TOLERATION WITHOUT TOLERANCEof purity. What is ‘‘pure,’’ Kant implies, is that which holds the conditions of possibility
in its own hands.^33 Moreover, it arises spontaneously, without influence from some cause
other than reason itself, and it maintains its autonomy insofar as it does not mingle with
that which individuals experience through their senses, through their engagement with
the world. Both the moral law and the three postulates of pure practical reason hinge on
this kind of purity. But does this commitment to purity allow us to address the pain and
suffering around which the issue of tolerance revolves? Much suggests the contrary, be-
cause pain and suffering are the kind of phenomena that challenge Kantian autonomy.
They do so, first, by making the one who experiences them feel vulnerable and, second,
by suspending the very idea of reason, putting into question the criteria that define it.
Because of this, we might say that to address tolerance proper (and not only toleration)
would require the opposite of what it means to be pure and, thus, autonomous in the
Kantian sense. It would require that we set out from the presumption that individuals are
not the cause of their own actions, from the assumption that they are not autonomous,
reckoning the way in which they are under the influence of affects and moods that they
do not control. Only with these alternative assumptions at hand will we be able to address
the pain and suffering that circumscribe the issues of tolerance and toleration.
Rethinking Tolerance and Toleration
We have now uncovered the ontological presuppositions underpinning the model of rea-
sonable toleration. These presuppositions depict reason as a disembodied faculty of cogni-
tion—a faculty capable of detaching itself from everyday experience—and they lead to an
image of reason that demands a disconnection of tolerance and toleration. To be clear,
this image does not existin concreto, but instead emerges between the events of the seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment and contemporary appropriations of these
events. Indeed, it shapes the spiritual exercises from which our sense of what it means to
be a tolerant subject emerges. The way it does so entails: (1) an ontology drawing a strict
line between the essential and inessential aspects of the world; (2) a set of postulates
stating the immortality of the soul, the autonomous character of our freedom, and the
existence of God; and (3) a mode of political inquiry expressing itself in a tone of neutral-
ity, dispassionateness, and systematicity.
Theorists of reasonable toleration are confident that the result of this image of rea-
son—what I have referred to as a ‘‘theory of toleration without tolerance’’—represents
the best way of adjudicating the tolerable in a neutral yet case-sensitive manner. But the
preceding discussion has brought this confidence into question. It has done so by suggest-
ing that a theory of toleration without tolerance has few answers to questions such as:
What causes pain and suffering? What defines the kind of pain and suffering that the
citizenry should endure? What characterizes a political culture in which this endurance is
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