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Toleration Without Tolerance Enlightenment and the Image of Reason Lars Tønder The experience of chaos, both on the speculative and the other level, prompts us to see rationalism in a historical perspective which it set itself on principle to avoid, to seek a philosophy which explains the upsurge of reason in a world not of its making and to prepare the substructure of living experience without which reason and liberty are emptied of their content and wither away. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception The Ontological Imaginary of Reason Contemporary attempts to justify tolerance and toleration converge on the importance of reason. The argument for this, on behalf of what we might call the ‘‘model of reasonable toleration,’’ is that reason is available to everyone who is willing to give to others what they want for themselves. Its laws apply universally, and even though its results are more reliable than those that come from other sources of knowledge, it is always open to revision. This makes it the right candidate for being the ‘‘neutral’’ yet ‘‘case-sensitive’’ arbitrator in societies with conflicting notions of the common good. As Rainer Forst, a prominent advocate of reasonable toleration, argues, ‘‘Persons are tolerant to the extent that, even though they disagree with others about the nature of the good and true life, they tolerate all other views within the bounds of reciprocity and generality. This is why toleration is a virtue of justice and a demand of reason.’’1 This essay addresses the ontological presuppositions that circumscribe this kind of argument. It does so through the notion of what I call ‘‘the ontological imaginary of reason.’’ This term of art designates a loose gathering of world images that seek to make sense of what rea3 27 LARS TO / N DE R son is. The way it does so may change over time, but its purpose is always to connect abstractions about human existence with the embodied expressions through which citizens ‘‘image’’ their social circumstances. The imaginary is in that sense akin to what Hegel calls Gedanken in das Vorstellen, that is, a mode of ‘‘picture thinking’’ that presents itself through performances and storytelling.2 But unlike Hegel, who seeks to overcome picture thinking, this essay makes no such attempt. To the contrary, I suggest that we view the underlying performances and stories as the most profound way of expressing the nature of reason. I do so because the performances and stories, invoking the embodied circumstances under which reason arises, operate just as much in the register of affect as in the register of explicit consciousness. They connect, we might say, the procedural nature of reason to the bodily dispositions that sustain this nature. The importance of this connection is evident once we realize how the model of reasonable toleration legitimizes itself through privileging a limited group of Enlightenment thinkers, among which the most prominent are Locke and Kant. At first, this privileging may seem uncontroversial because of the originality with which these thinkers approach the issues of tolerance and toleration. But the closer we look, the more evident it becomes that at stake is a particularly contentious version of the ontological imaginary of reason. This version begins by depicting reason as a disembodied faculty of cognition. It then draws a strict dividing line between those aspects of human existence that matter ontologically and those that are indifferent. Moreover, it tries to ensure that any analysis of tolerance and toleration adheres to three imperatives of thought: namely, neutrality, dispassionateness , and systematicity. Both aspects—the identification of the indifferent and the three imperatives—then lead to an image of reason in which reason organizes its activities independently of how those who embody these activities experience the world on an everyday basis. I claim that this image is flawed because of its tendency to misrecognize the bodily dispositions from which reason arises. I also claim that this tendency prevents the model of reasonable toleration from approaching the issues of tolerance and toleration in a way that appreciates the unique nature of both. But I would like to emphasize that the defense of these claims is not the prospect of articulating the real essence of tolerance and toleration . It may be that there is such an essence, but it is unlikely that we, in the event it appeared, would be able to recognize its form and content. Rather, I defend my claims by showing how the effect that the image produces (as opposed to...

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