In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

141 12 Sustaining the Other: Tolerance as a Positive Ideal The modern conception of tolerance grew out of the exhaustion occasioned by the endless religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The various “edicts of tolerance” that brought this period to a close were formulated to permit the practice of sects that were distinct from the officially approved religions. As a result, tolerance, understood as a political ideal, came to have a primarily negative sense, one which ranges from the root meaning of “sustaining” or “enduring” some evil to the “forbearance” or “sufferance” of something not actually approved of.1 The difficulties of this concept can be expressed by raising the issue of the limit and validity of tolerance. How do we distinguish the tolerable from the intolerable? Why, in fact, should we practice tolerance? Is it simply to avoid the negative consequences of intolerance? What happens when we can avoid such consequences? Are we, then, free to practice intolerance ? As long as the concept of tolerance cannot itself afford an answer to these questions, it cannot stand as an independent political ideal. As dependent on the external criteria that we advance to justify it and draw its limits, it can always be undermined. Since such criteria, as history shows, are generally those of public expediency, such undermining is relatively easy. Such questions point to the need for a positive concept of tolerance, one whose analysis reveals its justification and limits. Tolerance and Empathy To develop this concept, it is necessary to draw the connection between tolerance and empathy. Given that empathy is a form of recognition, we need to remember how we recognize others. As I said, such recognition involves a double transfer. On the one hand, I transfer my sense of being a conscious subject to the appearing other. In this, I take myself as a standard. I assume that the other who behaves as I do in a given situation is a subject like myself. On the other hand, I also take the other as a standard. Here, I assume that were I in his situation, I would behave as he 142 E M B O D I M E N T S does. I thus transfer his sense of being a subject, as shown by his behavior, to myself. My ability to do so is what socialized me in the first place. Such socialization involved my learning the projects of others, that is, learning from them the behaviors that disclosed the senses of our common culture. Each time I continue this process, I let myself be guided by the other. I do so by imaginatively putting myself in his situation in order to regard the world in terms of his categories, his interpretations, his ways of making sense of the situation. The above allows us to draw the connection to tolerance. This is because it makes clear that recognizing another includes empathy in its basic etymological sense of feeling or experiencing in another person .2 To experience the world in and through another is to take up the other’s standpoint.3 Without the empathy that allows me to do this, the other that I grasp would not really be other. Granting this, my recognition of the other is characterized by a double perspective: that from my own and that from my other’s standpoint. Overlaid on the sense that I make of the world is the sense that the other bestows on it. My awareness of their incomplete coincidence does not just give me the otherness of the other, it also shows me the finitude and contingency of my own perspective . It is finite since my interpretation does not exhaust the sense that can be made out of a given situation. It is contingent since my very ability to imaginatively take up the other’s standpoint shows that my own standpoint could have been different. The interpretation that expresses my perspective is thus deprived of any inherent necessity. It is situated as one of many possible interpretations. The tie to tolerance comes insofar as tolerance implies the acceptance of the other as other. This means that we let the other be other, that we not try to force the other to be or behave as we do. Even if we do not choose to disclose the world as he does, it implies that we continue to affirm the other’s ideals, his standards of sense-making, as his. As Husserl puts this, in mutual...

Share