Chapter 3 - Fluid Identity and Overcoming Boundaries

Summary

What I would like to do in this paper is to look at an analysis of the concept of “overcoming boundaries.” What do we mean when we see that we are overcoming boundaries? Is overcoming boundaries the same as crossing boundaries? And what actually are boundaries? We can look at the issue at various levels, but in this paper, I will tend to focus more on the abstract level of the meaning of the term “boundary” itself, both in the context of physical objects and, more interestingly, a social entity such as a social or an ethnic group. The latter obviously depends on the former for their metaphysical analysis. A boundary is what separates one thing from another. There is a boundary, and it is supposed to divide one thing, one entity, from another. However, as we are focusing on overcoming a boundary, this implies a further analysis of the concept of “a thing” or in other words its identity. I would like to introduce the notion of fluid identity as a corollary to the notion of boundary. If the identity of a thing is fluid, then a possibility exists for a boundary to be overcome. An implication of this is that “boundary” is always a pragmatic concept. There is no way to separate out one thing from another objectively; instead, it depends on us who do the separating and creating a boundary. Afterward, I will discuss this metaphysical analysis in the context of social identity and social boundaries. Then, toward the end of the paper, I will discuss what this pragmatic consideration means for the more practical acts of crossing or overcoming the existing cultural, social, political, and other forms of boundaries.

A Metaphysical Analysis of Identity and Boundary: Hegel and Nāgārjuna

We begin by undertaking a metaphysical analysis of the concept of identity first. This is because identity is a counterpart concept of the boundary. There can be no boundary if there is no identity and vice versa. If all things completely dissolve into one another, then we can draw no boundaries between them. Furthermore, creating boundaries in an unspecified object in effect creates more objects whose identities are defined by those boundaries themselves.