Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (review)

460 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY e8:3 JULY 199 o one. It may, indeed, be only a story from God's perspective, but from the human perspective of the Kantian, Copernican-revolutionary framework it's the truth. HoKE ROBINSON Memphis State University Robert C. Solomon. Continental Philosophy sinc.e z750: The Rise and Fall of the Self. Oxford : Oxford Univesity Press, 1988. Pp. viii + 214. Cloth, $~9.95. Paper, $9-95. With this latest contribution to its series of OPUS books, Oxford University Press inaugurates a new eight-volume "History of Western Philosophy." The publisher describes the aim of the volumes in this series as follows: "to provide concise, original, and authoritative introductions to a wide range of subjects in the humanities and the sciences. They are written by experts for the general reader as well as for students." Let us examine how well Robert Solomon's Continental Philosophy since z75o fills this bill. A survey of Continental philosophy from Rousseau to Derrida in barely two hundred pages can certainly be described as concise, though such brevity has its costs. Rather than attempting an encyclopedic survey of all the major figures and works of the past two centuries, Solomon has adopted a more selective approach. As his subtitle announces, this work is organized around a single central theme: the problem of the nature of the self in modern European thought, beginning with a short account of Rousseau's alleged "discovery of the self" (Solomon even informs us where this "discovery " occurred, viz., in the forests of St. Germain0 and concluding with a discussion of the "abandonment of the self" in the works of Foucault and Derrida. This provides a serviceable armature for the main body of the text, which is divided into three parts: Part l, on Kant and the German idealists; Part ~, on reactions to the collapse of German idealism; and Part 3, on twentieth-century phenomenology "and beyond." Each of these parts is further divided into three or four very brief chapters. Naturally, something had to be omitted from a survey of such length, and readers will search in vain for any account of neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, the Vienna circle, Lebensphilosophie, and Critical Theory. (To be sure, Solomon does devote a few unsatisfactory pages to Habermas, but discusses his work entirely in relation to Gadamer's and in the context of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics.) In any case, all of the heavyweights--Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartremare present and accounted for, plus a fair number of lesser lights, including some mild surprises such as Frege, Brentano, Meinong, Stumpf, DUthey, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, and L~viStrauss . Perhaps the most surprising inclusion is Freud, who, under the umbrella title, "Two Discontents and Their C.ivilization," is yoked with Wittgenstein. It is a pleasure to see Wittgenstein included in a survey of the history of Continental philosophy, but the pairing with Freud is not entirely a happy one. One might also wish that Solomon had paid some attention to Spanish and Italian philosophy, for, with the single exception of Kierkegaard, all of the philosophers in this volume wrote either in German or in French. Furthermore, by concluding with a discussion of structuralism, poststructural- BOOK REVIEWS 46~ ism, and postmodernism, the author leaves the reader with the unfortunate impression that contemporary European philosophy is identical with the latest fashions in French philosophizing. Readers familiar with Solomon's other writings will not be surprised to hear that the present volume also deserves high marks for originality. Unlike most histories of philosophy , Solomon's does not concentrate on technical epistemological and metaphysical issues, but emphasizes the larger issues of self-identity and meaning which attract students and lay readers to philosophy in the first places. The author promises the reader "a thrilling cultural, intellectual, and psychological adventure story," and, to a remarkable degree, makes good on this promise. With his usual flair and wit, Solomon has written an immensely readable book: a story with a plot and a villain (though, alas, no real hero). The "plot" is indicated in the subtitle. The device which drives the story forward is also the villain of...