On tolerance and fictitious publics

Abstract

The purpose of this paper 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. The important question to ask is whether the use of reason is threatening to the public. The background problem being examined here is the problem of the public. By raising this old problem in our era of digital transition it is here argued that the new technological environments is a precondition for the kind of Manifesto that Breivik has published online.