The word “tolerance” has various meanings. My favourite is its characterization as lying between that of soft-headedness and narrow-mindedness, per Aristotle. I’m wondering how this is evaluatively different from the very romanticized ideal of the word “tolerance”, and one at the core of democracy, that one should tolerate the other, in the other’s interests and goals, while respecting one’s own. As discussed previously, multi-culturalism is basically the bracketing of one’s own interests and goals to appreciate the other’s. Multi-culturalism: it has become a precept, dogma of democracy.
Both Habermas and Gadamer aim for this goal in radically different ways. Whereas Habermas encourages oneself to adopt the standpoint (political, epistemological, theological, cultural) of the other, a communicative discourse with the other,Gadamer encourages the acquiescence of one’s self to the other’s standpoint in an endless dialogical experience at play.
Acquiescence in the sense of being able to accept the other’s position as true despite our own, and to examine how both our horizons of meaning meet. If I remember my work correctly, Gadamer’s position is both an acceptance and a rejection of Hegelian absolutes, but paying due homage to hegelian synthesis. While Gadamer shies away from any assertion about the existence of an absolute truth, the endless dialogical engendered play is a hermeneutical experience that is, by the very term, endless. What is important is not precisely truth (since, taking lessons from Heidegger, our finitude is our own absolute limit), but meaning. Warheit is an absolute term which is meaningless unless understood in interpretation. In other words, without understanding, truth will forever be a “42″.
And this open-ness is missing in our political discourse in Malaysia, today. In our country, there are values and terms that are put forth as absolute truths both explicitly and implicitly. The more insidious of these ‘truths’ are sometimes put forward as absolute and unquestionable explicitly. Dialogue with these ‘truths’ or about these ‘truths’ is anathema to our sacrilized ruling class, unfortunately. And before the English kings found the wherewithal to deny the Church its stranglehold on legitimacy, the Church represented truths in the most absolute of ways. The same situation now obtains in our country, and not just our country but other countries as well. The same situation can be applied to liberal democracies, for example: human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of speech and any question of the normative values or meanings of those words evoke heated debates.
It is the freedom to question championed by the encyclopedists, by the enlightenment elite that I think we must not lose sight of. And this is particularly important as far as I’m concerned, because I believe awareness begins with the most important word in our vocabulary: “why”. It is at the heart of Gadamer’s idea of the virtuous interlocutor. It is unfortunate that while we can see the obvious virtue in having the freedom to question, we do not see this here in Malaysia because, simply, the freedom to question is a vital flaw in the project of placing stakeholders out in the open as being truths representative of our society, as being representative of our collective weltanschauung.
But immediately we can see problems with this: in a variagated society such as ours, differing pre-dispositions by and from which we view the world - and in our case, in the most variagated of ways: culture - contradict these “truths”. In a society such as ours, we comport ourselves to an artificial social contract explicitly and implicitly agreed upon from the very start (nevermind the roots for the moment: the social compact must be necessarily ahistorical as far as it is foundational to our society). There are many ways to view this compact; in earlier times, it was understood that to a citizen of Rome required an extraordinarily good luch, connections or to have proven oneself in the defense of Rome. In Sparta, the requirements are far more stringent, being determined by the geography of your birth.
In our country, combine the aspiration for, and requirements of, a democracy and then consider the situation of a country fractured along ethnic lines. In what ways can such a compact be envisioned to obtain the best possible for our Malaysia?
I think its why I like Aristotle’s characterization of the word “tolerance” best.
