Public Reason and Limits of Tolerance

The purpose of this presentation is to identify what is here called ‘fictitious public’. This is contrasted to Kant’s concept of public use of reason. One fundamental criterion of public use of reason is publicizability. This criterion involves addressing a universal audience, i.e. the willingness to expose contested arguments to public scrutiny. Making something available on the Internet may or may not be publicizable in this sense. On this background the case of Anders Behring Breivik’s Manifesto in connection with the terrorist act of July 22 in 2011 in Norway serves as a key case of the analysis. It is argued that fictitious opposes real in a sense that is different from virtual; whether the addressing is done in a real, offline or virtual, online context is not decisive of its being worthy of tolerance, as opposed to fictitious use of public reason.