is connected with the literal understanding ofagnoscoas an‘upward’
human act. As the divine object of this act is immutable, it is not
ontologically transformed. In addition, the older usage assumes that
the divine object exercises an activity of promise and expectation that
precedes and accompanies the human act of upward recognition.
While modern theologians like Spalding and Schleiermacher share
this view, they also perform something like an ‘epistemic turn’
that moves the performative change towards the cognitive status of
the object.
These historical considerations may be helpful in discussing such
contemporary views as the claim by Bedorf (section 1.2) that all acts
of recognition cause a misrecognition of their object. In other words,
the attribution of as-qualification to the recognizee is a move in a
power game that imposes problematic identities on persons and
groups. The present study has, however, employed an overall defin-
ition of content that is broader than Bedorf’s qualification of the
recognizee‘as X’. From the perspective of our study, the basic act
‘A recognizes B as X’can assume that both A and B can change in
recognition and that there are other components (expectation,
response) that contribute to the overall meaning of this act.
Bedorf’s claim of misrecognition assumes that only B changes
in recognition; in technical terms, his definition of the content of
recognition (what we called Rdef in section 1.5), equals the
as-qualification‘BasX’. However, such an assumption may invert
cause and effect in the same way as in Griffin’s above-quoted discus-
sion about patronage. We need to ask whether there is already an
underlying structure (such as the permanent identity of A and B)
against which the adequacy of recognition can be measured. If not,
that is, if the performative‘A recognizes B as X’only initiates the
process of recognition, there is more at stake than the status
change of B. When the overall meaning of recognition covers
both‘what becomes of A’,‘what becomes of B’, and‘what is X’, the
act of recognition is not a simple power game of A’s imposing
something upon B. Granted, it remains a power game, but a much
more complex one.
This response may not solve all the problems manifested in
Bedorf’s thorough discussion. However, it accounts for the explicit
naming of the recognizer A. It is not adequate merely to discuss
Bedorf’s example‘to recognize Israel as the Jewish state’, since one
must name the recognizer and realize that it is also affected by the act
206 Recognition and Religion