Toleration, recognition and identity

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 14, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 123-143

  Jones, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645802628     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2006.00246.x     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
2. Another current issue which, Galeotti argues, calls for toleration as recognition is racist hate speech, though in this case we should accord toleration as recognition to minorities by not tolerating hate speech. I focus on her other examples since the general nature of hate speech laws means that they are less conspicuously geared to the recognition of a particular group.
3. Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition, pp. 5-14, 85-109.
4. I shall not here challenge the questionable claim that people 'choose' their beliefs; on that issue, see my, 'Bearing the consequences of belief, Journal of Political Philosophy, 2 (1994), 24-43.
5. 'Toleration' is now sometimes used to mean a readiness to accept and positively to value difference, rather than merely a willingness to permit that to which one objects. In this sense, toleration does not entail a negative view of what is tolerated; indeed, it signifies a determination not to view difference negatively. For examples of this usage of toleration, see Karl-Otto Apel, 'Plurality of the good? The problem of affirmative tolerance in a multicultural society from an ethical point of view', Ratio Juris, 10 (1997), 199-212;
6. and Michael Walzer, Toleration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
7. Galeotti sometimes dallies with this more positive sense of toleration (Toleration as Recognition, pp. 21-2, 225) but, for the most part, she conceives toleration as something that is needed only where there is contestation, disapproval or dislike (e.g. pp. 88-94).
8. Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition, pp. 133, 223, identifies the majority as male, white, Christian and heterosexual. Taken literally, that makes her 'majority' a numerical minority; but presumably membership of the relevant majority is shifting so that, on issues concerning ethnic minorities and homosexuality, straight white women are no less guilty than straight white men.
9. Recognition has not always been understood as a benign process. Sartre, for example, gave a pathological account of the recognition relation. For accounts of Sartre's thought and influence on this subject and defences of Hegelian recognition against Sartre's interpretation, see: Majid Yar, 'Recognition and the politics of human(e) desire", Theory, Culture and Society, 18 (2001), 57-76;
10. and Axel Honneth, 'The struggle for recognition: on Sartre's theory of intersubjectivity', in his The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 158-67.
11. Cf. Patchen Markell, 'The recognition of politics: a comment on Emcke and Tully", Constellations, 7 (2000), 496-506.
12. For an analysis that problematises 'political toleration" in this way, see Glen Newey, Virtue, Reason and Toleration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), especially chs 4 & 5.
13. I argue for the compatibility of neutrality and toleration at greater length in 'Toleration and neutrality: compatible ideals?' Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy, ed. Dario Castiglione and Catriona McKinnon (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 97-110.
14. Jonathan Seglow marks the difference between these two sorts of recognition by distinguishing between 'narrow' recognition, which consists in being recognised in measures instituted by the state, and 'wide' recognition, which resides in the affirmative attitudes and sensibilities of a population; 'Theorizing recognition', Multiculturalism, Identity and Rights, ed. Bruce Haddock and Peter Sutch (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 78-93. In Seglow's terminology, Galeotti's goal is to secure wide recognition; narrow recognition has value if and because it manifests wide recognition.
15. Toleration as Recognition, pp. 8-9, 12, 96-9, 100-5, 112-3.
16. Axel Honneth, 'Invisibility - on the epistemology of recognition", Aristotelian Society Supplement, 75 (2001), 111-26 at p. 115.
17. Toleration as Recognition, pp. 8, 16, 101.
18. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 107-21.
19. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., p. 122.
20. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., p. 121.
21. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., p. 121.
22. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., p. 126.
23. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., p. 122.
24. Honneth allows that there will be conflict over the specific way in which a society's value-horizon should be interpreted, as different groups try to raise the value ascribed to their particularities (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., pp. 126-7). That is part of the struggle for recognition. But that struggle, as Honneth conceives it, is not a struggle for toleration. It is a struggle for a new social consensus, or 'solidarity', that will accord positive value, and therefore recognition, to the struggling group (pp. 127-9).
25. Honneth's idea of a population's esteeming one another's particularities is most plausible when those particularities consist in individuals' different functional contributions to their society's common good. It becomes much less plausible when he extends those particularities to include people's different 'ways of life' (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Ibid., p. 134) and their 'self-chosen life-goals' (p. 174). He suggests that people with different and conflicting conceptions of the good may be able to esteem one another's conceptions by way of a formal conception of ethical life lodged midway between Kantian moral theory and communitarian ethics (pp. 171-9). That formal conception would be concerned with 'the structural elements of ethical life, which ... can be normatively extracted from the plurality of all forms of life' (p. 172). But that is a wholly unconvincing proposal - why should we suppose that there can be any such common 'formal conception' and, even if there could, how could anything so pale and thin do anything for anyone's esteem?
26. More recently, Honneth has limited the particularised recognition he proposes to an achievement principle that recognises people's different contributions to their society's goals, principally through work. See Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political- Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 135-59. In that volume he addresses issues of identity politics more explicitly than previously and rejects the demands of those who call for specific recognition of different identities (pp.160-70). In part that is because he believes that many of those demands are really complaints about discrimination and disadvantage and are properly dealt with under the equality principle of legal recognition. But he also observes that the publicly shared value-horizon that would be needed to satisfy those who seek positive endorsement for the practices, ways of life, and value orientations of particular identity groups, simply does not exist (pp. 168-70).
27. comment on Honneth's thinking on recognition in greater detail in 'Equality, recognition, and difference', Critical Review of International, Social and Political Philosophy, forthcoming.
28. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 51.
29. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, bid., p. 52.
30. Charles Taylor, The politics of recognition", in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalistm: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25-73, at p. 64 (emphases in the original).
31. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalistm: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Ibid., p. 70.
32. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalistm: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Ibid., p. 66.
33. For a different reading of Taylor's position on this point, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'Toleration, proselytizing, and the politics of recognition: the self contested', Charles Taylor, ed. Ruth Abbey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 127-39. Taylor himself does not juxtapose toleration and recognition in the way I describe here, but I take a dissonance between tolerating and recognising to be implied in what he does say. The focus of his concern is rather different from mine. The issue to which he addresses his remarks is not how we should respond to conflicts amongst cultures but how we should assess the value of each culture and what might be the result of that assessment. Even if we judge one culture inferior to another (because, for example, it has yielded an inferior literature or no literature), that need not imply a conflict between cultures of a sort that raises issues of toleration. I examine Taylor's approach to recognition more critically in 'Equality, recognition, and difference".
34. E.g., Toleration as Recognition, pp. 96-9.
35. A further issue is that the specific identities under which people should be recognised and the manner in which they should be recognised may be controversial amongst those at whom recognition is targeted. See Carolin Emcke, 'Between choice and coercion: identities, injuries, and different forms of recognition', Constellations, 7 (2000), 483-95.
36. Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition, pp. 180-4, notices this as an issue in relation to same-sex marriage.
37. Toleration as Recognition, pp. 14-15.
38. Toleration as Recognition, Ibid., p. 15; also pp. 103, 108, 176, 194-5, 207-8.
39. Toleration as Recognition, Ibid., pp. 14, 73. An intermediate possibility is that, rather than giving either full endorsement or no endorsement to a specific identity, we might give it partial or limited endorsement. Thus, if we take the case of Islam again, those who are not Muslims might recognise value in some features of Islam and Islamic culture. Similarly, Muslims are able to give limited recognition to other 'peoples of the book'. But the demand that we should give limited recognition to the intrinsic value of different ways of life does not avoid the difficulties associated with a demand for full endorsement and Galeotti rejects it (p. 104).
40. Toleration as Recognition, Ibid., p. 15; also p. 104.
41. Toleration as Recognition, Ibid., p. 15.
42. At one point (Toleration as Recognition, Ibid., p. 104), Galeotti goes so far as to say that recognition of a group can be 'content-independent', but it is hard to reconcile that with her repeated assertion that recognition must be recognition of difference. 'Content-independence' implies that we should look past or through difference rather than at it and begins to sound like the difference-blindness of which she is so critical.
43. Colloquially, this is not quite true. I might say, for example, that I 'tolerate' a hot climate even though I can do nothing to change it. That could be consistent with what I say in the text - I may choose to remain in an unpleasantly hot climate rather than move to a cooler location. But the 'toleration' I affirm could also be no more than my adopting an attitude of stoical resignation to something I cannot avoid. The Stoic ideal of tolerance was, in part, 'a cultivated indifference toward uncontrollable externalities'; Andrew Fiala, 'Stoic tolerance', Res Publica, 9 (2003), 149-68 at p. 154.
44. Richard Bellamy, 'Toleration, liberalism and democracy: a comment on Leader and Garzön Valdés', Ratio Juris, 10 (1997), 177-86 at p. 177.
45. See also Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 16-17, 149-51.
46. Galeotti is much more inclined to characterise the negative disposition of the majority towards the minority as 'dislike' rather than 'disapproval'; e.g., Toleration as Recognition, pp. 91-4. That presumably reflects her view that contemporary difference concerns identity rather than belief and value. If identity supplants belief and value as the principal marker of difference, antagonism will take the form of dislike rather than disapproval.
47. For a rather different argument against transferring the language of toleration from beliefs to identities, see Wendy Brown, 'Reflections on tolerance in the age of identity', Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E Connolly (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 99-117. Although there is some overlap between Brown's argument and my own, her view rests upon a decidedly jaundiced analysis of 'tolerance' that forms no part of my argument.
48. I phrase this tentatively because, even if we look favourably upon diversity of belief, there may be some beliefs that we think should be dropped. The classic example is, of course, racist belief. Our thinking about the appropriateness of toleration will depend partly upon our view of which objections are reasonable (assuming that we can recognise an objection as reasonable even though it is one that we do not share). If we think an objection is unreasonable, we shall think that it should be dropped rather than be retained but provide occasion for toleration. But given that toleration becomes relevant only in contexts of conflicting belief and value, it may very well be that those conflicts will infect the question of which beliefs and values are reasonable and which unreasonable, and therefore the question of when toleration is virtuous and when it is not. Cf. John Horton, 'Toleration as a virtue', Toleration: an Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 28-43.
49. I argue against reinterpreting beliefs as identities in 'Beliefs and identities', Toleration, Identity and Difference, ed. John Horton ans Susan Mendus (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 65-86.