TOLERATION WITHOUT TOLERANCEissues of tolerance and toleration. We may think of this lopsidedness as a ‘‘theory of
toleration without tolerance,’’ a theory that has difficulty responding to questions such
as: What kind of pain and suffering should citizens tolerate? What makes it possible to
endure pain and suffering? What kind of agency does this endurance entail? And what
kind of sensibility nourishes this agency in the most effective way?
This essay seeks to prepare the ground for a project that could answer these questions
without falling into the pitfalls created by the image of reason just outlined. I begin by
discussing how any reading of the Enlightenment is just as much a reflection of the desires
and interests of the present as it is a reflection of past events. This will help us to address
the ontological presuppositions that circumscribe the contemporary model of reasonable
toleration.
Enlightenment(s)
There are obvious reasons for connecting the Enlightenment era with issues of tolerance
and toleration, the most significant of which is the way in which the Enlightenment itself
followed from the internal fragmentation of the Christian faith. This fragmentation in-
creased the level of religious pluralism—at least if we count the sheer number of Christian
denominations that emerged after the Reformation (for example, Lutheranism, Presbyte-
rianism, and Anabaptism)—and it led to the search for a way to justify the principles
of religious freedom that would go beyond the theological motives informing previous
discussions of these principles. This search, in turn, motivated Enlightenment thinkers
across Europe, who, more than anyone else, were concerned with finding a way to liberate
the foundations of knowledge from the influence of medieval theology. The result was,
thus, what many today think of as a happy marriage between the politics of religious
freedom and a philosophical interest in knowledge based on reason alone. As historians
such as Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter argue, ‘‘it was the thinkers of the Enlightenment
who most clearly voiced arguments for toleration, in all their strengths and weaknesses,
which continue to envelop us in our present multicultural and multireligious societies.
Here, as in so many other ways, we are the children of the Enlightenment.’’^4
The problem with this proposition is that, while we may be children of the Enlighten-
ment, it is not self-evident that this says anything specific about what or who ‘‘we’’ are.
In fact, a number of historians have over the past ten years argued that to speak of the
Enlightenment in the singular is to betray what this era is all about.^5 The Enlightenment,
they argue, is a complex phenomenon, which includes opposing paradigms of thought. It
crosses its own lines of division—lines that follow distinctions between ‘‘radical’’ and
‘‘moderate,’’ ‘‘early’’ and ‘‘high,’’ ‘‘conservative’’ and ‘‘liberal,’’ ‘‘civil’’ and ‘‘metaphysi-
cal’’—and it remains nothing but an infinite network of ideas about what it means to be
a reasonable person. Because of this, these historians propose, each from his own perspec-
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