Customer Reviews

Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm not as put off by La Vopa's academicism as the last reviewer, though I agree that the book's coverage is absurdly narrow. What's really disturbing about this work is that La Vopa's understanding of Fichte's philosophy is impossible to justify. Fichte was not concerned with teaching people how to create a stable sense of self, as La Vopa thinks; he is out to explode all such constructions. And this isn't just the case with his later work. The very notion of the self-positing self and Fichte's teaching that the act of positing is the self makes the self into an ongoing and fluid activity without any fixed content. For an insight into Fichte's intellectual development the reader is far better off with Dieter Henrich's Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism, which treats it only in passing but with unsurpassed insight. For more conventional biography there's always the memoir in William Smith's nineteenth century The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Tr., With a Memoir of the Author by W. Smith. (There are several reprint editions of this around.) Much of what you'll learn in La Vopa's work is simply wrong, alas.

The recent publication of biographies of philosophers in English, many by Cambridge, has filled a gap in the literature. Unfortunately this particular item is totally inadequate. First the style is pedantic and long-winded; apparently Mr. La Vopa had a sabbatical to fill up, a publication requirement to meet or just thought he might turn that dissertation into a book. Second, amazingly, it actually ends before Fichte did any of his most significant work! So it is unhelpful both as biography and commentary for any but the most narrowly focused of readers. Thirdly, at $65 it physically fell apart in my hands as I was reading it. I doubt if there are a dozen people in the English-speaking world to whom this book would be of interest.