To Be Thoughtful of the Other

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V

ERESS

K

ÁROLY

T

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B

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HOUGHTFUL OF THE

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Abstract: In my paper I examine the question of tolerance. In the first part of the discussion I follow up the process in the course of which the problem of tolerance appearing in connection to the practice of religious freedom in the 17^th-18^th centuries leaves the territory of religious morality and the relation of church and state, and is placed into the empirical sphere of a general human relation to the otherness of the other, and with it to the private sphere of the individual. However, the intolerance continuously present in our life world still keeps the question in the forefront of theoretical interest. In the second part of the paper I examine the relationship of tolerance and intolerance, proving that the tolerance conceived as the experience of being tolerated induced intolerance.

This situation can be exceeded by a change of attitude outlined by philosophical hermeneutics, the essence of which is the practical and behavioral application of the principle of “being thoughtful of the other”.

The history of European philosophy has always been concerned with the question of the relationship of one and many, or singularity and multiplicity. This has never been an arbitrary interest, since at the same time it has always been one of the basic problems of the European man’s self- interpretation. The human being as an authentic being can be thought of as a unity which in all its individuals possesses the basic features of a human being. However, human existence in its actual experienced reality is divided into a multiplicity of individuals, persons, and personalities, and it is characterized by the difference of its purposes, interests, endeavors, relational and action forms, as well as by the variety of its cultures.

Veress Károly,

Professor, Ph.D., Department of Systematic Philosophy, Faculty of History and Philosophy, Babeş-Bolyai University. He is author of the books: Paradox (tudat)állapotok (Paradox states (of

consciousness)) (1996); A nemzedékváltás szerepe a kultúrában (The cultural role of the change of generations) (1999); Filozófiai szemiotika (Philosophical semiotics) (1999); Kisebbségi létproblémák (Problems of minority existence) (2000); Egy létparadoxon színe és visszája.

Hermeneutikai kísérlet a nem lehet-probléma megnyitására (The ups and downs of an existential paradox. A hermeneutic experiment for the opening of the problem of not possible) (2003); Az értelem értelméről. Hermeneutikai vizsgálódások I. (On the meaning of meaning.

Hermeneutical investigations I.) (2003); Fiinţa generaţională şi destinul culturii (Generational existence and the fate of culture) (2003); A megértés csodájáról. Hermeneutikai vizsgálódások II. (On the miracle of understanding.

Hermeneutical investigations II.) (2006); Bevezetés a

hermeneutikába (Introduction to hermeneutics) (2007).

Email: [email protected]

How can these two sets of experiences be reconciled? How is it possible to convey

multiplicity by singularity? The problem of tolerance is rooted in these matters.

Key Words:

religious tolerance, freedom of consciousness, tolerance, intolerance, allowance, otherness, rationality, change of attitude, philosophical hermeneutics.

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Veress Károly To Be Thoughtful of the Other

The problem of tolerance

The question of tolerance appeared in modern European history as a philosophical, political, and theological problem of religious tolerance and freedom of consciousness, in the period beginning with the evolution of the Reformation, accompanying the unfolding of European modernity until the age of the Enlightenment in connection to the spreading of liberal and rationalist spirituality.¹ Its appearance is connected to a well-defined historical period, the re-organization of the religious, political, and ethical relations of the European man. Looking back in history, one can see that the question of tolerance appeared in the age of the Enlightenment in connection to the attempts to cease the impatience and enmity caused by denominational differences; it appeared first as an issue of political philosophy and practical politics, in 17^th -18^th century England, France, and Germany. In effect, the overall problem of tolerance is much more deeply rooted in the self-interpretation and life experience of modern man. It is equally present in the life of the contemporary man on the level of experiences and intellectual reflexions. It provokes our prejudices, moral gestures, and human relationships on a daily basis, and thus nobody can escape it.

The philosophical content of the problem is organized around the questioning of the possibilities of “the permission of a certain religious opinion or moral behavior”. Its appearance is rooted in the Protestant considerations aiming at the renewal of religious and moral life, and the individual’s intellectual and confessional liberation. The idea of tolerance was grounded by ideals such as: there is nothing more powerful than a free consciousness; constraint and persecution can only give birth to hypocrisy and not faith; faith is only given to men by God’s mercy, and it cannot be forced from the outside, by cult; faith belongs to the intimate sphere of the relationship of man and God, and does not require the care of ecclesiastical power; any kind of aggressive, external unification of subjective faith and inner religiousness leads to the death of faith; the Church is the willful, voluntary association of the congregation. Protestantism had started from the concealed premise of the psychological, intellectual and religious autonomy and freedom of the moral individual, the self-sufficient human personality reclining upon its own reason and experiences. The new kind of human self-interpretation delineating at the beginning of modernity was constructed upon the man’s individual, personal, and intimate relationship to God. The ideas connecting to the sublime loneliness, singularity, and non-repeatability of the moral individual standing alone against God had a decisive role in its creation. All this has outlined a basic principle for the foundation of tolerance and freedom of consciousness: no man is authorized to force the salvation of his fellow-humans; one can attain one’s salvation only in accordance with one’s own conviction.

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Mária Ludassy, an outstanding researcher of the period, sketches the important instances which guide the essential changes in relation to the problem of tolerance during the age of modernity. The problem of tolerance was powerfully raised for the first time in the relationship of the church and the state, connected to the ways that the intolerant religious communities could be made religiously tolerant by means of state power.

Later, as the church became national and partly subordinated to secular state power, tolerance has turned into a “political concession”. Then, as a result of the further decrease of the political role and weight of the Church, the question of tolerance gradually turned from a religious political concession into a “principle of religious philosophy”. Thus the problem of tolerance has left the scope of the problem of religious freedom, both in its moral and political references,² and it has been placed to the empirical spheres where the experience of multiplicity and the need for relating to the others’ otherness appeared as a new experience. Thus the question of tolerance has gradually shifted from a church and state relation to a state and nation relation, while in the places where state borders did not coincide with the expansion of a national community, the phenomenon of national intolerance has emerged. At the same time, the moral- philosophical way of argumentation in the sphere of politics has been changed with a strong Machiavellian political argumentation. The truth hidden in statements such as John Locke’s, according to which the best way to turn a group of people into enemies is to start persecuting them,³ has also become apparent. On the basis of such considerations intolerance has begun to be regarded as “foolish politics” or “the stupidity of politicians”.⁴ All this reveals the ambivalence of Enlightenment – its religious and its social- political aspect –, and the need to differentiate them, as H.-G. Gadamer calls our attention in his essay on the idea of tolerance.⁵

As the autonomous human personality started to gain ground, another important transformation has taken place. The modern man has gradually obtained his relative independence and has validated his individuality not only against religious and ecclesiastical, but also against secular and political power. From the range of the ecclesiastical and political institutional framework encompassing larger groups of people, the problem of tolerance has been transposed to the private sphere of the individual, and the practicing of a tolerant or intolerant behavior has become dependent of the decisions of the individual, that it, it has turned into a private matter. On the level of the individual the acceptance or rejection of tolerant behavior can happen on the basis of several motivations. Its cause may equally be a certain external requirement of conformity, or an internal conviction based on consciousness. The former is nothing else in fact than a sort of prolonging towards the individual of the previously mentioned “political concession”, while the latter preserves even in the sphere of individual morality something of the old organic relationship of tolerance and the wider sphere of (religious) morality.

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The essence of this process is excellently grasped by Gadamer’s idea which reveals the connection between the edict of tolerance issued in the Habsburg Empire at the end of the 18^th century and the real nature of state power. The premise of such an edict which guarantees religious freedom – argues Gadamer – is the unquestionable inviolability of the Christian character of state order and society. By all means, it does not mean the insurance of the equality of those who think differently or of political pluralism. On the contrary, tolerance is an expression not of weakness, but of strength and power. That what is tolerated is actually confined to the sphere of internal and private life, and the free practice of one’s religious convictions. Thus, the practice of tolerance towards the other becomes on the one hand a moral and humane existential conviction of the individual as an effect of the fact that state power guarantees it. On the other hand, the fact that the contemporary state also considers it as a responsibility to guarantee religious tolerance and the right to freedom is the expression of a new kind of state consciousness which is rooted in the yet unexhausted inheritance of the Enlightenment.⁶

These having been said, it seems that tolerance has lately become a kind of accepted life practice, and the decision regarding a tolerant or intolerant behavior is almost entirely up to the individual, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to force it out by external intervention. Furthermore, it also seems that on account of this situation the problem has left the interest of a theoretical approach. Certain philosophers – mainly those who approach the question from the direction of political philosophy – consider that, philosophically speaking, we have left behind the age in which it has still been possible to reasonably speak about tolerance as the permission of a religious opinion or a moral conduct.⁷

Could the problem of tolerance indeed be left on the periphery of their interest?

Our experiences prove that the challenges of this problem cannot be set aside with such ease, because this problem addresses us in our direct environment, often exactly by our personal involvement.

The experience of intolerance

One regards tolerance on the one hand as an unconditioned value, and on the other hand as a historical achievement, which could as well be lost.

Intolerance can be experienced daily both in the institutional, organizational, and power systems of the society, and on the microstructural level of our everyday life world.

In the life world of the contemporary man, tolerance appears as the problem of the plurality of mentalities and life forms, as well as the question of the tolerance or even acceptance of diversity and difference. In a general respect, it seems that the circle of mutual acceptance and permission widens as the individual and collective life worlds and

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experience acquiring possibilities become more open, and as the relations of communication and the degree of freedom of human activities increase.

In a professional language, the readiness for tolerance and acceptance increases. Still, our everyday life experiences stand as evidence for the repeated manifestation or even continuous presence of intolerance in the most diverse circumstances. The modern communication techniques make it even more exaggerated, but at the same time sophisticated and concealed as well. The intolerance nesting in our world is often induced by the discourse of tolerance and democracy which, instead of giving voice to the actual patience towards each other, tries to legitimate intolerant manifestations and practices by the (pseudo-)democratic gesture of tolerance towards intolerance. Intolerance, equally at home in the sphere of politics, ideology, and morality, makes its way into our interpersonal relationships, and enmeshes all our power-structured existential situations, all the way to our most intimate private life.

The intolerance that has lately presented itself in our life world refers to the fact that the bourgeois society and the civil sphere can become such feeding media of intolerance as the sphere of politics and power. It is by no means exaggerated to state that general human intolerance has found its place in our accelerated and desultory world one-sidedly prone to efficiency.

The intolerance which is part of our lives usually acts in two opposite directions. It is not only the representatives of global and power structures and universally valid processes that are intolerant towards local, particular, and provincial manifestations, but provincialism and local spirit in its self-contained world is equally or even more intolerant to both directions: both towards the power structure above it, and the other kinds of provincial and local manifestations. But if we look into ourselves, we can also see that we do not only suffer the intolerance of others, but we are not tolerant ourselves towards others. We are often incapable of assessing what we are, or are not, ready to endure, what is the limit of our tolerance.

The most varied of circumstances can play a role in making a man intolerant. If one does not possess enough knowledge, or sees one’s interests in danger, or considers unity a more important existential value than diversity, or cannot break out of the closure of one’s prejudices and experiences, and is incapable of openness, if one considers oneself the unfailing possessor of the only truth, then one easily becomes inclined to intolerance. The existential situations endangered from the outside mostly become inwardly intolerant as well towards the otherness, opposition, and all kind of openness of their own medium. The psychological pressure coming from above/outside also has a role to play in this: if continuously considered intolerant or being forced to live in an intolerant group or environment, a person may become intolerant as well after a while.

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The relationship of tolerance and intolerance

One cannot escape the question: what is the explanation of the increasing, or at least permanently sustained and reproduced intolerance?

I argue that the essence of the problem is tolerance itself.

The term “tolerance” is often used today, but we rarely think of its actual meaning. However, should we do that, one could see that it is in fact the product of a situation which is essentially intolerant, of which otherness and its acceptance is not a natural state. Intolerant – both ways: towards the outside and towards the inside; towards others, and towards itself. The principle and practice of tolerance is the attempt to a solution rooting in intolerant situations. Therefore it cannot be separated entirely from intolerance.

Tolerance is usually formed or becomes necessary in connection to something which has not been accepted for a long time. It often appears as a kind of extra effort to accept something which is naturally not accepted in itself. Tolerance means allowance, permission, patience towards the other and towards diversity, and not necessarily acceptance or recognition.

However, only that can and must be allowed which is not regarded as natural and good, but rather as something bad, something that one would naturally escape from or eliminate rather than accept to live with it. Still, what could be the cause of this allowance and the effort accompanying it?

The effort of tolerance is the effort of withholding and inhibition, which is directed to the neutralization of the rejection of the other and otherness.

Thus, it is an effort to one’s withholding, that is, the reversal of the constraint applied to the other, and its application to ourselves. Therefore tolerance can be maintained only by a continuous effort, and when this effort stops, it may possibly turn into intolerance.

The state of tolerance is thus a state of forced necessity, and indeed not a state of freedom. It might seem paradoxical, but it is not, that the tolerance obtained by force is actually intolerant, and an aggressively practiced tolerance necessarily brings about intolerance. It is not easy to decide whether it is intolerance which enforces tolerance, or vice-versa.

They often mutually enforce each other.

Furthermore, it always remains an open question to establish how far the allowance of otherness can reach. Where are the limits between allowance and patience? It is a general experience that otherness can demonstrate itself in a great variety of ways. In the case of more tolerant relations, it can even take on extreme forms which actually endanger the existent order, or the values of others. Tolerance opens up the possibility of the integration of otherness, its adaptation in a tolerated or even accepted way to the frameworks of a given order and way of life. On the other hand, it can generalize its continuously incentive presence by its difference.

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The experience of being tolerated

A further question arises in connection to those said before: who is tolerant? According to our previous investigations it seems that tolerance, whether regarded as a political practice or a philosophical or moral principle, is a strategy (or tactics) of one or more persons to manage a situation or a certain state of things. The tolerant person is someone who could be intolerant as well, but in a given situation considers tolerance as a more reasonable, efficient, and practical approach. Thus, tolerance itself is the expression of a power relation. It is a self-reinforcing and at the same time self-legitimating strategy of power, which can have double consequences: a) it can be the stabilization of a given power relation, as the most reasonable and efficient situation, worth to be maintained; b) the stabilization of the situation of the tolerated in a given state of tolerance, and the exhibition of tolerance as a positive value. This however does not make the given situation more acceptable, nor does it make the tolerated people feel better in their situation.

Being tolerated is essentially a stigmatized situation. An openly strategic tolerance continuously reminds the tolerated of his toleratedness.

The tolerated always senses the relativity of the situation, the endangered state of tolerance, as it can always shift to intolerance. The state of tolerance therefore essentially limits the human evolution of the tolerated, and thus it proves to be a contradictory and even paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it deprives the tolerated of the free manifestation of their concrete human rights and values, of the achievement of the possibilities to do so, and on the other hand it insures a framework of possibilities which is outlined not by the needs of the tolerated, but by the limits of tolerance, and makes the tolerated accept it. In other words, it urges the tolerated to accept an existential situation which externally, artificially limits his actual evolution, and at the same time it makes impossible for him to stand up against these limits. From a universal human viewpoint, the existential situation of the tolerated is therefore a situation unworthy of man.

The unworthiness of tolerance mainly comes from the situation that the relation of tolerance also presumes the tolerance of the tolerated towards those who are tolerant with him. It asks for his tolerance towards power, the others’ power over him. This is the trap of tolerance: in the formation of its own situation the tolerated does not only start from the tolerance of those opposed to him, but from the real human needs and aspirations deriving from his situation: from the need of asserting his own freedom and dignity. Therefore his behavior and stance towards the power structures tolerating him may even transform into intolerance. And this considerably increases the probability that the tolerance towards him may sooner or later change into intolerance.

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Occasionally one may find arguments that it would be more appropriate to replace the term of tolerance by that of freedom. However, in fact it would not be more appropriate. Tolerance does not mean freedom either for the tolerant, or for the tolerated side. The movement of tolerance towards freedom could only be measured by the diminution of the constraint. Thus, in a life form which needs and creates tolerance, freedom can be attained at most as the lack of constraint, but this is not identical with an existential situation in which freedom unfolds as a positive value.

The problem of otherness

Is there any way out of this trapping situation?

These days it is not only the mutual inducement of tolerance and intolerance that one can witness, but also the diversification of othernesses. With the extension of tolerance, the othernesses are revived and become stronger. Due to mass communication, the othernesses simply become visible. The globalization processes render problematic even those kinds of othernesses which have previously not had a direct contact with us. With the degradation of totalitarian systems and the strengthening of particularities and regional characteristics, everybody tries to display his own otherness. Thus the surface of the confrontation of tolerance and intolerance also largely increases.

The basic existential problem of modern man is the fact that the self- based individual, the autonomous personality has to adapt to the homogenizing and universal structures of community and/or organizational-institutional rationality. Therefore he has to divide his life according to the division between public and private sphere, the institutional structures and his life world. The former acts towards uniformization and unification, while in the latter it is the individual, subjective freedom which builds its own spaces, looking for its possibilities of self-assertion. The medium of the encounter between the two spheres – which is the scene, at the same time, of both the effort of the public sphere to extend itself to the private sphere, and that of the private sphere to assert itself in opposition to the public sphere – is civil society itself. The main problem in this situation arises from the fact that the human constitution of the modern European man is itself double-faced, in accordance with this dichotomy: in relation to his institutional connections, it is conformist and intolerant, while in its private manifestations it tends to be open to otherness and diversity. The more the structures of rationalization restrict the scope of the life world, the more intolerant the modern man will become in his private sphere.

According to J. Habermas’ hypothesis, who outlined the philosophical and sociological implications of the problem,⁸ the techniques and methods of rationalization consider the human being an abstract subject. The

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subject-centered viewpoint accompanying this view urges the extension of the rational arguments of the abstract subject, and the containment of otherness into the field of reason. In this context only that appears as real what is reasonable, what is subordinated to the central reason which invades organization and techniques. Thus the chance of displaying diversity and tolerance is largely placed into the life world, and its possibility to unfold is the greater the more it has the possibility to free itself from the totalizing rational and power structures of rationalization.

But in order to achieve this, the organizational forms and assertive processes of rationality should be changed as well. Habermas sees this possibility in the evolution of communicative rationality: that is, in the practice of the communicative processes of agreement and collaboration based on free discussion which reveals at the same time the truthfulness, normative requirements and authenticity of our message.⁹

But does this adequately solve the most important question: the question of the relation to otherness and the Other, the problem of otherness? It is clear that for the authentic posing of the question of otherness, one has to leave behind the totalizing approach of dominant rationality, unifying everything according to universal rational arguments.

Similarly, one must exceed that kind of subject-centered approach which can think of the relation to otherness only as an extension of the I, of the personal to the other, which is a general feature of emancipatory discourses.

In all events, it seems that under the actual circumstances two options emerge; one alternative is the reproduction of tolerance (and intolerance with it), the other is the transcendence of the existential situation based on the dichotomy of tolerance and intolerance.

The possibility of changing attitude

The possibility of transcendence can be condensed into one single expression: the change of attitude. The ground of approach to this matter is offered by one of the great achievements of 20^th century philosophical thinking: philosophical hermeneutics.

The problem of otherness was actually discovered and elaborated in all its depth by 20^th century philosophy, but its antecedents date back to the beginning of the 19^th century, to Hegel’s concept of experience (the experience of negativity) and to Romanticism, which also appeared as a kind of opposition or a similar change of attitude against the intolerance of the rationalism of 18^th century Enlightenment.

The question of the other’s otherness in relation to my otherness, as the question of the unity of my identity and my possibility to become another, and my self-understanding and existential understanding based on this, appears almost simultaneously in various trends of contemporary philosophy. The problem, in connection to the I-You relationship, is raised

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by phenomenology (A. Schütz), religious philosophy (M. Buber), Heideggerian existential philosophy, and it is present in Lévinas’ and Ricoeur’s recent thinking.¹⁰ However, the question is most efficiently and comprehensively dealt with by H.-G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

In what sense does philosophical hermeneutics open up a novel perspective? Its novelty and productivity can best be grasped by the fact that it shifts the essence of the problem of otherness towards us from the scope of the outside world, the circumstances, the environmental factors and the human relations and institutions being built by their mediation, and makes it our own problem. The change has to occur with us, inside us, and through us even before the net of institutional structures and communication techniques and the interpersonal relations of the life world can be reformed and adequately “humanized”. In the horizon of the problem of tolerance it is our attitude towards ourselves, the world, and the things within it that must be changed with regard to our disposition to otherness.

The problem is raised in the following way: how can we interpret and understand our human existence in relation to otherness? As something which emerges from foreignness outside and beyond us, and steps into our life in such a way that it forces us to accept this foreignness, even by violence? Or as something which has always belonged to us as an organic part of our world and experience, and consequently as something that we could not leave out from our actual life without the risk of canceling ourselves along with it. The mere recognition and understanding of the fact that we can get to the conscious acknowledgement and understanding of our belonging to otherness is actually based on our belonging to otherness, which has always existed, even before we consciously acknowledged it.

The essence of the hermeneutic problem can probably be best expressed by the term of “being thoughtful of the other”. This expression draws out the problem from under the several misunderstandings connected to the I-You and I-Other relations. The reflexive approaches to this matter encompass a large space, from the possibilities of the direct and unconditioned identification of the I with the other all the way to the circumstances which create the conditions of the objectifying, instrumentalized possession and alienation of the other. The misunderstandings are not related primarily to the content of the subject;

instead, they are connected to matters of approach and structure. They derive from the fact that in the relationship of the I and the other they see a real relationship with two actors, as if this relationship would actually depend on how they relate to each other. In other words, the approach which depends on such a dual structural framework reduces the relationship of the I and the other on an abstract scheme utterly lacking any concreteness of human life and world just as much as it has previously claimed the

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abstraction of the individual in itself. However, no matter how impressive the voicing of the personal closeness of the You might be, or the mystification of immediacy (being closer to the other than to ourselves!) and its determined opposition to the ruthless experience of the objectification of ourselves, it takes us nothing closer to the essence of the problem.

This is so because the essence of the problem does not lie here in fact.

The idea of “being thoughtful of the other” leads us much closer to it.

“Being thoughtful” creates a situation, and brings with itself a viewpoint and a horizon opening up from it, in which we find ourselves in a common situation and a common horizon with the other, but not by identifying with each other. Instead, we all appear in front of the other with our concrete aptitudes and experiences and bring our needs and expectations to that common ground in which we meet precisely by and because of finding ourselves drawn into an extensive, common relation of meaning.

While “being thoughtful”, the other may get into the sphere of my regard because my regard falls onto the thing that he is doing, and onto the relation of meaning which opens up towards me, addressing me and involving me into its own range in such a way that the inquiring opening of my concerned regard is already an answer to the question addressed to me.

While “being thoughtful”, we meet each other in this common thing as in a commonly built relation of meaning. This encounter has the advantage that, by the horizon of our regard falling on the common relation of meaning opening up by our mutual participation, we always see at a greater distance than our closeness. Just as the regard opening up towards the other does not fall on the other, but on the thing “regarded” by the other, we can truly see our thing in its projection onto ourselves. In the Truth and Method Gadamer formulates the essence of being thoughtful of the other as follows: [it is] “not the sensing of one individuality within another, nor is it the subordination of the other to our own standards, but always an elevation to a higher generality, which not only defeats our own particularity, but also that of the other.”¹¹

It is only this approach that can reveal the essential relationship, exceeding superficial connections, of modern human existentiality and tolerance, to which the conclusions of Gadamer’s essay also lead. In the hermeneutic horizon of the mutual relation of the I and the Other, tolerance does not emerge only as a behavioral virtue, which can be acquired by learning and self-instruction, but as an existential basis of our moral behavior consciously building upon the otherness of the other and the plurality of the othernesses living together with our human beings.¹² Looking back from here, the moral truth hidden within religious experience – as Gadamer points it out – can gain its ultimate legitimacy in the extensive existential foundation of general human tolerance.¹³

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Bibliography:

Buber, Martin. Eu şi Tu (I and You). Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1992.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Igazság és módszer. Egy filozófiai hermeneutika vázlata (Truth and Method. An outline of philosophical hermeneutics).

Budapest: Gondolat, 1984.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Ideea de toleranţă 1782-1982.” (The idea of tolerance 1782-1982), 77–87. In Elogiul teoriei; Moştenirea Europei. (The praise of theory; The inheritence of Europe) Iaşi: Polirom, 1999.

Habermas, Jürgen. “A cselekvésracionalitás aspektusai.” (Aspects of action rationality), 223–257. In Válogatott tanulmányok (Selected studies).

Budapest: Atlantisz, 1994.

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Nyelv és közelség (Language and proximity). Pécs:

Tanulmány Kiadó–Jelenkor Kiadó, 1997.

Locke, John. Levél a vallási türelemről (Epistola de tolerantia) (Epistle on religious tolerance). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982.

Ludassy Mária. “A toleranciától a szabadságig. Anglia 300 éve egy eszme történetének tükrében” (From tolerance to freedom. 300 years of England in the mirror of the history of an idea). Világosság, Május, 1987, 3–

33.

Ricoeur, Paul. “Az én és az elbeszélt azonosság.” (The I and the narrated identity), 373–411. In Válogatott irodalomelméleti tanulmányok (Selected studies in literary theory). ed. Szegedy-Maszák Mihály. Budapest:

Osiris Kiadó, 1999.

Schütz, Alfred. “Az idegen.” (The alien), 405–413. In A fenomenológia a társadalomtudományban (Phenomenology in the social sciences). ed. Hernádi Miklós. Budapest: Gondolat, 1984.

Notes:

1 According to Mária Ludassy, an outstanding knower and analyzer of this period,

“The Reformation was Europe’s great chance to preserve its moral unity by spiritual diversity, and the universality of its culture by individual rights”. – Ludassy Mária, “A toleranciától a szabadságig. Anglia 300 éve egy eszme történetének tükrében” (From tolerance to freedom. 300 years of England in the mirror of the history of an idea), Világosság, May, 1987, 3.

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2 In France, for instance, where religious tolerance has been a subject of skeptical philosophy and pragmatic politics, “the idea of religious freedom had actually won only when it meant a freedom from religion: in the time of the French Enlightenment and during the French Revolution”. – Ludassy, 3.

3 John Locke, Levél a vallási türelemről (Epistola de tolerantia) (Epistle on religious tolerance) (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), 44–6.

4 Ludassy, 32.

5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Ideea de toleranţă 1782-1982.” (The idea of tolerance 1782-1982) In Elogiul teoriei; Moştenirea Europei (The praise of theory; The inheritance of Europe) (Iaşi: Polirom, 1999), 77.

6 Gadamer, 79-80.

7 Ludassy, 18.

8 Jürgen Habermas. “A cselekvésracionalitás aspektusai.” (Aspects of action rationality) In Válogatott tanulmányok (Selected studies), ed. Felkai Gábor (Budapest:

Atlantisz, 1994), 236–249.

9 Habermas, 249-257.

10 Alfred Schütz, “Az idegen.” (The alien) In A fenomenológia a társadalomtudományban (Phenomenology in the social sciences), ed. Hernádi Miklós (Budapest: Gondolat, 1984), 405–413; Martin Buber, Eu şi Tu (I and You) (Bucureşti:

Humanitas, 1992), 29–60; Emmanuel Lévinas, Nyelv és közelség (Language and proximity) (Pécs: Tanulmány Kiadó–Jelenkor Kiadó, 1997), 25–40; Paul Ricoeur, “Az én és az elbeszélt azonosság.” (The I and the narrated identity) In Válogatott irodalomelméleti tanulmányok (Selected studies in literary theory), ed. Szegedy- Maszák Mihály (Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 1999), 373–411.

11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Igazság és módszer.Egy filozófiai hermeneutika vázlata (Truth and Method. An outline of philosophical hermeneutics) (Budapest: Gondolat, 1984), 216.

12 Gadamer, “Ideea de toleranţă 1782-1982” (The idea of tolerance 1782-1982), 86.

13 Gadamer, “Ideea de toleranţă 1782-1982” (The idea of tolerance 1782-1982), 85.