German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels – a recognised phenomenologist interested, among other things, in the theme of a ‘stranger’ or ‘alien’ – suggests that humans are liminal beings. He presents this idea in his book Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts. What does Waldenfels mean? In the first chapter of the book, he introduces and explains this idea as follows:
“As the “non-fixated animal” which finds itself forced to invent and create orders, man reveals himself as a lack-being and, at the same time, a surplus being. He cannot rely on anything, not even on natural or essential needs, and he cannot concentrate on any fixed goals, not even on regulative ideas, which require a unified standard. “There are orders,” and this flexible basic fact refers to those orders that are indeed subject to necessary and restrictive conditions, for which, however, no sufficient reasons can be found.”
Waldenfels (2011, pp.17-18)
The liminality of a human being is revealed in the way we make sense of the world, ourselves, and each other. The underlying assumption is that we are sense-making beings and that all our lived experiences are already pregnant with meanings, even if some remain unexpressed or only anticipated.
Being “non-fixated”, humans are not fixed in a specific, essential, and predetermined order of meanings. We lack this unified and absolute order. In Waldenfels’s terms – we are lack-beings in this sense. Simultaneously, however, sense-making is our way of being in the world. Perhaps this is one of the few ‘orders’ or structures of our being we all share. Of course, it, too, is contingent. Had the conditions and environment on Earth that happened to shape us been different, the whole story would have unfolded differently. Or not at all.
As it is, humans cannot help but create orders of meanings, where each such structure is with its necessary preconditions but not necessary as the only (valid) order in itself. With any and all orders being historically situated, humans have a surplus of meaning and, therefore, we are surplus beings. Waldenfels stresses this surplus when he criticises ‘traditional’ orders that, in claiming universal validity, miss their own contingency, which is their origin: “An “absolute present,” which would gather in it all sense, belongs to the phantasms of traditional orders that deny their origin.” (Waldenfels 2011, p.18)
This is where liminality comes in. Our being unfixed in terms of any one specific meaning structure and simultaneously restricted to requiring structures to create meaning reveals humans as inhabiting an in-betweenness – liminality of being. Rephrasing what Waldenfels calls the order(s) that constitute the ‘world’ for us (in a phenomenological sense of meaningful lived experiences), our liminality can be expressed as follows:
As meaning-seeking-and-creating beings, we find ourselves inhabiting the threshold between the felt lack of a fixed, universally valid meaning and the intuited availability of a surplus of meanings that, at least in principle, can provide different interpretations of our experiences.
Such a liminal way of being results in “the inevitable self-thematizing, [where] the self enters the ordering net that it designs.” (Waldenfels 2011, p.16). In other words, our liminality allows us to self-reflect and make our own lives a theme of our thoughts – a process that can challenge existing meaning structures, but only to create new ones in an ongoing circle of interpretations.
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