Thrice-Born: Selected Memories of an Immigrant (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 351 a great love for the hidden riches of his own language. He does not coin new words so much as re-invest old words with their original (or imagined) sense. Our translators have largely lacked an equal love for our English tongue and have been content to render his terminology into something like a philosophical Pennsylvania Dutch! Though Mehta is not immune to this fault, especially when he takes over terms (in contrast to real words) previously used by American translators, he manages much better in the third part where he is forced to rely on his own resources in the absence of any "translations." He finds also more affinities in this "late" Heidegger with Indian and Oriental philosophy. Consequently his tenth and final chapter is in my opinion his best one. It is sensitive, revealing, and easier on the reader than all that has gone before. Here he even suggests some tentative criticisms of Heidegger, based on the fact that the Indian tradition has made some of Heidegger's discoveries much earlier. The best thing that could happen to this book would be for an American publisher to reprint it in paperback and make it available to a wider public than it now seems likely to have. If the size of the book makes that impracticable, the lengthy second part could be omitted on the grounds that we now have a translation (of sorts) of Being and Time as well as numerous summaries of it. I suspect that it is unlikely that most university libraries will order this book from Varanasi, the postal service being what it is. Furthermore, it is unfortunate that this book is wretchedly printed on poor paper, with no attention paid at all to dividing words by syllables at the end of lines. Apparently the printers did not know English. There is also no evidence that Mehta had a chance to read any galley proofs, much less page proofs, for the book abounds in typographical errors. Because of misprints the reader is sometimes in doubt about what the author is trying to say. Despite all, this book is much too valuable to be "lost." All students of Heidegger need it and college libraries do too. Mehta's energy, scholarship, and insights are beyond the normal level. It would be possible, of course, to take issue with him on many points. However, this reviewer feels grateful for the many difficult things he has got right. We could do worse than have Heidegger mediated to us via Asia where he has long been better understood and appreciated than in England and America. J. GLEr~ GRAY Colorado College Thrice-Born: Selected Memories of an Immigrant. By J. Loewenberg. (New York: Hobbs, Dorman, 1968. $6.95) J. Loewenberg's autobiography, Thrice-Born, written in the third person about "Leo Berg" ("my own name's thin disguise could fool no one"), provides more than an interesting story of the life of a well-known philosopher. The historian of philosophy will find anecdotes of Royce, James, Santayana, Palmer, Muensterberg, Holt, Simmel, Cassirer, Alexander, Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Howison, Miss Calkins, and many others. But here also is little-known information about the final organization and disposition of Royce's unpublished papers after his death. Mrs. Royce's decision to destroy letters exchanged between Royce and Hugo Muensterberg concerning the loss of the Lusitania, "Berg" later found regrettable. "The letters constituted documentary evidence of states of mind and modes of behavior characteristic of the times. To some future biographers or historians they would doubtless have been important. In retrospect destruction of such evidence seemed to Berg indefensible" (pp. 132, 133). 352 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY One learns of early influences at Harvard clearly discernible in Loewenberg's later writing. In spite of admitted exceptions he took to Royce's metaphysics, the author acknowledges that he learned as much from Royce as from Hegel and "that in the synthesis of unity and multiplicity, priority must be accorded to multiplicity." In this connection, James' concept of a pluralistic universe also had its appeal. The search for a method of explicating Hegel's Phenomenology in English (a work which Loewenberg notes is not only...