Lars Tønder undertakes two ambitious projects in Tolerance, his appropriately impassioned new book. First, he works to diagnose and alleviate the “somatophobia” that pervades contemporary democratic theory (p. 25). Against “intellectualists” who “disavow the sensorial forces that motivate and empower the endurance of pain,” Tønder defends the inextricable link between reason and embodiment, sensation, and emotion (p. 7). Second, he argues that tolerance risks becoming “impossible” if we cling to a somatophobic, dualist metaphysics that denies the political significance of “lived experience” (p. 13). To reinvigorate pluralism, he contends, we must acknowledge that pain is part of quotidian democratic existence. Alert to pain’s public, political, and plural dimensions, we can mobilize its empowering potential for democratic projects, expanding “the span of acceptable differences in society” (p. 9). By “bringing pain back in” to the theoretical conversation, the author develops a spirited and compelling brief for tolerance, rehabilitating a concept that many have dismissed as tepid or, more darkly, as a ruse of power that entrenches hierarchy (p. 6). Indeed, he provides reason to hope that, properly understood, tolerance may again become “what it once was: a progressive practice of empowerment and pluralization” (p. 6).
Tønder’s most important contribution is to remind us that “the endurance of pain is an ineliminable component of democratic politics” (p. 105). When negotiating the dilemmas of common life, democratic citizens are bound to experience such feelings as disappointment, indignation, sorrow, aversion, and revulsion. Sustaining community with those who uphold divergent ideological, religious, aesthetic, affective, and ethical commitments involves painful political trade-offs, and painful challenges to one’s cherished self-conception. Thus, “endurance and resilience” are key virtues for democratic citizens (p. 19). Rather than promise the reduction or elimination of pain, Tønder suggests, democratic theorists must help us to deal with pain in a more affirmative manner. To cultivate the endurance and resilience that democracy requires, we must recognize that pain can be empowering as well as debilitating.
Understanding that “the feeling of pain sometimes can designate a transformation whereby one’s own identity is opened up to more empowering constellations of self, other, and world” is a key task for a theory of tolerance, given that word’s history (p. 12). As Tønder reminds us, “tolerance” has historically signified an active practice of enduring pain—as well as a passive practice of restraint or forbearance. For the most part, theorists of toleration have focused on what he author identifies as the term’s passive connotations—appealing to reason as the faculty that enables us to moderate or quash morally unjustified objections to our fellow citizens. By contrast, he develops a theory of “active tolerance”—invoking sensory experience to illustrate “how the endurance of pain empowers the desires, powers, and limits of being tolerant, and how this empowerment stages relationships between tolerator and tolerated” (p. 11).
In the book’s opening chapters, Tønder exposes limitations of “intellectualist” approaches to toleration (e.g., John Rawls) and outlines an alternative genealogy of the concept, recovering hitherto unacknowledged traces of a sensorial orientation to politics in texts by “intellectualist” luminaries, such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant. In subsequent chapters, the author develops a theory of active tolerance indebted to Seneca, Spinoza, and Merleau-Ponty, and exemplified by the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the comedian Dave Chapelle. Tønder concludes with a nuanced and powerful reading of the controversy surrounding the 2005 publication of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. (Perspectives ran a September 2011 symposium on Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World, featuring comments by Anne Norton, Cecile Laborde, Donald Downs, Abdulkader Sinno, and Carolyn Warner.) For Tønder the key question posed by the cartoon controversy is not whether to regulate offensive speech but how to turn “harmful speech acts into an agonistic exchange” (p. 126).
Tønder makes a compelling case that democratic theory would benefit from a more nuanced assessment of the political resonance of pain. Yet one can appreciate the various pains that democratic citizens experience, and the political uses to which pain can be put, without embracing his neo-Spinozist ontology. In other words, Tønder’s two projects in Tolerance do not mesh as seamlessly as he suggests. On close inspection, his instructions for the practice of active tolerance appear independent of his campaign to combat metaphysical dualism by elevating what he calls the “sensorium.” When Tønder provides illustrative examples of what a sensorial approach to politics entails, he instructs theorists to historicize and contextualize contemporary toleration debates: “A sensorial orientation to politics reverses our mode of engaging the politics of tolerance because it raises the question of contextual specificity, of who tolerates what, what their differences are, and whether their tolerance contributes to the pluralization of society, so as to more readily historicize, problematize, and transform the function and value of tolerance in democracies where citizens come together in an ongoing democratic struggle against inequality, suffering, and violence” (p. 18).
Thus, in his analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, Tønder argues that we should critique the most incendiary cartoons less because they cause pain (understood as a brute fact) or because they violate legal norms, than because in their conflation of Islam with terrorism, they replace “mutual contestation (which, of course, has its own harms) with the opposite: moral binaries, cultural stereotypes, and clear lines of causality for pain and suffering” (p. 123). But one need not embrace a neo-Spinozist ontology—in which “there is no higher power than the sensorium”—to ascribe political value to historical contextualization (p. 85). There are many routes to “contextual specificity,” not all of which require one to reject mind/body dualism and embrace masochism’s “affirmation of life” as “a key to another, more affirmative world of difference and disagreement” (pp. 98, 96–97).
If, as a practical matter, Tønder wants theorists to attend to the precise circumstances under which tolerance is invoked, why does he yoke the call for “contextual specificity” to a neo-Spinozist ontology? As in the work of William Connolly, to whom Tønder is indebted in Tolerance, an ontology that foregrounds openness and instability licenses a stance that is highly prescriptive. Tønder asserts that “the power immanent to tolerance is inherently open-ended and can be expressed in both active and passive ways” (p. 106). With this assertion, he makes an important admission: Endurance of pain does not always yield an embrace of difference. Tolerance’s open-endedness is an opportunity as well as a risk, for, in Tønder’s account, realizing tolerance’s affirmative potential requires accepting “the heteronomy intrinsic to the sensorium” (p. 129). Active tolerance is “an expansive practice driven by the desire to experiment and become otherwise,” a practice “at its noblest when it actively seeks out new ways of encountering the world” (pp. 11, 65). “The idea,” Tønder writes, “is to cultivate a resilient orientation to the endurance of pain, which enables tolerator and tolerated to expand their presence in the world and allows both sides to affirm the desire to affect and be affected in different ways” (pp. 89–90).
Although Tønder elevates receptivity to “the not-yet-seen-or-felt” to the status of a “living creed,” he does not hesitate to pronounce on what democracy needs and how citizens should feel and behave (pp. 133, 132). Throughout Toleration, he issues “demands,” identifies necessary “conditions and requirements,” and teaches us “lessons” (pp. 129, 50, 87, 132). Indeed, his “experiment” appears to have a preferred outcome, namely, learning to appreciate “how and why a politics of empowerment and pluralization might be desirable in the first place” (p. 110). Yet how experimental is the practice of active tolerance if certain transformations are discredited in advance? Genuine openness to “becoming otherwise” would involve affirming the possibility that, unbeknownst to ourselves, we might come to find “a politics of empowerment and pluralization” undesirable. Without denying this possibility, Tønder seems reluctant to affirm it. Committed to an ethos of deep pluralism, he risks constraining the very open-endedness that he touts as a condition of democratic subjectivity. His admirable plea for a “proactive stance with regard to pluralism itself” shows how hard it is for proponents of a heteronomous ethos to avoid the tropes, and the temptations, of sovereign mastery (p. 130).
