Principle of Tolerance and Non-interference

The Laisser-faire and Tolerance principle names a paradox of relations with the Other: tolerance and noninterference cannot preserve another person’s freedom, because every attitude already helps shape the world in which that freedom is exercised. Nor can anyone escape this involvement by withdrawing; the shared situation precedes any chosen policy toward others and makes guilt a recurrent feature of human relations.

Tolerance as a project

Tolerance may appear to leave the Other free, but it is itself a project undertaken by someone who already limits the Other’s possibilities. Charity, noninterference, and even abstention are not neutral absences of action: each establishes a particular relation and invites the Other’s acquiescence. To realize tolerance is to place the Other in a tolerant world, while removing the possibility of developing forms of courageous resistance, perseverance, and self-assertion that an intolerant world might have called forth.

This argument does not endorse intolerance. It denies that tolerance can function as an untouched space outside relations of freedom. The person who abstains still acts from a chosen stance, and the Other encounters that stance as part of the situation in which they must act.

Education and the limits of respect

Education makes the problem concrete. Severe education treats the child as an instrument, bending the child by force toward values the child has not admitted. Liberal education changes its methods, but it too begins from principles and values chosen in advance, in whose name the child is trained. Persuasion and gentleness therefore do not eliminate compulsion: both direct the child’s development according to someone else’s prior commitments.

For this reason, respect for the Other’s freedom is an empty promise if it means that a chosen attitude can leave that freedom untouched. Even a project explicitly aimed at respecting freedom becomes one more way of relating to and limiting it. Total indifference offers no escape either. People are already thrown into a world in which others are present; no act, not even suicide, can undo that original situation.

The unavoidable situation

The principle’s force lies in its refusal of a clean ethical alternative between intervention and withdrawal. Reassurance and comfort, too, can organize means toward an end and treat the Other as an instrument; yet withholding action does not restore a freedom free of limits. Whatever people do, they must do it in a world already inhabited by others, where each is superfluous in relation to others.

This account does not present freedom as something that one person can simply hand over to another or protect by adopting the right policy. Every project outlines limits around the Other, including projects that profess benevolence. The problem is structural: relations begin from shared existence, not from a neutral position in which one could first decide whether to affect another person.

Guilt before the Other

Guilt follows from this situation in two connected forms. Beneath the Other’s look, a person experiences alienation and nakedness as a fall from grace that must be assumed. The account invokes the scriptural image of people discovering their nakedness to express this exposure to the Other’s judgment and presence.

Guilt also arises in the reverse direction. When a person looks at the Other, that act constitutes the Other as an object and an instrument, subjecting them to the alienation the observer has experienced. Original sin is thus not a later transgression added to an otherwise innocent existence; it is the upsurge of a person in a world where others already exist. Further relations may vary, but they remain variations on this original theme of guilt.