Protrepticus, and of embarking on a study of Galen’s Platonism. Yet, for reasons that remain imponderable, he suddenly abandoned all interest in these projects. After 1961 he refrained completely from publication, resisting all attempts by successive department chairs to get him to continue an orthodox research career. It is possible to speculate that he was disappointed by some of the reviews his monograph had received. It is also possible that he was mortified by harsh criticism that he heard from some Oxford scholars when he delivered a paper to the Oxford Philological Society. Whatever the cause may have been, Rabinowitz decided in the early 1960s to concentrate his professional work on undergraduate and graduate teaching at Berkeley, following Socrates’ observations in Plato’s Phaedrus that personal contact between teacher and student is greatly superior to the writing of books. He directed numerous dissertations of students who, in several cases, have made names for themselves in departments of classics or philosophy. He especially liked to teach beginning Greek and courses on Greek tragedy and philosophy. Some students found him too severe, but in many he inspired a reverence that was quite remarkable. What they valued in him was his tireless determination to help them understand all the nuances of Greek and, as one puts it, “to work through dialogue rather than simple assertion,” and to give “critiques that leave the student dissatisfied until he has given the best account of which he is capable.” Anyone familiar with Plato’s Socrates will recognize this allusion. He was in every sense of the word a personality, old-fashioned in his manners, abrasive in his conversation, but gifted with a fine sense of irony and self-deprecation. Opening the door of a colleague by mistake, he apologized with the words: “Trying to open the wrong door—that’s the story of my life.” As a young man he had been strikingly handsome and a fine tennis player. Even when elderly and frail, he was stylish in his dress and spritely in his demeanor. In his spare time he assiduously attended the Albany racetrack, and one would like to have known how his love of betting on horses meshed in with his Platonism. One may regret that a person so intelligent should have chosen to withdraw so resolutely from the scholarly community of his peers, but Rabinowitz had his own priorities and he remained true to them. Few university teachers leave as strong a mark on their students as he did. That is his main legacy.
