I recently read a paradigm-shifting book on the importance of recognition in contemporary life. In The Course of Recognition, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur narrates the history of “thought events” related to the concept of “recognition” beginning with how two French dictionaries define the term. This course of recognition provides a basis for understanding how recognition as a cognitive event is interlinked with self-recognition and eventual mutual recognition in the political and social sense. The importance of this work is how it foregrounds the ability of human beings to interactively affirm or deny identity in and through gestures, talk, and narratives that take into account the alterity of other human persons. As anthropologist Janelle Taylor mentions in her brilliant essay on recognition in dementia care, “what begins in the sovereign self’s active intellectual ‘recognition’ of external objects ends in the socially and politically embedded subject’s passive receipt of ‘recognition’ granted by others.” This sociopolitical recognition takes place in the intersubjective realm where misrecognition is always possible. It is a fragile accomplishment to be recognized in his sociopolitical way.
As Ricoeur explains, it is this struggle for recognition that often motivates the workings of economic and political competition for “economies of standing”, because the many different overlapping social worlds in contemporary society do not distribute recognition in an equitable way. What Ricoeur means here is that the recognition lawyers receive for their excellence in their profession does not necessarily translate into terms recognized by painters, singers, physicians, or politicians. Each profession in our contemporary society has its own world of meaning, and understanding across them is often hard to achieve. Foreseeing the social conflicts inherent in this struggle for recognition, Ricoeur also proposes that a “superabundance” of love and recognition continues to be available across the divisions of social worlds in the form of “agape” and the social practice of gift giving. Gift giving in its festive sense operates in a realm that is not determined by rules of reciprocity. It is not obligated but free to create the potential for gestures that achieve mutual recognition that affirms the identities of the givers. In this way, gift giving balances between the need and quest for recognition of self and other, identity and alterity.
Now, I go as a chaplain to visit someone with dementia, I go because it is my job. When we as clinicians visit someone who has dementia, we go because this is within our scope of work. As a hospice or hospital chaplain, I go in order to provide spiritual care. I listen to the person’s account of themselves, if they can provide it. I also change my approach and strategy if I find that they cannot talk. No matter what I find in the encounter, I make sure to spend enough time with the person so that I can imagine them in the fullness of life. Depending on my state of mind, I am more or less successful in doing this, more or less successful at recognizing them as persons and noticing their situation and accepting them for who they are as they appear to me in the moment and as I can imagine them. I have limited time, and I cannot sit with them beyond thirty minutes or an hour in most cases. However, I bring with me memories of all the care I have given to family and friends, my care relationships with my grandfather, mother, brother, children. These external relationships of care enter into the room with me, not only in moments where persons remind me of family, but also in how I have learned through care as a practice to make space for mutual recognition to take place. This spiritually grounded and present way of being with others is a gift of time, agape in the truest sense of the word, because it is the place from which compassion arises and it has not expectation of return.
