The non indifferent against the tolerant

Abstract

The norm and the practice of tolerance are being critically considered. It is being opposed by non-indifference as a morally vital priority setting. The author appeals to the existential experience, reconstructing it with minimal internal censorship. In the text the semantics of the life specificity prevail over the conceptual-categorical schematism. Reconstructed experience is full of irony which is mischievous and bitter. The grounds, the advantages and disadvantages of the ironic view of the world and of oneself are being considered. The author examines the relationship between men and women, the element of attraction, the miracle of love – and adjacent to them social and cultural phenomena which do not induce sympathy – prostitution, homosexuality, feminism. The author’s intuition and feelings regarding the sequence of events in the political and economic spheres of modern public life are mainly not optimistic. All interpretation and evaluation relate to the protected position of the non-indifferent to illustrate it, and to the rejected line of tolerance.

Liberal tolerance (according to K. Popper) teaches me to be tolerant to all other, apart from the intolerant. But how should I treat myself? If I treat with intolerance I am a necrophiliac tragedian aimed at disengagement. If with tolerance, then I am not me, but someone of the many other; necrophiliac comedian with progressive symptoms of schizophrenia, with mannered crushing of selfhood into fragments.

“Tolerance” is the pseudoscientific, politicized synonym of “patience”. Terminated word – from philosophical and scientific theories – is different from the word from ordinary, everyday language with much more rigorous outline of its semantic boundaries. The politicization of the term gives the opposite effect, the content of the token becomes vague, in addition the attraction to absurd contexts grows inside.

“Patience” is not the most invigorating idea, it is sluggish. It is, of course, more emotional and mental that the prim tolerance, but, unlike the one (drifting near the centrist zero level) it allows hopeless stooping: “Think of Our Lord suffering on the cross”. Comparing respective antonyms, “intolerance” and “non-patience”, gives somewhat similar situation. Intolerance is vague, it does not have a characteristic detail, is applicable to the foolish protest and to elementary bad manners. Non-patience is much more specific (requires clarification of the recipient), sharper – and not only in opposition to the smallest detail, but and in rejection of powerful structures: “Impatience” is Yuri Trifonov’s novel about the people of the movement of “Narodnaya Volya”: selfless, heroic men... but with a nervous breakdown and agitation of the doomed.

Non indifference is fighting in itself with essentially nondescript tolerance and deformities: like non hurrying impatience, like not doing things in a big way, like not vulgar (but not without edges of rigidity) intolerance. It recommends that I must be not indifferent and have different attitudes to myself and the world around – with all the responsibility to ourselves and others. Not indifferent person has someone to love, someone to hate. It saves some, while tolerating many others. Without advertising. Without hiding. Tolerant person condemns antagonists, real and fictional, treats the others evenly (within the margin of error). Evenness does not exclude indifference but rather encourages it.

As a conclusion, alias premised intuitive point: liberally substantiated tolerance is being responsibly confronted by the not indifference of healthy individualism and existential concentration as such. Both in Europe and in Russia – with great difficulty today.