Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (review)

The voluminous European Vocabulary of Philosophies: Dictionary of Untranslatable Terms published by Seuil and Le Robert under Barbara Cassin's supervision is a comparatist's bonanza. Not only do comparative studies stand to benefit from the history of ideas, but the two fields overlap. It is this overlap that shapes the whole project of the Vocabulary, which thus provides a comparative history of Europe's philosophical terminologies—or of European terminology of philosophies. Either way, Cassin insists, the plural must be stressed. For this reference tool surveys and organizes precisely this plurality, this multiplicity of "philosophies" and their "vocabularies" in European languages.

We learn in Cassin's introduction that Émile Benveniste's 1969 two-volume Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes was the model for the work reviewed here. And the recent Vocabulary does follow it—up to a point, because its own scope is, with some exceptions, limited to Europe. We are dealing, as a matter of fact, not only with a European survey, but also with a European project. As Cassin writes, "One of the most urgent problems Europe raises is languages. One can imagine two solutions: either pick out a dominant language in which we will communicate from now on—a kind of globalized Anglo-American idiom—or 'bet' on preserving plurality instead by uncovering each and every time the meaning and relevance of differences, which is the only way of truly facilitating communication among languages and cultures" (xvii). Needless to say, the book takes the latter route even though the global status of English as lingua franca or the language of choice in many fields is a bit more complex. Further complicating the case of English and making it so different from German and French as far as philosophical terminologies go is the English language's refusal to produce a jargon, a specialized sublanguage (xix) in academic discourse generally. English has borrowed loan terms and phrases and has anglicized some of them, but the dominant feeling is still that the best writing, in philosophy, criticism, theory, and so on steers clear of esoteric lexicons.

But is this "English" problem not the problem of most modern European languages surveyed in the Vocabulary? They all more or less tried to overcome the esotericism of the original Greek and Latin, then the German philosophical lexicons by nationalizing them through paraphrases, décalques, translations, and mistranslations. Alternatively, terms such as the Latin veritas were not simply translated or imported into certain modern languages, but contested by indigenous counter-parts such as the Russian istina and pravda ("truth" and "justice," respectively). At various points, different national languages attempted to become self-sufficient terminologically, to pick up where Greek left off. This was the case with German's "ontological nationalism," as Cassin says, after Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. In most situations, though, translations, equivalencies, and the like did not work. The end result no less than the beauty of this failure of import and adaptation is the untranslatability of most philosophical terms in use today in Europe (and in the United States).This is why for the most part the volume is indeed a dictionary of "untranslatable" concepts (e.g., Heidegger's Dasein) or of concepts that can be rendered quite accurately but by several distinct equivalents (e.g., politique, which can mean both "policy" and "politics"). By the same token, from abstraction and phronesis to saudade and Wunsch, across hundreds of carefully researched lexical histories, this exceptionally rich and useful Vocabulary also makes a forceful argument for doing philosophy in dialogue with other philosophical traditions, with their original languages and texts.