Letting Be
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Serenity Prayer, attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr (c. 1932)
Letting-be sounds at first harmless, almost passive. Yet it is one of the most difficult stances of all, because it can mean two very different things: the wise acceptance of what cannot be changed, and the recognition of the other in their otherness. An emancipatory and at the same time critical view takes both meanings seriously and at the same time asks: Where does serenity turn into resignation, and where does tolerance turn into mere indifference?
Letting others be as they are
In its most demanding form, letting-be means: to see, endure and understand the other, the foreign, the unfamiliar, without judging at once. That is anything but passivity. It requires holding back one's own standard for a moment and not measuring everything that is different against oneself.
Whoever really lets another be grants them that their life, their language, their way of existing need no justification before my vocabulary. Richard Rorty coined for this the figure of the liberal ironist: she knows the contingency of her own convictions and therefore does not claim to have the last word about the form of life of others.1 Letting-be here is no disinterest but the self-restraint of one who knows that they too could have become otherwise.
Even more fundamentally, Judith Butler asks how much I can know of the other at all. Since no human being is entirely transparent to themselves, everyone remains in some residue opaque to the other.2 Whoever recognizes this renounces the claim to grasp the other completely and to pin them down to a finished judgment. Letting-be would then be the ethical consequence of one's own ignorance: to leave the other room to show themselves other than I expected.
Accept or change?
Letting-be seems to be the opposite of wanting-to-change. Precisely this tension is named by the Serenity Prayer, whose basic thought is far older than its Christian version. Already the Stoa, especially Epictetus, sharply distinguished between what is in our power and what is not. Whoever confuses the two suffers twice: they fight against the unalterable and neglect the alterable.3
This distinction is liberating and dangerous at once. Liberating, because it releases us from the burden of having to be responsible for everything. Dangerous, because the boundary between the unalterable and the alterable is rarely given by nature but is often political. What some are supposed to accept as immovable fate is for others a convenient pretext not to touch existing conditions. Poverty, inequality, established roles long appear as nature, until someone recognizes them as made and thus as alterable. Here it shows that the Stoic question "Is it in my power?" is never innocent: it can lead to wisdom or to practised powerlessness.
The limit of letting-be
With this, the critical question of the limits arises. Not everything deserves to be let be. A form of life can be ossified, a practice can be oppressive. Rahel Jaeggi has shown that forms of life do not stand beyond critique merely because they have grown. They can be examined for whether they solve the problems for the sake of which they exist, or whether they merely administer suffering.4 Letting-be must therefore not be an immunization against critique.
A usable measure is provided by Rainer Forst with the right to justification. Tolerance, that is, the letting-be of the other, finds its limit where a practice can no longer be justified to those affected, where, that is, someone is dominated and silenced in the name of tradition or difference.5 To let the batterer be would mean abandoning the victim. Genuine tolerance tolerates the foreign, not domination.
So letting-be turns out to be a demanding practice of distinction. It is neither indifferent looking-away nor resigned acceptance, but the hard-to-learn art of leaving the other their own mind and at the same time not taking the alterable for fate. It is emancipatory where it protects diversity from the grip of standardization; it remains critical as long as it asks whether what we serenely accept might not, after all, be in our power to change.