What they take tolerance to be

The notes start from a question in a reflective-humanities assignment: why should I show tolerance? The dictionary sense they quote is a generous acceptance, or forgiveness, of someone else’s fault. In English they render the idea as tolerance; the French word they already know well is tolérance.

We spend a life, they write, both committing faults and being hurt by them. To show tolerance is not easy, so a person who does it, or who receives it, still causes surprise. For a fault too large to undo, they think, a penalty still has a place, so that the same thing is not done again; for a small fault, it is often better to show tolerance. Tolerance, they write, is “the beauty of losing”: not imposing the sanction that could be imposed, and finishing a quarrel quietly, which they find beautiful.

Why they say a society needs it

A generous respect for a view unlike one’s own, even a view at the opposite pole, is, they write, a virtue a society cannot do without. People cannot live only by fighting. This is an age of competition, but a moment still comes when a compromise has to be made: each side says what it wants, and each gives one step. That, they say, is when tolerance is needed — not a grudging pass, but real respect, listening, and understanding.

Freedom of thought, they add, should be kept except in cases they treat as unavoidable, the extreme of terrorism among them. To refuse tolerance to another person’s thought, and to call it simply wrong because it is not one’s own, is, on this account, to claim a right to trample that thought; the same claim could then be turned back on oneself. Showing tolerance is also a way of thinking about oneself: what would I have felt in that place, have I made the same mistake, why does that person think as they do? Reflection of that kind, they write, is how a person grows inwardly.

A class discussion, and a trip

The writer recalls a class discussion in which another student met every view with criticism. The writer did not want to answer in the same key, and tried instead to think through why that person spoke as they did, and to show a willingness to take the view in. Nothing obvious changed, they write, but the effort to listen widened the range of thought a little.

On a trip to Japan, the writer and a friend argued over whether to visit more sites or more restaurants. The friend gave way toward the restaurants the writer wanted, and the writer in turn respected the friend’s wish: one day was spent only on restaurants, and one day only on sites. Tolerance, they conclude, is not only “letting someone off once.” It is also this kind of talk and compromise, a way of standing for a moment in the other person’s place. The same Korean report, written out more fully, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reflection on tolerance, with a class discussion and a trip to Japan.

Last updated: 15 November 2026