In the reception of Hermann Cohen’s Deutschtum und Judentum (1915), particularly after the Second World War, it has become common to charge Cohen with naivety and self-delusion. Scholars ranging from Gershom Scholem to Jacques Derrida have regarded his thesis of a unity between ‘Germanism’ and Judaism as little more than fiction. While these approaches rightly identify problematic nationalist elements in Cohen’s wartime writing, they often overlook both the historical context and the systematic philosophical foundation of his argument. Through contextualization within the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” (1879–1881) and the Bauch Affair (1916), and by drawing on Ernst Cassirer’s response to Bruno Bauch, this paper argues that Cohen’s thesis of German-Jewish kinship does not represent an essentialist claim about given affinities, but a normative project grounded in his theory of reason and his hypothesis-theorem. Read in this way, Cohen’s work can still provide important insights into contemporary debates on universality, difference, and identity.

This paper examines Richard Hönigswald’s contribution to a philosophy of concrete subjectivity. Its starting point is the tension between the transcendental subject and the empirically situated human being. Central to this is Hönigswald’s critical concept of objectivity: objects are not things in the world, but normative conditions for valid judgements, which are polymorphic in nature depending on the domain of reference. The general meaning of objectivity therefore lies not in an abstract form, but in the given reality of the here and now. This gives rise to anthropological implications: psychological experience, the physical organism, intersubjectivity, language and historical community appear as concretisations of transcendental subjectivity.

Philosophie ist sich selbst Problem. Wer philosophiert, bezieht nicht bloß einen Standpunkt, sondern muss ihn vor allem auch rechtfertigen. So trägt denn Hönigswalds ‚Selbstdarstellung‘ auch keine Lehre im herkömmlichen Sinn vor, sondern erörtert die Idee eines Systems von Gründen, in welchem sich der Begriff der Philosophie bestimmt. Mein Essay beschränkt sich auf Hönigswalds Schriften im Umkreis seiner ‚Selbstdarstellung‘; auf die nach ihr verfasste ‚Philosophie der Sprache‘ gehe ich nicht ein.