Between Reinhold and Fichte: August Ludwig Hülsen’s Contribution to the Emergence of German Idealism by Ezequiel L. Posesorski (review)

The history of philosophy, like any history, has its own winners and losers. We do not penalize the losers; we simply leave them for oblivion. The fortunate among the damned are subject, occasionally, to heroic resurrection attempts by noble historians. Such an attempt has recently been made by Ezequiel Posesorski, in his important book on the philosophy of the German Idealist and early Romantic thinker, August Ludwig Hülsen (1765–1809), whose work is barely known even among scholars of classical German philosophy. Posesorski convincingly documents how highly the major figures of both German Idealism and early Romanticism esteemed Hülsen. Thus, we learn that Fichte ardently recommended Hülsen’s only book as an introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, Friedrich Schlegel described him as “only second to Fichte in dialectical virtuosity” and called him a more important philosopher than Schelling (who, incidentally, edited and published Hülsen’s Nachlass), and Novalis included Hülsen among the five members of “the philosophical directorate” of Germany (2).

Hülsen, the son of a village preacher, enrolled in 1785 at the University of Halle, where he pursued studies in critical philology. In 1794 he went to the University of Kiel to study the new philosophy of Kant with Reinhold. Not being satisfied with Reinhold’s philosophy, he moved to Jena in the spring of 1795 in order to hear Fichte lecture on the Wissenschaftslehre. During this stay in Jena, Hülsen contributed to Fichte’s Philosophisches Journal, and published his sole book, Was hat die Metaphysik seit Leibniz und Wolfffür Progres- sen gemacht? (in 1796; the manuscript of the book had been submitted a year earlier to the 1795 Berlin Akademie contest). In 1798, upon Fichte’s recommendation, Hülsen was offered a chair at Jena. Hülsen turned down the offer, wishing to keep his freedom as an independent thinker. Instead he opened a Socratic school for boys in a village near Berlin, an experimental initiative that soon failed. In the last decade of his rather short life, Hülsen collaborated closely with the brothers Schlegel, with Schleiermacher, and with several Scandinavian philosophers (201).

According to Posesorski, Hülsen’s crucial contribution to the emergence of German Idealism was his “historical enlargement of the Wissenschapslehre as an attempt to fill the empty spaces left by Fichte’s incomplete rearticulation of Reinhold’s early Elementarphilosophie” (7). In his Preisschrift Hülsen developed a systematic view of the history of philosophy and its epochs. The telos and vocation [Bestimmung] of human history is the gradual explication and achievement of self-determination and self-consciousness. Such history unfolds through reason’s self-contradictory activity (106). Hülsen follows the steps of the dialectical structure of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, though next to the unfolding of pure reason (Hülsen’s equivalent of Fichte’s unconditional I), he also charts the parallel progress of empirical reason through the historical stages of philosophy.

Hülsen’s intimate assimilation of speculative logic and the history of philosophy is likely to remind the reader of Hegel’s thought. Yet Posesorski avoids such comparisons, and instead attempts to trace punctually the development of Hülsen’s thought against the background of his predecessors, Reinhold and Fichte. He thus refuses to make his hero a stepping-stone to others.

Overall, Posesorski’s book is lucidly written, meticulously documented, and well structured. In addition to a thorough exploration and exposition of Hülsen’s philosophy of history, the book contains valuable discussions of core issues in the systems of Reinhold and Fichte, as well as Hülsen’s ideas on the philosophy of education. Let me conclude this review by reminding the readers of a modest truism: there is no a priori reason to assume the justice of history. Those who are enchanted by the prospect of expanding their philosophical horizons through the discovery...