Dr. Flewelling and the Hoose Library: The Life and Letters of a Man and an Institution (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 249 the Critique does include, as an "Annexe" immediately following the main text (a rather odd placement), the three pages that Sartre wrote to introduce the ot:iginal French combined edition of Question de m~thode and the Critique. In addition, the present volume includes an index and a glossary. Both are brief, but those who have hitherto worked through the totally unindexed French text are in a position to be grateful for almost any such contribution! As for the glossary, it is useful not only for giving brief definitions of some of Sabre's most important new technical terms, but also for indicating just what equivalents the editor and translator have settled upon for some of Sartre's more difficult-to-translate French expressions. The former function is bound to be only very imperfectly fulfilled at best, since the full meaning of a technical term in a lengthy systematic work in philosophy must obviously be learned from seeing its many uses in the text, rather than from a one- or two-line "definition." To identify the meaning of "project" in Sartre, for instance, as "a chosen way of being, expressed in paraxis" (p. 829) is clever and not incorrect, but it is hardly exhaustive! The other function of this particular glossary, however, that of revealing the translators' choices of equivalents in the cases of crucial terms, is worth some further consideration. Rde appears to have been most worried about two such choices, that of "investigation" for experience and of "transcendence" for d~passement, since he singled them out for special mention in his introductory note. I regard the first as very felicitious, but the second is as unlikely to meet with widespread satisfaction as is any other proposed English expression for the dialectical process of going beyond. Several other translators' choices seem to me to deserve mentioning because I find them questionable, to varying degrees. Statut should surely have been translated as the commonplace English word "status" rather than as "statute," which was the translators' decision . "Fused group," their term for groupe en fusion, has the unfortunate effect of conveying a sense of rigidity and fixedness concerning a phenomenon that, for Sartre, is quintessentially process-like in nature. Serment, a very important Sartrean term that dentoes the beginning of institutionalization in a group, is translated as "pledge"--not incorrect, but also not sufficiently redolent of the historical connotations and the hints of interiorized violence that the French term and its more usual English translation, "oath," bear. On the other hand, readers have reason to be pleased with the great majority of the decisions that Sheridan-Smith and R6e have made, and it is on the whole a good thing that their translations of terms will now become more or less standard. While the text shows occasional lapses from exact literalness or idiomatic precision (e.g., in translating Satire's general title of what is roughly the second half of his volume, Du Group a l'Histoire, as "From Groups to History," or in rendering II n'y a pas assez de place pour tous as "there are not enough places for everyone" [p. 260]), such lapses appear to me to be relatively rare in the course of a truly mammoth endeavor. WILLIAM LEON McBRIDE Purdue University Wallace Nethery. Dr. Flewelling and the Hoose Library: The Life and Letters of a Man and an Institution. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1976. Pp. xi + 203. This is a delightful volume recounting the history and growth of a philosophical library which now stands as the largest of its kind on the Pacific Coast, with over 40,000 volumes on its shelves and in its stacks. Flewelling has rightly insisted that "no work of man's hands.., can be so vocal as those which in the volumes of a great library speak more directly to the soul. The secret of culture lies embedded in the volumes of the great thinkers of the earth . . . [that] influence the 250 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY minds of men after the crises of the present age have been forgotten. ''l Nethery, who served as Librarian for "nearly twenty years," observes that "the Hoose Library of...