Recognition and Religion A Historical and Systematic Study

(John Hannent) #1

the reversal of the roles of lord and servant, the ideas of labour and
struggle as the contexts of appropriation, and the idea of different
‘orders’through which a person develops on the way towards fuller
maturity.
The obvious difference from Hegel and many others is found in the
anti-intellectualism of the Pietists. We have seen that the anti-
philosophical attitude is part of the long tradition starting from the
Recognitionsand that to claim an alternative to philosophy is not
always innocent. Zinzendorf takes over some claims of modernity,
especially the ideas regarding individual freedom and the interpret-
ation of religious truths in terms of‘rights’. The idea of personal
appropriation also has its oldest roots in Cicero and Stoicism.


3.2.Anerkennungin Religion: Fichte and Spalding


Thefirst German dictionary to include the verbanerkennenis that by
Adelung in 1774.^58 Adelung considers that‘recent philosophers’use
this verb in a purely epistemic sense, that is, for identifying something
on the basis of known features (mit klarer Unterscheidung der Merk-
mahle erkennen). He also mentions the legal sense of attaching a
normative status (erkennen und eingestehen). The evidence of later
dictionaries supports the view that this legal use is the most trad-
itional in German and that the philosophical and literary uses only
emerge in the last decades of the eighteenth century.^59
Paul Ricoeur has discussed Immanuel Kant’suseof‘Rekognition’in
thefirst edition ofCritique of Pure Reason(1781) at length.^60 Ricoeur is
right in holding that Kant continues the Cartesian trajectory that
speaks ofRekognitionas epistemic identification, relating the concept
to the representation of an object. Ricoeur points out that such recog-
nition is‘indistinguishable from knowing’.^61 As Kant is interested in


(^58) SoTrübner, 76. We use the enlarged second edition ofAdelung(1793).
(^59) The following dictionaries have been consulted:Adelung,Goethe,Grimm,
Grimm-Neubearbeitung,Trübner.Trübnerin particular shows the legal origins of
this word in German in detail.
(^60) Ricoeur 2005, 36–55. Kant,Kritik, A 103–10. (^61) Ricoeur 2005, 42–3.
The Modern Era 125

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