RYSZARD LEGUTKO
615
which, understandably, made him attribute a special role to eccentrics
constantly undermining our thoughtless sense of stability - to Herbert
Marcuse - who came to a somewhat baffiing conclusion in
A Critique of
Pure Tolerance
that "liberating tolerance" meant "intolerance against
movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."
During the last decade or so, another solution of how to make the
world safe for toleration has come from a group of thinkers who like to
label themselves as postmodern. In spite of important differences among
them, they seem to share a conviction that we can, we should, and we
have already begun to liquidate the intellectual basis of intolerance.
Negative tolerance was defective because - it is maintained - with respect
to truth it preached only humility. It is truth as such, regardless of the de–
gree of arrogance or humility with which it is professed, that is responsi–
ble for intolerance. Whatever we regard as true, be it in philosophy,
morals, ways of life, criteria of permissiveness, is always exclusive. It in–
evitably relegates some people outside the sphere of what is normal and
respectable. For example, by stressing one's heterosexuality one may be
suspected of implying that there is something objectively wrong with
homosexuality, which in turn makes one susceptible to the charge of de–
priving homosexuals of their dignity and consequently of inciting discrim–
ination against them.
From truth to persecution there is then a straight and logical transi–
tion. Hence the obvious implication is that in order to secure toleration
we must abandon the traditional criteria of evaluation, and in more ambi–
tious projects, we must abandon traditional metaphysics and the episte–
mology from which the criterion of truth derived its strength. We must
eradicate once and for
all
the sense of philosophical certainty that permit–
ted some to look down on others, a sense of certainty stemming from the
assumption that our world has an essence or foundation reachable by the
cognitive faculties of the wise, who then impose it on the ignorant. Once
we annihilate the assumption of philosophical essentialism and founda–
tionalism, the sting of intolerance will be cut off
Truth, wrote Michel Foucault in
Power/Knowledge,
is not something
to be discovered but rather "a regime": "the ensemble of rules according
to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power
attached to the true." For the old followers of the truth-as-regime theory,
for Marx, Lenin, and their disciples, the power-holders were explicit: the
bourgeoisie, capitalists, the industrial-military complex. For the following
generations of the philosophers of suspicion - for post-structuralists, post–
modernists, deconstructionists - the enemy who holds truth through
power is more obscure. We usually see only the effects, not the perpetra–
tors: a frame of mind, a system of concepts, a philosophy. This power has
