ABSTRACT
Although tolerance is the primary ethical inheritance of the Enlightenment it was hardly the preferred solution through the long and bloody history of religious-based violence in Europe. Nonetheless, with the increasing fragmentation of the religious ‘superpowers’ after the Thirty Years War, the notion of religious tolerance became a more common means of coping, both philosophically and politically, with religious difference (Outram, 1995; Gay, 1977). The concept of tolerance is alive and well today in the field of philosophical ethics, safely inserted into debates between liberalism, cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. In these debates, however, it is assimilated to the traditional question of liberty. (What liberties are just and affordable in a society where not all can be free?) Yet while canonical ethical debates about tolerance take the identity of the individual or group as a starting point for reflexion about the nature of tolerance to be ascribed to them or claimed by them, we will in this chapter try to better understand the insecurity of our time by posing the question of tolerance as one at the heart of identity itself, and look for a response to the question of the modern-day relation between tolerance and security. The concept of tolerance is structured around a curious double logic,
based on a more or less contradictory relation to a directive, law, convention, custom, norm or ethical principle. Tolerance is the subject position from which one adopts or, at least recognizes the law or convention, and then simultaneously enacts a rule or principle by which breaking the convention is both sanctioned and regulated: ‘The teaching language in US classrooms is English; however, the use of Spanish will be tolerated.’ According to the logic of tolerance, the rule is asserted, presented under
the sign of a certain kind of recognition and validity at the same time as the principles of its violation. The rule is established, as are the mode and limits of its implicit or explicit violability. These limits vary considerably. The measure of tolerance corresponds to the variance between the convention and its violation, either in terms of the frequency of its violation or the degree of its violation. For Hegel, the course of history of universal reason requires a certain form of tolerance, a spiritual ‘patience’ to undertake the
‘enormous labour of the world’s history’ with the non-alignment of the Weltgeist with knowledge of the imperfect world it is meant to be a model for (Hegel, 1977: 17).
