Reconciling Judaism and 'cultural consciousness': The idea of Versoehnung in Hermann Cohen's philosophy of religion

This dissertation deals with the development of Hermann Cohen's Jewish philosophy. Combining biographical and historical methods with an analysis of Jewish and philosophical texts by Cohen, the fundamental theme of his thought is determined as the reconciliation of Judaism and the "cultural consciousness." The traditional Jewish idea of atonement (kappara, Versohnung) is determined as the Leitidee by which Cohen attempts this conceptual "reconciliation" of seemingly disparate fields of culture.;The conceptual organon emerging from the idea of Versohnung makes it possible to demonstrate that--despite its apparent rational abstractness--Cohen's ethical monotheism anticipates elements of existentialist philosophy. By crediting the biblical prophet Ezekiel with "the discovery of the individual"--this emerges first in an essay of 1892 and becomes the "center of gravity" of Judaism in Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums--Cohen solves two problems: he accounts for concrete subjectivity in the context of a philosophical system which is otherwise in danger of being "a transcendentalism without subject" and he lays the groundwork for a reconciliation between the "unity of the cultural consciousness" and Judaism as the religion of reason par excellence.;Based on manuscripts which are, for the most part, published here for the first time, this study aims to come to a precise understanding of the coherence of Cohen's Jewish thought with his philosophical ethics. I also argue historically, biographically, and philosophically for a revision of the standard notion about the development of Cohen's Jewish philosophy, which claims that he turned to Judaism more fully only after 1912 when he retired from Marburg University, moved to Berlin, and taught at the Lehranstalt fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Instead I show that Cohen's intellectual biography and his philosophical oeuvre must be understood as a continuous struggle for the reconciliation and mutual advance of Jewish, theoretical, and ethico-political impulses and ideas.