RYSZARD LEGUTKO
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nizes people by ordering them to obey an abstract rule, which he claims
will bring peace and harmony to all, unrelated to experience. In the first
case, tolerance is a virtue of an individual human character; in the second,
a principle to which human habit should conform.
Voltaire himself perfectly illustrated both of these attitudes. There
were in fact two Voltaires: the first is the author of
Traite sur la tolerance,
a
good Christian (at least pretending to be one), defending toleration as the
culmination of many moral components. The other is the Voltaire of
ecrasez l'jnJame,
the visionary of the Enlightenment who sought to elevate
toleration on the ruins of Christianity, the extirpation of which he re–
garded as the major mission of his life. In his struggle against
l'inJame,
Voltaire committed precisely the error that the idea of toleration was
meant to prevent. He fell victim to intellectual hubris: armed with his
philosophical humanism, he set out to eradicate the evil and falsehood
that people - because of the inertia of tradition and ignorance - still al–
legedly harbored in themselves.
John Locke was more cautious. His
Letters
spelled out a case for toler–
ation that was based on an attitude of humility toward truth. To gener–
alize his insight, one can say that if there is some specificity in the idea of
toleration, irreducible
to
other ideas and habits, it reveals itself in the ac–
ceptance of human imperfection; it expresses the effort to put into prac–
tice the ultimate moral standards - truth being the most vital one. Locke
formulated his argument against the magistrates who claimed the power
to punish the false religion and
to
defend the true one. We need tolera–
tion , he argued, when we do not have the knowledge or certainty of
what is true, or when the nature of controversy is such that it precludes
the establishment of any common ground. The latter case clearly applies
to religious conflicts which, as Locke repeated emphasized, are to a con–
siderable degree a matter of faith and cannot be settled through rational
argument. The purpose of toleration was to draw the attention of all par–
ties involved to the danger of arrogant and hasty transformation of true or
seemingly true concepts into political instruments.
Such a rendering of toleration was clearly modest, and there was not
much philosophy in it, except perhaps an implied empiricist distrust of
abstract and aprioristic formulas functioning as criteria in political life.
This version of toleration is often called negative: it usually limits itself to
negative qualifications. Contrary to what Voltaire the prophet of the
Enlightenment (in contrast to the Voltaire of
Traite)
thought, it neither
indicates truth nor promotes it, nor even helps intellectually in the process
of establishing truth . Toleration does not presuppose any identifiable
metaphysics or ethics or political philosophy. Locke and Voltaire (in his
Treatise),
while stressing that toleration and truth are in practice related,
