Comment enchaîner ? Réflexions sur le déchaînement de la pensée tolérante

Eighteenth-century intellectual debates may sometimes be used to reveal the issues at stake in contemporary ones as does for example the controversy between Mendelssohn and Christian Wilhelm Dohm about the emancipation of the Jews: what matters to Mendelssohn beyond the question of the rights of the Jews as a religious minority, is the recognition of fundamental natural rights on which the recognition of civil rights can be established.Mendelssohn opposes a communitarian misinterpretation of the issue of equal rights, rejecting thus the confusion between liberalism and laissez-faire. US-American debates on freedom of religious thought, in which religious tolerance, relativism and freedom are often used to justify discrimination, show how perfectly right he was as a man ahead of his time.Pluralism does not mean that all assertions are acceptable as a principle; in fact, quite the opposite is true: it presupposes that they are acceptable in principle, i.e. that they meet the requirement of pluralism.This article confronts Habermas’s theoretical models with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s, and analyses the contribution of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. Lyotard’s essential idea is to encourage the acceptance of diversity of opinion, provided it does not jeopardise democracy, and to maintain the dialogue, without surrendering to reasons that are not recognised as better ones. A commitment that is not hopelessly dogmatic must allow the dialogue to flow in a discursive way.