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Before Hegel and Beyond Kant: Risto Saarinen's Recognition and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2017

Suzanne E. Smith
Suzanne E. Smith*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

When religious tolerance appears in the literature on ecumenicism, religious pluralism, and other modes of peaceful coexistence, it is frequently juxtaposed with the words “beyond,” “more than,” and “is not enough.” To be sure, it is generally conceded in these contexts, tolerance is an improvement on intolerance, and, relatively speaking, then, a fine thing, as far it goes. For many, however, it does not go very far. “Religious tolerance,” we are told, “however virtuous, does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another.” It is thought to lack strenuousness, and hence, to be unsuited for modern moral conflicts, which tend increasingly toward the polarity characteristic of war: “Tolerance, especially of the knee-jerk variety. . . works as long as people can slink off by themselves, avoiding contact, and never facing up to what they truly believe.” No one says, “I am fighting for [fill in the blank] with all the toleration I can muster.”

Type
Review Essay
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 110 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 301 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); 304 pp; $80 hb; page references appear in parentheses in the text.

References

1 Williams, Bernard, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?,” in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (ed. Heyd, David; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 18-27, at 19 Google Scholar.

2 Fredericks, James L., Faith Among Faiths: Christian Theology and Non-Christian Religions (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999) 172 Google Scholar.

3 Wuthnow, Robert, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 287 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Schreiter, Robert J., “Summation: Call to Action,” in A Dome of Many Colors: Studies in Religious Pluralism, Identity, and Unity (ed. Sharma, Arvind and Dugan, Kathleen M.; Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1999) 190 Google Scholar.

5 This is David Heyd's description of Barbara Herman's argument in his introduction to David Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 7 [italics in original].

6 Kleingeld, Pauline, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 1 Google Scholar.

7 Kant, Immanuel, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (trans. Humphrey, Ted; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983) 118 Google Scholar. “Wider ecumenicism” pertains to a branch of Christian ecumenicism that extends its scope to include other religions. See, for example, Hillman, Eugene, Sp, C.S.., The Wider Ecumenicism (New York: Herder, 1968)Google Scholar.

8 Kant, Perpetual Peace, 118.

9 Kant, Immanuel, “Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View,” in Anthropology, History, and Education (trans. Louden, R. B.; The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 227–429, at 411Google Scholar.

10 Ibid.

11 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: with On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns (ed. Ellington, James W.; 3rd ed.; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993) 12 Google Scholar.

12 Hegel develops his notion of recognition in Chapter 4 of his 1807 text, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 104–119. Amongst the vast literature on this topic, see especially Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (ed. Bloom, Allan; trans. Nichols, J. H. Jr.,; New York: Basic Books, 1969)Google Scholar; Pöggeler, Otto, Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1973)Google Scholar; Brandom, Robert, “The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (2007) 127–150 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pippin, Robert B., Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. The seminal text that prompted the philosophical recovery of recognition in the 1990s is Honneth, Axel, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (trans. Anderson, Joel; Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Saarinen, Recognition and Religion, 96, 189, and 248.

14 On occasion, Saarinen's statements are perhaps a little too flatly obvious. For example, he remarks that “Augustine's writings are formative for Latin Christianity” (54), that “[Cicero's] thoughts remain influential in early modern Europe” (60), and that “the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century revived the knowledge of Greek and Latin” (79).

15 On anonymous Christianity, see Rahner, Karl, “Anonymous Christians,” Theological Investigations (trans. Bourke, David; 23 vols.; New York: Seabury Press, 1974) 6:390–98Google Scholar as well as Hillman, The Wider Ecumenicism. On Rahner's critical incorporation of and argument with German philosophical ideas, especially those of Kant and Heidegger, into his theology, see Kilby, Karen, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004) 14 Google Scholar.

16 The classic source on the relation between a sovereign lord (the suzerain) and his subject (the vassal) as it figures in the convenantal language employed in the Hebrew Bible is Moran, William L., “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” CBQ 25 (1963) 77–87 Google Scholar.

17 The “Decalogue for Dialogue” still survives, but it is now called “Dialogue Principles.” See “Dialogue Principles,” Dialogue Institute and Journal of Ecumenical Studies, http://dialogueinstitute.org/dialogue-principles/. For Knitter's discussion of ground rules and a priori commitments, and the objections that have been made against such preconditions, see Chapter 5 of Knitter, Paul F., One Earth, Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995)Google Scholar.

18 See A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World's Religions (ed. Hans Küng and Karl-Josef Kuschel; New York: Continuum, 1993).

19 Sacks, Jonathan, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken Books, 2005) 110 Google Scholar.

20 Ibid.