Habermas, Jürgen

Tolerance Makes Great Demands. Jürgen Habermas Shows What Is Involved

In modern, pluralist societies, people of different backgrounds and religions live as neighbours and diverse, in part contradictory, values and life-projects knock up against each other. The question how peaceable living together is possible in such societies has made the call for (more) tolerance wax ever louder.

Yet tolerance, says the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, makes great demands. In various writings, for instance, in his lecture When Must We Be Tolerant? On the Rivalry of World-Views, Values and Theories (Wann müssen wir tolerant sein? Über die Konkurrenz von Weltbildern, Werten und Theorien, 2002) and in his most recent collection of essays Between Naturalism and Religion (Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, 2005), he has shown in what these demands consist.

Tolerance and prejudice

By tolerance, says Habermas, we commonly understand putting up with divergent convictions. The concept thus contains an element of rejection since we can in fact only demonstrate tolerance towards convictions that we have renounced for good subjective reasons.

Tolerance is not indifference, for indifference towards alien convictions and practices, or even appreciating the value of the other and otherness, would make tolerance pointless. At the same time, the reasons for which a certain position is rejected must be looked upon publicly as legitimate ones. “Tolerance may be spoken of only when the participants can rationally base their rejection on a continuing non-agreement”. Not every rejection is rational and must be accorded toleration. “We meet the racist or the chauvinist not with a call for tolerance, but with the demand that he overcome his prejudices”.

Cognitive Rejection without Practical Consequences

The rejection inherent in tolerance is thus radical. Tolerance is located where non-negotiable fundamental convictions meet and no agreement can be expected. What is expected of a tolerant person is not some unresolvable contradiction between competing convictions. That must be accepted. "At issue is the neutralizing bracketing of specific practical consequences arising out of unresolved interpersonal contradiction". In other words, the demand is that no action should be allowed to follow from the collision of competing views.

Potential for Conflict: The Good Takes Precedence over the Just

Anyone who is not "metaphysically restricted" has an easier time with the demand that contradictions between competing views of the world should simply be left open. That becomes problematic for someone who derives an ethos, i.e. personal moral convictions, from a religion. After all every religion lays claim to total structuring of a way of life, orienting itself on an infallible doctrine of salvation which lays down what is good and what bad. A religion thus prescribes how a good life must be led. What is good takes precedence over what is just. For someone who derives his or her personal ethos from religious truths laying claim to universal validity, the burden of tolerance is particularly difficult to bear. As soon as his own ideas about right living are determined by generally binding models of the good or of salvation, there arises a perspective where other ways of life seem not only different but also mistaken. The ethos of the other appears as a question of truth or untruth rather than an assessment of values. That explains the potential for conflict implicit in disputes between religions.

Peaceful Co-Existence: The Just Takes Precedence over the Good

Following that model, religious tolerance does not signify that the adherents of some belief should relativize let alone renounce their own claims to truth and certainty. Instead tolerance calls for limitation of the practical impact of one’s own claims to truth and certainty. The demand is that the way of life prescribed by one’s own religion can only be implemented on condition that the same rights are accorded to all others. What is just takes precedence over what is good, and that precedence manifests itself positively in inter-subjective and supra-confessional recognition of the rules of liberal co-existence - as provided for in democracy and human rights as normative foundations of the constitutional state. So for the individual believer that means he can only implement his own ethos within the boundaries set by civic norms of equality. He recognizes the other as a fellow citizen with equal rights, no matter what his or her religious convictions might be.

Pluralist Societies

The expanded concept of tolerance does not remain restricted to the sphere of religion but can be generally extended to tolerance of others who think differently in any way. Within today’s pluralist societies where the traditions of various linguistic and cultural communities come together, tolerance is always necessary "where ways of life challenge judgements in terms of both existential relevance and claims to truth and rightness" (J. Habermas)

Jürgen Habermas: Wann müssen wir tolerant sein? Über die Konkurrenz von Weltbildern, Werten und Theorien (i.e. When Must We Be Tolerant? On the Rivalry of World-Views, Values and Theories), Lecture at the Leibniz Conference at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of the Sciences June 29, 2002; available on the internet under: http://www.bbaw.de/schein/habermas.html Jügen Habermas: Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/main 2005. 371 S., € 24,80; ISBN: 3518584480