Against Fanatic Religious Delusion and the Fury of Destruction: Tolerance, Respect, and Recognition in Kant and Hegel

Abstract

This article reconstructs Kant's and Hegel's moral, political, and legal treatment of tolerance in the larger context of their philosophies of religion and freedom. Kant and Hegel have similar initial remarks on tolerance, religion, and fanaticism, then seem to separate when they resort respectively to respect and recognition-they agree in the end when the former defines intersubjective respect as recognition and the latter defines legal and political recognition as including respect. All of this allows us to better understand, first, the extent of their repulse of practical-religious dogmatism (superstition, fanaticism, violence), and secondly, that tolerance, in contrast to violent and superstitious fanaticism, is nothing more than a peculiar facet of respect and recognition.