Spinoza and the Theory of Active Tolerance

Tolerance and Power in Contemporary Democratic Theory

A likely explanation for why Marcuse’s reference to a turning point in the history of tolerance does not figure prominently in contemporary democratic theory is that the notion of tolerance as a non-practice has become such a commonplace that it overshadows the older conception of tolerance as a practice of endurance defined by a desire to resist inequality and repression. ¹¹ Remnants of this older conception can be found in Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, which is why bringing it into conversation with Marcuse’s critique may prove helpful for theorizing tolerance outside the default parameters of contemporary democratic theory. Before coming to these arguments, however, I first want to map how liberals and post-Marxists in contemporary democratic theory have received Marcuse’s critique of tolerance. The idea is not to collapse the differences internal to these two camps, but to explore how they are positioned vis-à-vis each other so as to better grasp some of the blind spots that trouble the extant literature on tolerance. My suggestion will be that the two camps share an emphasis on tolerance as a non-practice, which in turn has limited our understanding of tolerance’s potential for resistance against inequality and repression. To see why this might be the case, we need to examine how liberals and post-Marxists use Marcuse’s critique in their own accounts of the relationship between tolerance and power.

These two abstracts suggest that contemporary democratic theory mainly has responded to Marcuse’s critique of tolerance by criticizing the underlying onto-political framework, challenging Marcuse’s teleology and accompanying assumptions regarding rationality and truth. The reasons for taking issue with these aspects are well founded. Not only does Marcuse’s reference to “true tolerance” seem too restrictive with regard to what tolerance might mean, his account of how tolerance has moved “from an active to a passive state” invokes a linear conception of history that runs the risk of depoliticizing our understanding of how political institutions and moral norms evolve over time. Even if one agrees with Marcuse’s diagnosis of what has become of tolerance, such depoliticization should call for concern. What matters, you might say, is not just a bird’s-eye view of political development, but also an appreciation of the many contingent forces that decide whether tolerance and other democratic practices once again can become an active force in the struggle against inequality and repression.

The shared critique of Marcuse’s teleological commitments makes it all the more surprising that the alternatives suggested by contemporary democratic theory do not elaborate on how to recuperate this more active side of tolerance. There is an internal logic to this blind spot that is worth explicating. To begin with, exclusion of tolerance’s active side is secured by a privileging of the norm of respect, which, according to deliberative political liberalism, entails an imperative to limit and restrain oneself in the interest of a more general morality that all reasonable persons are said to share. ¹⁹ Exclusion of tolerance as an empowering practice is then deepened by post-Marxists, who reproach their liberal counterparts, not for privileging the norm of respect, but for missing out on how the norm hinges on institutional structures and cultural practices that more often than not tilt the power balance in favor of the State’s interests and preferences. ²⁰ Notwithstanding the important insights proffered by this reproach, including how passive tolerance can be used to marginalize constituencies who do not share the majority’s view on issues of religion and sexuality ²¹ , what calls for attention here is how the debate in contemporary democratic theory is framed in terms of a zero-sum game in which the tolerating party is perceived either as self-limiting the exercise of political power or as submitting to the institutions and norms that are said to “hold” power. At the same time as deliberative political liberalists and post-Marxists debate the reversible, even contradictory, possibilities embedded in the present, they have come together in privileging Marcuse’s conception of tolerance as a “non-practice” with limited potential for resistance and subversion. For the two camps, the key question is not whether tolerance is best understood as a “non-practice,” but whether it serves the right purpose, given the context in which the demand for tolerance arises and given the need to justify acts on either moral or political grounds.

My concern is that this way of framing the debate restricts our appreciation of the ambiguities and possibilities that subsist within the practice of tolerance, and that this restriction, contrary to what both sides of contemporary democratic theory suggest, makes it more (not less) difficult to re-politicize the various powers that move the practice of tolerance between its “active” and “passive” sides. Indeed, we do not have to settle the dispute between deliberative political liberalism and post-Marxism in order to see how the debate between them implies a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the range of outcomes is given once we accept the framing of tolerance as always-already passive. Once the demands of normativity and the requirements of politics are framed as opposites, we are no longer encouraged to explore how tolerance might empower what other efforts in contemporary democratic theory have characterized as the subjugation needed for civic virtue or the techniques of the self that enable citizens to contest their own identity so as to meet others more openly. ²² Once tolerance has been reduced to a non-practice, we no longer attend to how the tolerating party can engage in multiple practices of tolerance. Once tolerance’s rich and multifarious history has been reduced to a unidirectional turn from the “active” to the “passive,” we lose sight of how tolerance entails the possibility of (what Marcuse calls) “a subversive liberating notion and practice.”

To be sure, it is tempting to follow Marcuse’s own argument and argue, as most contemporary democratic theorists do, that although active tolerance may be possible in theory, it is now lost to a past unavailable for reinterpretation, let alone remobilization. Many empirical-ethnographic analyses support this argument. ²³ Still, if we want to repoliticize tolerance in the manner suggested by contemporary democratic theory, dissociating Marcuse’s critique from its overtly teleological commitments, then we must also acknowledge that the framing of tolerance as a non-practice is neither final nor uncontaminated by anxieties about how what we take for granted in one instance can be thematized critically in another. ²⁴ Consider, for example, the discussions in France about whether or not to ban the hijab in public, a question that together with the Employment Division v. Smith case in the United States and the crucifix case in Germany has become a litmus test for how contemporary democratic theory envisions the politics of tolerance. ²⁵ At one level, the discussions in France surely illustrate the challenges that deliberative political liberalists and post-Marxists have identified: lack of respect, unequal distribution of power, and preferential treatment of the majority. ²⁶ At another level, however, the discussions also illustrate how the framing of tolerance as a non-practice breaks with itself at the same time as it tries to reproduce its conditions of possibility. This break is suggested to us most powerfully by a minority of Muslim women who reacted to France’s ban against the hijab by foregrounding a feeling of hurt, which they did not want to endure indefinitely (as perhaps envisioned by the proponents of the ban), but one they nonetheless invoked temporarily and expansively to contest the status quo. For these women, endurance of pain could not be a “non-practice” or something opposed to their capacity for political action, for their tolerance, animated and suffused by a desire for fairness and equality, was an important part of the collective ability to mobilize in the name of a different future. As one of the Muslim women asked, “What about our sisters in France? How did we forget about this crime that occurs on a daily basis? Where is the body of the ummah that feels pain, when one part of it is hurt?” ²⁷

Statements like this one are worth emphasizing as part of the work needed to interrupt our preconceived notion of tolerance as a repressive non-practice. Although such work does not guarantee that that tolerance once again becomes an active force, it does bring out the otherwise hidden excesses and imperceptible remainders that subsist within all lived experience, including the practice of tolerance. My wager is that if we focus more directly on these excesses and remainders, we will be better able to theorize the powers that turn tolerance from an active state to a passive state and back again. The issue, we might say, is not simply why the tolerating party refuses to act, but also who the tolerating party is, and how it mobilizes tolerance’s capacity for endurance and resilience in response to cultural homogeneity, political domination, and social injustice.

Spinoza’s Tolerance

Spinoza’s subtle contribution to such a reconsideration is secreted within his claims that “nobody . . . has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities” (EIIIp2s) and that democracy is the most “natural form of state” because its “purpose is, in reality, freedom.” ²⁸ Disagreements about the importance one should attribute to each of these two statements may explain why contemporary democratic theorists have limited Spinoza’s conception of power and tolerance to one of two options: either as privileging a self-constituting mode of being (potentia) ²⁹ that makes tolerance a “limited” ³⁰ virtue open to charges of “perfectionism” ³¹ and “depoliticization” ³² or as invoking a liberal approach focused on how to “rein in” ³³ the institutional power (potestas) held by both the Church and the State. Lost in both interpretations is how Spinoza uses the term “tolerance” (tolerāntia) as a way of fostering what Michael Rosenthal calls the “strength of character” needed to act in a sociopolitical context characterized by human finitude and worldly pluralism. ³⁴ In what may be his only use of the term, Spinoza suggests that the reason why one would tolerate “vices” that are contrary to one’s own conception of the good is not only that such vices “cannot be prohibited by legal enactment” but also that they stem from the “freedom to philosophize” (libertas philosophandi), which itself is a way of augmenting the power to think and to act. ³⁵ Spinoza here frames tolerance as a political practice that entails more than a refusal to act—a refusal that, as Deleuze and Guattari point out in their Spinoza-inspired analysis of fascism, can make citizens desire their own repression. ³⁶ Spinoza does not reject this as a possible outcome, but suggests nonetheless that we expand the discussion in order to conceptualize tolerance as immanent to power, which is to say: as a way to power as well as a power in its own right. Such conceptualization does not assume that tolerance always will be practiced in an active mode, but it may make it more likely to discern the varied circumstances in which it could become the case.

To see how, we need to situate Spinoza’s use of tolerance in its intellectual and historical context, and then develop a more general account that resonates with the tragic (and, hence, non-teleological) elements that permeate his philosophy of immanence. ³⁷ With regard to the former, one readily sees how Spinoza takes his use of the term “tolerance” from the Stoic tradition, which conceptualizes tolerance as a practice of endurance and resilience that can be morally virtuous and politically potent, in particular when linked to the desire for connectedness (convenientia) and tranquility (ataraxia)—key elements of Stoicism’s stance toward human finitude and worldly pluralism. ³⁸ Spinoza expresses a similar thought when he suggests that humans, who as finite beings are “not so much active as passive,” ³⁹ should “patiently bear whatever happens to us that is contrary to what is required by consideration of our own advantage” (EIVap32). ⁴⁰ Spinoza, however, moves the emphasis from the “faculty of willing” to the “faculty of sensing” (EII49s), and thereby replaces Stoicism’s correlation of power with the individual’s detachment from worldly concerns with an alternative conception of power wherein bodily vibrations (affectus) are context-dependent constellations of “motion and rest” (EIIp13ax1) that empower humans and other finite beings to act and think at “varying speeds” (EIIp13ax2). ⁴¹ For our purposes, the emphasis on “speed” and on “movement and rest” is particularly interesting because it highlights how power subsists within so-called passive modes of being, including the refusal to act that contemporary democratic theory now associates with the practice of tolerance. Whether we take tolerance to be active or passive, we must always acknowledge that power is immanent to tolerance because it subjugates (and hence modifies) the bodily vibrations of those practicing it. Tolerance empowers, you might say, because it sustains a certain constellation of motion and rest, and because it enables the one being tolerant to engage the world while “patiently bearing” whatever seems contrary to the aims of such an engagement.

If power is immanent to the practice of tolerance, then the key question is not so much whether this practice should be limited to the demands of “respect” or “governmentality” but how to enhance its own capacity for modification, interaction, and transformation. It is in connection with this second question that the “tragic moments” in Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence become relevant. As already noted, the tragic moments arise in Parts III and IV of the Ethics where Spinoza considers challenges to the pursuit of a joy that would enable finite human beings to persevere in their own being without having to depend on anything externally caused—what Spinoza names as the conatus driving every mode of being (EIIIp7). Spinoza elaborates on the challenges to this drive by considering the power of external causes—what Spinoza often refers to as the “passions” (passiones)—which undermine the pursuit of absolute joy because they diminish the ability of finite human beings to govern their own thoughts and actions. ⁴² The ability of passions to “overtake” the directions of finite human beings may be more powerful than Spinoza admits, and in any case should be taken seriously because they frustrate the ability of finite human beings to “agree in nature” (EIVp32), engendering a condition that the Stoics, especially Seneca, had characterized as the essence of the tragic: the disagreement and wretchedness so prevalent in a world of human finitude where the outcome of one’s thoughts and action rarely turns out as intended. ⁴³ Spinoza’s attention to this dimension of embodied life is evident throughout Parts III and IV of the Ethics where the unlimited potential of the body is juxtaposed to the limits of thought and action created by passions and other externally caused events. In one of the most poetic passages in the Ethics, Spinoza goes so far as to compare the limited power of finite human beings to someone caught at sea in strong winds: “From this is it is clear that we are in many respects at the mercy of external causes and are tossed about like the waves of the sea when driven by contrary winds, unsure of the outcome or of our fate” (EIIIp59s).

The key point, at least with regard to noting how to enhance the power internal to the practice of tolerance, is that not only are finite human beings “right” to endure the tragic world of passions and external causes, they can practice this endurance in ways that neither contradict the desire to augment one’s own power, nor depend on somebody else losing his or her power. Building on the Stoic conception of tolerance, Spinoza does not envision the capacity to “patiently bear” as a second-best option, but instead suggests that it is an inherent part of the ability to open oneself to the world in order to engage with other finite beings (human or nonhuman). The point is not just that finite human beings are “infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes” (EIVp3). Rather, the point is that while the world of external causes and troubled passions do empower finite human beings in ways that seem frustrating, even painful, it is nonetheless from within this world that their ability to think and to act is constituted and further developed. This insight suggests that all finite beings are vulnerable and dependent on other finite beings, which in turn highlights how tolerance can enhance the desire driving each and every mode of existence: the conatus. Without disavowing the tragic condition, or assuming the absence of externally caused events, tolerance enhances this desire when it empowers finite human beings to perceive vulnerability and dependency as a premise for rather than a threat to ways of persevering oneself as one finite mode among many other finite modes. Another way of saying this is even though that one should not tolerate each and every externally caused event, tolerance can still play an empowering role in the attempt to persevere, if not augment, one’s ability to think and to act. Spinoza explains this by supplementing his image of a finite human being caught at sea with an almost Dionysian call for affirmation. According to Spinoza, insofar as finite human beings are able to affirm the power of passions and externally caused events, “the endeavor of the better part of us is in harmony with the order of the whole of Nature” (EIVap32).

I dwell on these elements of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence because they suggest an account of power and tolerance that is close to Marcuse’s discussion of a tolerance that in the past invoked a “subversive and liberating notion and practice.” ⁴⁴ Like Marcuse, Spinoza emphasizes how the power immanent to tolerance embodies more than a zero-sum game in which restraint and refusal to act is construed as either normatively desirable (deliberative political liberalism) or politically necessary (post-Marxism). Unlike Marcuse, however, Spinoza does not envision a situation in which this excess is usurped so thoroughly that tolerance gradually but surely moves from an “active” state to a “passive” state. Bringing tolerance’s politicality back into view, anticipating the charges of teleology and progressivism leveled against Marcuse’s critique, Spinoza acknowledges the possibility of a process similar to the one Marcuse describes, but insists nonetheless that the sensorially inflected life-world is so powerful that it exceeds complete appropriation, let alone final determination. Spinoza elaborates on this insight when he suggests that the desire to “persist in [one’s] own being” (EIIIp7) is directly linked with the desire to affect and “be affected in many ways” (EIVp38). What Spinoza means to suggest here, I think, is that finite beings, driven by the desire to persist, must affirm the worldly forces that define life as such, even if it entails exposure to vulnerability and dependency on others. Here tolerance can play an affirmative role because it has the potential to empower a set of relationships—a force field, if you like—in which the frustrations and disagreements associated with the exposure to vulnerability and dependency is endured as a cause of disapproval as well as a reason for affirmation. In this force field, tolerance subverts existing constellations of movement and rest in order to share and augment the powers that both divide and unite finite beings. In this force field, tolerance grows the number of connections in the world in order to expand opportunities for thought and action. In this force field, tolerance embodies the fortitude needed to put oneself in places or situations that enrich one’s rapport with the world while presumptively affirming the vulnerability and dependency of every other finite being.

The empowering potential embedded in this tolerance is perhaps felt most strongly by those who are new to Marcuse, and who have not yet learned about how developments in late modern capitalism have limited tolerance to a passive practice that, driven by the “tyranny of the majority,” protects rather than reconfigures the politics of inequality and repression. My aim in this section has been to sustain this impression in order to offer a new frame that repoliticizes our appreciation of the forces determining how tolerance is practiced in this or that context. Such repoliticization does not assume that tolerance always is active, but it may enable us to better detect the circumstances in which it might be the case, encouraging us to disclose heretofore unexplored opportunities for thinking and acting embedded in late modern political life. ⁴⁵ A guiding thread in these analyses would be a different version of the distinction between active and passive tolerance, one that links Marcuse’s critique with the tragic moments in Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence. The link between these two perspectives suggests that tolerance is “passive” when vulnerability and dependency are perceived as an assault on the ability to think and act, calling forth a practice of self-restraint, offering the tolerating party “a robe of modest superiority in exchange for yielding.” ⁴⁶ Tolerance becomes “active,” however, when the powers embedded in it evoke a resiliency that affirms the condition of vulnerability and dependency in order to both redistribute and augment the speeds and connections generated by the sensorially inflected forces associated with human finitude and worldly pluralism. Resisting inequality and repression, this tolerance is akin to the one Marcuse associates with tolerance’s active side and is one that remains present today, as illustrated by the French hijab example cited earlier. In these instances, the distinctive feature of tolerance is not a refusal to act, but an empowering desire immanent to tolerance itself: the desire to deepen one’s connection with a world that Spinoza describes as “driven by contrary winds.”

Active Tolerance and the Politics of Religious Pluralism

In order to develop the implications of this argument with regard to the politics of religious pluralism, we need to consider this objection: even if we grant that power is immanent to tolerance, we cannot assume that the exercise of this power will be democratic, unless it is circumscribed by laws and norms that independently of the practice of tolerance secure the equal standing of all constituents regardless of faith or religious conviction. Deliberative political liberals and post-Marxists would here want to discuss how to best secure this commitment to equality—whether it should be justified “on moral grounds” ⁴⁷ or whether it must be secured through a “political hegemony” that serves the demands of social justice. ⁴⁸ Neither camp, however, would question the very commitment to equality and indeed would likely agree that true equality (however defined) must be secured before demands for tolerance can enter into the discussion about how to delimit the politics of religious pluralism. Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence fails in this regard, so the objection goes, because it (1) holds that the State “should be given the right to decide what is right and what is wrong” in matters of organized religion, and (2) stipulates that natural rights can be distributed unequally as the right itself is “co-extensive” with the “determinate power” of each individual person. ⁴⁹ Both suggest that Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is too weak to secure the proper conditions of religious pluralism, making the argument developed in the previous section a much riskier proposition than acknowledged heretofore.

There are two ways to respond to this objection. The first highlights how Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence expresses a rather persistent concern for equality throughout his writings. ⁵⁰ For our present purposes, the concern for equality is clearest in Spinoza’s emphasis on how finite human beings are equal insofar as their finitude limits their ability to persevere in the context of something that is shared and essential to everyone’s capacity for thinking and acting, but at the same time is more powerful than any individual or institution can ever be—namely, the infinitely productive power of God that Spinoza names as Natura naturans (E1p29s). This concern for equality, developed in conjunction with the tragic moments discussed earlier, may not be as normatively binding as desired by those likely to raise the objection, but it may nonetheless help to explain how tolerance, when approached from within an affirmative view of vulnerability and dependency, can be mobilized against inequality and repression. Adding to what we already have seen, this approach suggests that agents of tolerance should resist inequality and repression because the policies promoting them disavow the interdependence and connectedness of all members of society, something that must be acknowledged rather than disavowed in order to nourish new and more empowering relationships. What is particularly interesting about this rebuttal is that it suggests that the drive to mobilize tolerance against inequality and repression is stronger and more visceral than the normative duty emphasized by especially deliberative political liberalism. Indeed, from the perspective of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, citizens should not become tolerant because they are bound by a duty external to their own interests and desires; rather, citizens should become tolerant because it enhances their ability to persevere, and because they in that sense have a self-interest in mobilizing tolerance against inequality and repression.

The second response to the objection is a more reconstructive one that encourages us to return to the power immanent to tolerance in order to ask whether that power might be able to supplement or, more interestingly, expand the concern for equality. If the answer is yes, then it may be fair to say that this immanent capacity is neither as impotent nor as regressive as discussions in contemporary democratic theory seem to suggest. To get some traction on this issue, we may begin with the Spinozan assumption that “no one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of,” and then proceed to interpret this assumption as a reason to privilege what Deleuze, speaking through Spinoza, calls a “long affair of experimentation” in which “lasting prudence” is mobilized as part of an attempt to both identify and mobilize the most powerful “composition of fast and slow speeds” in any given context. ⁵¹ Building on the self-interest highlighted above, this approach complements attempts to improve the equality of each and every constituent with a dynamic interest in how religion is practiced in this or that context. That is, the experimentation associated with Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence encourages us to consider, not only whether there are ways of improving the equality of all citizens, religious believers included, but also whether the relationships that ensue from such improvements foster the affective desires that will encourage all members of society to augment their ability to think and to act. The power immanent to tolerance plays here an independent role because it can sustain the critical distance needed to both affirm the ideal of equality and mobilize the desire to experiment whenever this affirmation, as is often the case, leads to a paradoxical situation in which the attempt to achieve more equality in one area of political life leads to less equality in another area. ⁵² In these cases, the pursuit of equality requires not only an interest in eliminating unfair access to power and privilege, but also an active tolerance of the limits and imperfections of this endeavor—one that experiments with alternative ways of thinking and acting, acknowledging the finitude of equality in a society too complex to be measured by one standard alone.

Another way of saying this is that the proper response to the objection that Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is unable to secure the conditions of religious pluralism is not only to acknowledge the importance of this objection but also to point out that the accompanying criticism is misguided insofar as religious pluralism itself requires prudent experimentation in order to persist as a viable option. This point brings us back to Marcuse’s critique and his claim that active tolerance can be mobilized against inequality and repression, in particular when situated in a context that cherishes disagreement and plurality. Spinoza not only agrees with this insight, he seems to anticipate more recent arguments which suggest that one way to improve religious pluralism is to exempt religious believers from laws that, although legitimate in themselves, impair the believers’ ability to practice the tenets of their religion with the same kind of freedom as everyone else. ⁵³ Spinoza may not phrase his support of this argument in a manner that resonates with contemporary democratic theory. Still, the reason Spinoza holds that a democratic state has “the right to decide what is right and what is wrong” in matters of organized religion, while also stipulating that the natural right can be distributed unequally because it is “co-extensive” with the “determinate power” of each individual person, ⁵⁴ is because he wants us to consider more carefully the various differences that exist among religious constituencies, and then recognize that some flexibility is needed in order to compensate for discrimination and underrepresentation. For Spinoza, you might say, political equality and religious freedom are not mutually exclusive.

To better appreciate what this means, we should be careful to note that exemption from the law—and the experimentation it enables—does not entail a plea for impartiality or indifference. Neither Marcuse’s nor Spinoza’s contribution to the politics of tolerance and religious pluralism lies in a refusal to engage with religion, but in how their different philosophical orientations mobilize the power of tolerance to experiment with new and more proactive modes of engagement. A Marcuse-Spinoza approach to tolerance and religious pluralism reconnects two areas that contemporary democratic theory, with some notable exceptions, has come to examine separately: (1) the right to religious pluralism, including institutional concerns about how to combine rule of the law with preferential treatment of religious minorities underrepresented in the legislative process; and (2) the culture of religious pluralism, including the affective comportments and embodied sensibilities that sustain, perhaps even deepen, the citizenry’s desire to comply with the legal framework delimiting the right to religious pluralism. Since both areas are open to contestation and revision, and since both therefore must be approached as dynamic in nature, it is not possible to mobilize a robust and vibrant politics of religious pluralism unless both are pursued in conjunction with each other. Indeed, as contemporary tolerance conflicts such as the ones cited earlier suggest, failure to do so may lead to a bifurcation of the public debate whereby the politics of religious pluralism is defended either by “legalists” who do not recognize that strict adherence to the law is tainted by historical presuppositions that do not protect all citizens equally, or by “culturalists” who insist on the uniqueness of religion, but do not elaborate on how religious communities can become more open to other worldviews (religious or otherwise). The inability of both sides to engage claims made by the other may explain why tolerance has become passive in the manner predicted by Marcuse and others. Without a critical approach to both the legal and cultural side of religious pluralism, tolerance becomes an acceptance of the status quo that more often than not empowers an unequal distribution of power and privilege.

Countering the bifurcation that leads to this outcome, both Marcuse and Spinoza encourages us to mobilize the power of tolerance in ways that elaborate on what Akeel Bilgrami, in a recent discussion of the connection between religious pluralism and secularism, calls “intra-community democratization,” by which he means a political process that tries to make the internal power structures of all constituencies, including religious ones, more conducive to democratic government. ⁵⁵ The power immanent to tolerance contributes to this process because it combines the need to rein in ecclesiastical and magisterial power with an orientation toward the kinds of comportments and sensibilities that can augment the citizenry’s desire to affect and be affected in many ways. ⁵⁶ As already indicated, such a combination requires a willingness to experiment with institutional design and new forms of equality. It also requires ingenious use of imagination, narrative, and other affective registers that can help to constitute the force field needed to both sustain the practice of active tolerance and mobilize it against more passive modes of tolerance. ⁵⁷ An approach like the one developed in the previous section combines these requirements in two ways, both of which contribute to the proactive stance that an agent of tolerance might take with regard to practices and traditions that she finds objectionable. To begin with, the approach mobilizes the endurance linked to the power of tolerance in order to reach out and to engage the opposing practices and traditions from within their own conceptions of the good. The idea here is not to reject one’s own conception of the good, but to relax its demands in order to acknowledge the finitude that define all communities, including the ones defined by religious belief. In a second move, the approach uses the ensuing encounter to augment the capacity for thinking and acting, not by embracing or rejecting the experience of objection and disagreement but by disclosing the plurality embedded in it, thereby multiplying the range of connections one might imagine within and across different religious communities. The result is a virtuous circle, or dialectic process, to use Marcuse’s language, one in which the interplay between institutions and comportments pluralizes the internal power structures of all constituencies, binding them more directly to the desires and demands of democratic government.

The nature of this approach may become more apparent if we turn to some of the many tolerance conflicts in today’s world, including the French hijab case already mentioned. Deliberative political liberals and post-Marxists have responded to this case by highlighting the unintended inequalities engendered by France’s history of laïcité and republicanism. ⁵⁸ But in so doing, they have been caught between a language of sameness that eviscerates the specificity of religious beliefs and a defense of minority religions that does not demand full identification with the institutions and comportments that sustain the politics of religious pluralism. In an attempt to undo the persistence of this dilemma, the approach suggested here favors a proactive engagement with minority voices within each of the two camps. At the local level, such engagement could entail reaching out and actively supporting the Muslim women who mobilized against the ban. The idea here would not be to shift one’s allegiances from one desire (e.g., French secularism) to another (e.g., protection of religion), but rather to see the multiplication of desires as an invitation to augment the element of plurality that subsists within each, creating the opening needed to augment the conditions of thinking and acting. Whereas the Muslim women could contribute to this opening by simultaneously insisting on the importance of wearing the hijab and contesting the limited role assigned to Muslim women in public life, proponents of French laïcité could contribute by modifying their resistance to religion in the public domain. Such modification could include exemptions like the ones known from United States First Amendment jurisprudence, or it could be a more radical intervention in which state officials reject the assumed universality of laïcité in favor of thoroughly historicized conception of community and power. In both cases, the outcome could be something like the one anticipated by Marcuse and Spinoza: an experimentation with the desire to “affect” and to be “affected” that deepens constituencies’ connection with a world in which resistance against inequality and repression is always-already plural in nature.

Much of what these suggestions seek to achieve occurs in a terrain that is contestable and dynamic. Hence their speculative character. The approach developed in the previous pages does not deny this, but treats it as an invitation to participate in the same kind of thinking and acting that active tolerance seeks to empower—one that frames finitude and incompleteness affirmatively, allowing new ideas to appear and be used in the attempt to augment our capacity for thinking and acting. The possibility that tolerance will serve the ends of inequality and repression always remains. But the power immanent to tolerance cannot be appropriated for just one purpose, and thus there may be opportunities for agents of tolerance to subvert the inequality and repression that prevent the politics of religious pluralism from becoming a vibrant element of democratic life. Whether these opportunities materialize themselves will depend on a number of factors, including public culture, institutional context, and, as emphasized here, the divergent capacities of finite bodies to “affect” and to “be affected.”

Conclusion: Three Propositions for a Theory of Active Tolerance

We are now in a position to address the basic ambition of this essay: to resuscitate the theory of active tolerance and to establish its relevancy for contemporary democratic theory. The preceding discussions suggest that to do so we must first trouble our preconceived notion of how tolerance has swung from an active practice of resistance and subversion to a passive practice defined by the refusal to act, and then broaden the discussion in order to appreciate how the sensorial side of democratic politics is abounding with resources for a critical engagement with inequality and repression. Marcuse and Spinoza, each in his own way, encourage us to develop this line of thinking. And in so doing they suggest three propositions that together define the theory of active tolerance as an independent contribution to contemporary democratic theory. The three propositions are as follows: (1) the power immanent to tolerance is inherently open-ended and can be expressed in both active and passive ways; (2) tolerance is most active when its power affirms the shared condition of vulnerability and dependency; tolerance is least active when the same condition is perceived as an assault that diminishes the ability to think and act; and (3) tolerance’s active side is linked to a force field that both subverts existing constellations of movement and rest and enriches the shared desire to affect and be affected in many ways.

What these three propositions suggest, I think, is that tolerance still should be considered an important part of a progressive democratic politics, one that neither presumes a general consensus about the demands of justice and reason, nor posits an alternative set of agonistic practices removed from those affected by them. The theory of active tolerance avoids both because it works with the current language of tolerance without leaving it untouched by the many different ways it has been understood and invoked in the past. Not only does the theory of active tolerance reformulate the main insight embedded in Marcuse’s original critique—that tolerance has both a passive side and an active side—it suggests ways for tolerance to both augment and share power maximally, enabling constituents of different stripes to create new and more expansive connections in a life-world that is always-already plural in its many different instantiations. The latter, I submit, is more needed than ever.