Abstract
This chapter outlines the history of freedom and toleration. It pays particular attention to the Dutch Golden Age that exemplified tolerance, a trendsetting pragmatic response to the problems of modern plural society. It addresses John Locke, who composed his A Letter Concerning Toleration during his stay as a political refugee in Amsterdam in the 1680s. Inspired by his Dutch intellectual friends, Locke expounded the basic ideas of a liberal constitution, albeit not as yet in a perfect way. Spinoza and other representatives of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ were more coherent in their elaborations of the liberal principles of liberty and equality.
In the subsequent centuries philosophers, such as Mill and Rawls, have completed the model of the neutral democratic constitutional state that guarantees individual liberties and social rights. In interaction with this intellectual progress, in a process of trial and error liberal theory was transformed into political practice throughout the Western world via a series of real and metaphorical revolutions .
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Notes
- 1.
The thesis that Dutch nationalism is a typically 19th-century invention has been refuted by Jensen (2016a). On the occasion of the 1648 Peace of Münster, establishing the independence of the Netherlands, poets, painters and intellectuals celebrated Dutch identity and language. They associated its sense of freedom with the Batavian freedom struggle against the Romans, and announced the Golden Age of the Republic, characterized by the flourishing of commerce, arts and sciences. For more about Dutch national identity in the early modern period, see Waszink (2016), Rommelse (2016), and Schama (1987).
- 2.
In his 1524 open letter to Luther , notorious for his aggressive rhetoric, the Dutch scholar Erasmus stated that he would abstain from invectives because ‘the truth, which by excessive quarrelling is often lost, is discovered with greater certainty without it’ (Erasmus-Luther 1967, p. 6).
- 3.
- 4.
My sceptical pseudo-doctrine is called Critical Schizoism (see Maris 1996). It is based on the idea that we each have a multiple personality, split up into an actor and a spectator (and other subpersonalities). Our acting Self cannot act spontaneously because it is under constant critical self-observation. The observing Self, bound to its body’s perspective, cannot therefore attain objective knowledge from an Archimedean point of view. This scepsis is one of the reasons why I present part of my philosophical works in the form of theatrical and audio-visual projects that have no claim to academic truth, such as the oratorio Horror Vacui (building on Lucretius’ philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (co-written and co-produced in 1989 with the composer José-Luis Greco) ; The Dance of Zarathustra (2004; a theatrical dialogue between the thinker Nietzsche and the dancer Nijinsky) , and We Want our Freedom! (2013; a tragi-comedy on slavery in which you play a leading role—also see Chap. 8). Our multiple personality also constitutes the basis of the ideal of Multiple Love, which figures in Chap. 3 on Sex, Morality and Law.
- 5.
Locke (1991), p. 44: ‘it is also evident which liberty remains to men’, namely ‘that every one should do what he in his conscience is persuaded to be acceptable to the Almighty’.
- 6.
Buys (2015) points to a long tradition of ‘Vernacular Rationalism’, a lay philosophy written in Dutch language, running from the late 13th century (Jacob van Maerlant), through Coornhert in the 16th century and the Remonstrant ‘Coornhertists’, into the Radical Enlightenment of the Dutch 1660s. These lay philosophers tried to educate their compatriots in reasoning autonomously about the good life. This required tolerance, or freedom from coercion by state and church. ‘As such, Vernacular Rationalism was a powerful movement which disseminated a rationalistic view of man and morals in the intellectual, artistic and cultural networks active in the turbulent context of the rising seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. This would explain all the more why Cartesianism and, somewhat later, Spinozism, found such an exceptional fertile breeding ground in Dutch intellectual (and semi-intellectual) circles’ (Buys 2105, p. 241).
- 7.
Religious toleration had been defended back in the pre-modern Middle Ages too, but only from the perspective of a Christian state with an established Catholic Church. In this view, eternal Christian law is normative to public life; yet divergent religions may be allowed some free space.
- 8.
Tiranny, by contrast, extinguishes industry, because nobody has any certainty that he will enjoy the fruits of his investments.
- 9.
See Vries and Van der Woude (1997).
- 10.
This in contrast to Aristotle’s thesis that reasoning is syllogistic: ‘God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational’ and ‘that before Aristotle there was not one man that did or could know any thing by reason; and that, since the invention of syllogisms, there is not one of ten thousand that doth’ (ECHU XVII, 1; Locke n.d., p. 569).
- 11.
Spinoza (2012): Letter XXIII. Spinoza to Oldenburg .
- 12.
Rawls may misjudge Bayle , whose toleration was more generous than yours. His plea for tolerance included atheists, because in his view decent conduct is dependent on a person’s attitude, not on his faith. In his 1696 Dictionary Bayle pictured Spinoza as both an atheist and an amiable and decent person: ‘That is strange; but aufond one does not have to be more surprised then when one sees people whose way of life is very wicked, although they fully believe in the Gospel’ (Rawls 1999, p. 417).
- 13.
See Israel (1999).
- 14.
Although you, as we have seen, also state that acts that are sinful but not harmful are not the State’s business. Accordingly your arguments against promiscuity have a secular character; but their Christian origin is obvious.
- 15.
Beer (1976), p. 575.
- 16.
- 17.
Likewise, Fukuyama explicitly rejects the Whig Interpretation of modern history: the European modernisation process was the contingent result of shifting power relations.
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Maris, C. (2018). Can We Learn from History? A Letter to Mr. John Locke, Philosopher. In: Tolerance : Experiments with Freedom in the Netherlands. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 124. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89346-4_2
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