the overall dynamics of knowing, his somewhat accidental use of
Rekognitioncannot be taken as evidence that epistemic identification
is an older sense of recognition than normative attachment and mutual
interaction. Adelung’s dictionary gives both epistemic identification
and normative attachment as the meanings ofanerkennen. German
dictionaries and the Latin sources discussed in Chapter 2 emphasize
the ancient legal-normative roots of‘recognizing’.
While the epistemic and legal uses ofRekognitionandanerkennen
reflect the old Latin tradition ofagnosco, the English verb‘acknow-
ledge’, as employed by Hobbes and Locke (see section 3.1), does not
seem to have a semantic counterpart in eighteenth-century German.
For instance, when Joseph Butler’sThe Analogy of Religion, Natural
and Revealed(orig. 1736) was translated into German in 1756,
the English verb‘acknowledge’is for the most part translated by
zugestehen, and sometimes verbs likeeinräumenorbekennen.^62 The
translator, Johann Joachim Spalding, to whom I will return below,
begins to employanerkennenonly in 1794.
Recent studies in the history of philosophy assume thatAnerken-
nungenters academic philosophical discussion in Johann Gottlieb
Fichte’sGrundlage des Naturrechts, thefirst part of which came out in
March 1796.^63 Fichte’s work is important for the general history of
recognition, as he takes over the legal sense ofagnoscoand applies it
to a great number of legal and political issues, such as personal
property and the recognition of territory between states. Since Fichte
does not discuss religion in these contexts, we limit our discussion to
some philosophical matters of thefirst part of this work.
For Fichte,Anerkennungmeans a reciprocal relationship between
individuals who are ready to exercise their freedom so that they also
consider the freedom of others. When such mutual recognition takes
place within the rule of law, it regulates external relationships among
persons, constituting them as free individuals. A person can expect
others to recognize him as a rational being only when he himself
treats others in like manner.^64 This prompts reciprocity:‘Nobody can
recognize the other, unless they both recognize one another.’^65
(^62) For this, cf. Butler,Analogy 276 – 86 (English original) and Butler,Bestätigung
366 – 81 (Spalding’s translation). In this passage, acknowledge and acknowledgement
appear twelve times and are translated withzugestehenat least six times.Anerkennen
does not appear.
(^63) I use Fichte’sGesamtausgabe, Werke3 (1966). See also Siep 2014, 76–84.
(^64) Grundlage, 352. (^65) Grundlage, 351.
126 Recognition and Religion