I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Following his early encounter with Husserl’s ideas, Jaspers had gone on to develop his own work, building on his psychology background as well as on Kierkegaardian existentialism. He was especially interested in Kierkegaard’s studies of ‘either/or’ choices and of freedom: the ways in which we face up to dilemmas and decide what to do. Jaspers focused on what he called Grenzsituationen — border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality, or some event may make you realise that you have to accept the burden of responsibility for what you do. Experiencing such situations is, for Jaspers, almost synonymous with existing, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Although they are hard to bear, these are puzzles in our existence, and thus open the door to philosophising. We cannot solve them by thinking in the abstract; they must be lived, and in the end we make our choices with our entire being. They are existential situations.
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
A border or limit situation is one in which you must transcend ordinary forms of knowing and decision-making. You reach the limits of your ability to understand what is going on and you are pushed to confront these limits, leading you into a deeper and more mysterious mode of knowing.
From the Wikipedia entry on limit situations:
James G. Hart wrote that encounters with limit situations unsettle individuals, break them out of their inauthentic identifications, remove them from the social bond, and force them to come alive and find new ways of communicating. They can be compared to the similarly generative experience of the sense of bewilderment in Zen. Hans-Georg Gadamer believed the limit situation to provide a revelatory encounter with the other and that facing the anxiety arising from the foreknowledge of death can likewise be a growth opportunity arising from a limit situation.
German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) is associated with existentialism, because his work drew upon the ideas of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and because he emphasized individual freedom in many of his writings. He encouraged individuals meeting border situations to discard standard rational thinking and take a leap of faith towards transcendence in order to experience authentic existence.
He wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern scientific, economic, and political institutions. He was forced to abandon his teaching position during World War II because his wife, Gertrud, was Jewish. After the war ended, he published his work The Question of German Guilt, which examines the culpability of Germany as a whole for Nazi atrocities.
The greatest border situation that Jews faced in Germany in the 1930s was the rise of the Nazis.
Bakewell writes:
Of course, it is relatively easy for later generations (or for the same people later in life) to see what challenges a particular ‘border situation’ presented; no such retrospective view was available to those living through it. A natural human tendency is to try to continue with as ordinary and civilised a life as possible, for as long as one can. Bruno Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered; these were the ones who got away quickly.
I do believe we face a border situation right now with the present United States goverment. While it was Jews in the 1930s, now the ruling political party is making outcast anyone with with brown skin, mostly Mexicans (or other Latin Americans) and Middle Easterners. They are targeted for expulsion, imprisonment, and mistreatment regardless of their legal status. Even children are detained.
I don’t have an answer as to what to do about it, but I do see that most people are trying to “continue with as ordinary and civilised a life as possible for as long as one can.”