The final essay in A Critique of Pure Tolerance is “Repressive Tolerance” written by Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse claims that the realization of objective tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or supressed. In other words, the rulers would be required to be intolerant toward the policies, attitudes and opinions that threaten the national interest and the ruled would be required to extend tolerance to the rulers’ intolerance. Marcuse calls this a loaded tolerance which is determined by the class structures of a society. Pure tolerance, he points out, can take two forms: (1) passive tolearance which accepts the policies, attitudes and opinions of the status quo regardless of their harmful effects, and (2) active tolerance which is rigoursly non-partisan and conesequently protects and supports the machinery of discrimination. Pure tolerance, according to Marcuse, is inherently paradoxical.
Given that tolerating anything and everything leads to tolerance of the intoleraable Marcuse argues for a discriminating tolerance that extends tolerance only to those policies, attitudes and opinions that are not destructive. In other words, tolerance must be intolerant of intolerance. In order to be liberated from oppression of any kind there must be freedom of thought, speech and action, and more importantly, dissent. Dissent is the result of autonomous thought and challenges the entrenched and established ideas. But, Marcuse is quick to point out, the telos of tolerance is truth and this truth is not the truth of science and propositional logic but absolute truth as it unfolds in history as freedom from violence and supression. In the end, Marcuse advocates his discriminating tolerance as a practice for the radical minorities who struggle to break free from the tyranny of the majority who have institutionalized tolerance and thereby neutralized its power to attain truth. While his insight into the paradoxical nature of tolerance is helpful, one is left wondering who decides what policies,attitudes, and 0pinions are destructive or more importantly what the limits of freedom are. Indeed, he gives no clear definition for destructive,truth or freedom.
One significant problem this essay raises is what grounds are there for arguing for tolerance at all. Is there a metaphysical basis for tolerance or is it merely the dream of the disenfranchised. Hans Oberdiek has pointed out that tolerance is not a virtue in the classical Greek sense. In fact, following Marcuse, it is often virtuous to be intolerant. For example, to be intolerant of genocidal policies in Rhawanda or Nazi Germany. However, one would never argue that it is virtuous to be uncourageous or unjust. Here we may have hit on the real issue: tolerance as a practice must have a metaphysical ground in order to be compelling and to determine its limits. For example, the classical Greek virtues are grounded in the good or the beautiful. In short, tolerance must have a telos. Marcuse’s attempt to make truth the telos of tolerance is not helpful because his definition is vague at best weighted with elitist privilege. This observation makes it clear that a metaphysics of tolerance must precede any discussion of tolerance.
