enable such usage. In Hegel, the reflexive forms often illuminate the
emerging self-awareness of the consciousness. While the present
study cannot undertake a detailed analysis of Hegel’s language, we
can mention some similarities with the early modern ideas of the
heteronomy of faith and love. In terms of our three paradigms, Hegel
is closer in this respect to the second than to the third paradigm.
While the third, modern paradigm shifts the attention from the
transformation of the recognizer to the status change in the recogni-
zee, the second paradigm underlines the social bonds that transform
all participants in the act of recognition.
When Hegel employs dense phrases, for instance, in saying that the
consciousness and the other‘recognize themselves as mutually rec-
ognizing one another’,^64 he can be interpreted in terms of relational
social bonding (second paradigm) rather than existential attachment
(third paradigm). Moreover, Hegel’s remarks on recognition are
connected with the issues of love.^65 Ficino’s view of love as relational
self-recognition may provide important similarities. For instance, the
issue of equality in recognition is more strongly affirmed in Hegel and
Ficino than in their contemporaries.
This difference between paradigms is also relevant in the concep-
tions after Hegel. Most modern views are not particularly concerned
with the issue of self-recognition. Schleiermacher’s emphasis on
human consciousness and the feeling of absolute dependence (section
3.3) bring him in these respects into Hegel’s neighborhood, but
Schleiermacher does not employ thefigure of self-recognition expli-
citly. Karl Barth (section 3.4) is critical of modernity in many respects;
at this point, however, he is a typical representative of the paradigm
of‘existential attachment’. While the recognizer is relevant for Barth
as the one producing this attachment, the effects of this act primarily
concern the status of religious truth and Jesus Christ as the
recognizee.
The notable exception within the modern paradigm concerns
Catholic ecumenism since the Second Vatican Council. When theo-
logians like Joseph Ratzinger claim that recognition needs to be a
spiritual act of decision-making and an act of conscious revision of
earlier positions,^66 the relational structure of the second paradigm
(^64) Phänomenologie des Geistes, 147.
(^65) E.g.Jenaer Realphilosophie, 209. Cf. Honneth 1992.
(^66) Cf. section 3.6. Ratzinger,‘Zur Frage einer Anerkennung’, 236–7.
Recognition in Religion 237