Attachment is intentional and assumes agency, since it operates
on a cognitive basis but can be accompanied by emotional and
instinctive features. Attachment relates to the ancient ideas of
ownership and socialization (oikeiosis, see 2.3), but the owner-
ship need not be thought of in strictly economic terms. Both
Honneth’s idea of the object relation and Laitinen’s concern for
normativity point to this component; one may also remember
Hénaff’s view of the giver who gives himself/herself in‘recog-
nizing as’in this connection.
3 The third conceptual component is ‘availability’, by which
I mean that at least two participants are able to relate to one
another as‘the recognizer’and‘the recognizee’. Analogically,
Forst speaks of the relationship between the one who tolerates
and the one who is tolerated in terms of‘proper context’.^86 My
availability component is not taken from any particular philo-
sophical discourse; it rather expresses the general context or
framework in which recognition takes place. This component
has some affinity with the psychological‘availability heuristic’.^87
Such heuristic teaches that people tend to base their opinions
and attitudes on issues and persons that theyfirst recall: for
instance, the latest news instead of the more distant past, or
immediate colleagues instead of people in general. I am not,
however, claiming that‘availability’leads to biased judgements
but only that the historical frameworks of recognition employ
social reality that is immediately familiar to the participants.
Availability in this sense relates to the thought world rather than
the real world. For instance, God is available in Western intellectual
history so that people can recognize God or, on other occasions, be
recognized by God. This availability of God does not mean that a
divine being really exists but only that God is available in people’s
mental framework. The framework of the thought world often con-
ceptualizes religious recognition in terms of heteronomy and depend-
ence, in terms such as the relationship between the creator and the
creature, the lord and the servant, or the healer and the healed.
As I avoid neologisms in the historical Chapters 2 and 3, I will not
speak explicitly of‘the recognizer’and‘the recognizee’there. In most
(^86) Forst 2003, 31–2. (^87) For this, see Gilovich et al. 2002.
28 Recognition and Religion