The Catholic Peace Weekly Philosophy Chat column describes boundaries and their meanings in life. The Jesuit professor helps us understand how they relate to our daily lives.
Humans are creatures who build boundaries and live within them. Boundaries can mean many things. Levin (1890-1947), a German-Jewish social psychologist who fled to the United States to escape the Nazis, interpreted the concept of boundaries at the sociological level as the confusion of identity in different cultures. Boundaries are the fence that protects the self and the ground where we find our identity and life takes root.
On a philosophical level, boundaries refer to the fundamental condition of human beings, which means that we are “between” polarities. We are inherently caught between the soul and the body, the infinite and the finite, eternity and time, greatness and smallness. We set our own boundaries, constantly adjusting between the two to be our true selves, but we despair when these boundaries are out of balance and tilt to one side or the other.
Human boundary-building is realized in the world. The moment a human being is born, he or she is thrown into the world in which he or she is born, and it is in this world that he or she commits to his or her existence. This world is bounded. The already understood world forms a boundary between past and present interpretations, but it soon breaks down the boundary and invites us to a new understanding. Through this new understanding, we have the experience of crossing borders and boundaries in a limited way.
Humans cannot escape the fundamental situation bounded by various constraints, but we try to cross these boundaries every moment through determination. The experience of transcending boundaries is achieved by exercising the transcendence of the mind toward the absolute or transcendent, by “projecting” oneself into the world of the possible.
In philosophical counseling, boundaries are both the world itself and your own world. Understanding my world as mediated by my psyche is crucial for healing in psychotherapy. My boundaries are uniquely organized and structured in a way that corresponds to my psyche. As mental beings, humans express emotions, think, and act. All of our actions are based on the world we have formed, which becomes our boundaries.
These boundaries are manifested in a particular “behavioral style” that is repetitive and fixed. These boundaries are based on a worldview and are strongly influenced by an individual's unique customs, habits, education, and experiences. Behavior is an ‘interpretation of a situation’ and a ‘judgment’ made through certain ‘concepts’ and 'stereotypes'. This essentially means that we are shaped by our culture (history) and ideology (philosophy), which are influenced by our individual and collective experiences. These factors exert a significant influence on our behavior and ultimately control our lives. We cannot easily break our boundaries.
In “The Treason of the Masses,” Ortega (1883-1955) warns us that today we are all too easily exposed to the stereotype of the large, impersonal, irresponsible multitudes that lack self-reflection, insist that their own opinions are unconditionally correct, refuse to listen to others, and ignore the existence of others. The only way to break free from the violent stereotypes of the multitude is to critically examine and break down the boundaries of our own comfort with the 'masses'.
