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Notes
See Wittgenstein (1953, for example §108): ‘We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order. To this end we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook’.
Here, I take this to mean that sometimes it is better to be cautious than bold, rather than that the virtue of bravery or valour itself (as Falstaff seems to say in the lines from Henry IV, Part I that originated the phrase) is mainly characterised by caution.
The power, that is, to determine an answer and then to act on it. This is commonly called the ‘power’ condition for toleration. I discuss the condition in Newey (2013, Chapter 8).
I use the term ‘securitising’ in the sense made current in international theory by the Copenhagen School (see Buzan et al, 1998).
That is, one in which, against a background of retained naturalistic criteria for applying a term to some act, its evaluative valency is reversed (so that, say, what was evaluated as bravery becomes ‘foolhardiness’, or cowardice ‘prudence’).
The appropriation of the term ‘queer’ by homosexual activists is a case in point.
Often this is described as ‘indiscriminate’ in connection with acts of ‘terrorism’, but discrimination usually occurs, for example, in the selection of victims (such as Israelis rather than Arabs).
See McIntyre (2001) and Scanlon (2008).
By ‘naturalistic’ I mean simply that it attempts to ground the evaluative attitude in some property of the action to which that attitude is thought an appropriate response.
July 2014.
1 We need to think only of the language of ‘zero tolerance’ in relation to crime; it is intolerance that becomes the virtue.
2 Of course, a religious conservative might agree that the most urgent political problem of toleration is our passive toleration of injustice, but lays before our consciences a different account: the killing of unborn fetuses, for example. There is nothing particularly theoretically insightful in pointing to our daily toleration of injustices and atrocities done by our representatives.
3 One problematic feature of Wendy Brown’s analysis is that she often simply asserts that toleration is the concept doing the work she describes, and that toleration is in fact the hegemonic attitude toward a particular social group or practice, once she has set that as her frame.
4 Although Glen Newey has helpfully pointed out that there is a common intransitive usage of toleration. People or cultures are often spoken of as ‘tolerant’ simpliciter, without any particular object of their toleration (Newey, 2013, pp. 7, 30).
1 These two dimensions are primarily relevant for the discussion of the relationship between tolerance and power and are not meant to exhaust the entire map of theories of tolerance in contemporary political theory. For an account of the latter, see my discussion in Tønder (2013, pp. 25–35).
2 For a classical discussion of the tension between these two components of the concept of tolerance – often referred to as the ‘objection’ and ‘acceptance’ components – see King (1998, pp. 44–54).
3 As the emphasis on what the tolerating subject can do entails a decentering of the subject itself, one cannot say that the perspective proposed here disregards the lived experiences of the tolerated or in some other way sees the tolerator as superior to the tolerated. Such a conclusion is unwarranted as it fails to acknowledge how the sensorial dimensions on which the power of tolerance is based arises in between two entities or subjects undergoing their own processes of becoming. If anything, one might thus say that the perspective I am proposing here is one that sees the relationship between the tolerator and the tolerated as a reversible one, which is to say as a relationship in which the power of one side of the relationship relies on the power of the other side.
4 The most obvious example of this might be Diogenes the Cynic who is said to have appeared naked on the marketplace of Ancient Athens to show his tolerance while protesting the Athenian culture of intellectual pretense and financial wealth. For a discussion of this example and others, see Tønder (2013, pp. 3–4 and 96–101).
1 Important recent analyses can be found in Dobbernack and Modood (2013).
2 Newey (2013), in particular, points out this political dimension of the concept.
3 Nietzsche (1988) criticizes toleration as, among other things, the ‘inability to say yes or no’ (274f.; my translation).
4 My analysis of the components of toleration essentially follows that of Preston King (1976) (if not in every detail).
5 I discuss the idea of normative dependence in §3 of Forst (2013).
6 The same holds true of objections that stem from homophobia.
7 This plays a role in my debate with Wendy Brown in The Power of Tolerance, if I am correct. See the very end of our exchange on pp. 66f.
8 I discuss four conceptions of toleration in Forst (2013, §2).
9 This is one of the central questions of my debate with Wendy Brown.
10 As Newey (2013) fears (pp. 98f.).
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Brown, W., Dobbernack, J., Modood, T. et al. What is important in theorizing tolerance today?. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 159–196 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.44
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.44