RYSZARD LEGUTKO
emergence of a complex, interlocking, and decentered network of
institutions in which there is no longer any identifiable source, origin,
or centre.
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Those who live in such a world will no longer be troubled by the
metaphysical horror or the specter of nothingness; on the contrary, a sense
of Kundera's "lightness of being" will produce in them what Rorty has
called "the air of light-minded aestheticism," an attitude which the
American philosopher has openly welcomed and approved:
The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophi–
cal topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of
light-mindedness about traditional theological topics. Like the rise of
large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of
artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture,
such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the
disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants
more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the
appeal of instrumental rationality.
On a popular level, this frame of mind, as well as the hope attached to
it, is illustrated by the kind of postmodernist fiction which in many cases
is built on one symptomatic pattern: the protagonist (and with him the
reader) is forced by circumstances or by manipulation to repeatedly reor–
ganize his interpretation of reality and to pass through heuristic trials
which reveal to him the arbitrariness of his former philosophical self-as–
sured seriousness.
A somewhat different version of positive toleration expresses itself in
an attitude rendered by one Polish author as "sympathetic openness."
Since, as Goethe put it, "to tolerate is to offend," we cannot, following
his indication, confine ourselves to negative toleration which others might
find patronizing and humiliating. To the modern liberal British philoso–
pher R. M . Haire, man acknowledges the ideal of toleration if he ac–
knowledges "a readiness to respect other people's ideals as if they were his
own."
Those who champion this form of toleration do not maintain - and
such possible misunderstanding must be made clear - that sympathetic
openness should prevail only in the initial stages of contacts with un–
known individuals, groups, and opinions. It thus excludes the possibility
of being sympathetically open to something as yet unknown, of then en–
countering it, finding it repulsive, and ultimately deciding to treat it nei–
ther with sympathy nor with openness. Rather, sympathetic openness
