VI. Ethics at the Threshold: Responsibility to Practice

Moral Responsibility and the Tended Aperture

Given the understanding of the integrated self as a useful fiction composed of multitudes, a question arises regarding moral responsibility: how can a non-unified entity be truly accountable for its actions? Liminalism addresses this by embedding responsibility within the framework of the useful fiction itself and the function of the self as a threshold.

The fiction of the self is useful precisely because it allows us to adopt the "intentional stance"—to operate in the world by treating ourselves and others as if we are unified agents with coherent beliefs, desires, and goals. Moral responsibility is a necessary part of this fiction, essential for navigating interpersonal and social reality. It is a convention we cannot jettison without dissolving the very framework that enables meaningful interaction and continuity over time.

From the perspective of the self as a threshold, actions are among the most significant things that pass through our portal from the internal multiplicity to the external world. Moral responsibility is the imperative to care for the shape of the aperture—to exercise discernment over which internal impulses, desires, or narratives are permitted passage into action, and how they are shaped as they emerge. This is not about achieving absolute control over the multitudes (which is often impossible), but about the deliberate practice of selecting, refining, and inhibiting based on values, intentions, and attentional discipline.

For continuity and coherence over time, the useful fiction requires an equivalence relation – a sense of identity that links past actions to the present self for the purposes of responsibility. Denying this responsibility is an attack on the fiction that provides this continuity. Furthermore, the framework illuminates the very borderline cases where we already wrestle with responsibility (negligence, mental state, intent). These situations can be seen as points where the coherence of the useful fiction, or the capacity to tend the aperture with full discernment, is compromised, offering a nuanced lens through which to reevaluate accountability rather than simply discarding it. Accepting moral responsibility is thus an act of affirming and tending the necessary fiction of the self.

Ethical Implications of Threshold Existence

Liminalism recognizes that the nature of threshold existence carries with it inherent ethical obligations. These are not imposed from without but emerge from within the very structure of liminality itself.

The first obligation is truthfulness in narrative. Though complete understanding is impossible and all models remain partial, there exists a responsibility to move asymptotically toward greater fidelity in our accounts of what passes through the threshold of awareness. This is not the pursuit of an absolute truth, but rather a commitment to refining, revising, and deepening our narratives in dialogue with experience. The self as fiction does not negate the imperative toward honest witnessing—instead, it demands a more nuanced understanding of what honesty entails: not certainty, but sincere engagement with uncertainty.

The second obligation is participation. If consciousness is how the universe observes itself, and narrative is how it remembers, then to withdraw from the conversation of meaning-making is to diminish the cosmos. This participation need not be grand or public—it may be as simple as the deliberate witnessing of a moment, the crafting of a personal narrative, or engagement in dialogue. What matters is not the scale but the quality of attention brought to the threshold.

The third obligation is attentional discipline. Attention is not merely a personal resource but a cosmic one—the primary means through which reality configures itself. To attend carelessly is to squander this resource; to attend deliberately is to participate consciously in the ongoing creation of meaning. This requires discernment about what to notice, what to focus on, and especially what to witness—what to integrate into the narrative of self and world.

These obligations are not burdens but orientations—ways of aligning individual existence with the larger patterns of which it is part. They offer not certainty but coherence, not perfection but direction. In a universe of thresholds, ethics itself becomes liminal: not a fixed code but an ongoing negotiation across boundaries of self and other, is and ought, present and future. To live ethically is to tend these thresholds with care.

Interlude: The Gait of Growth

To walk is to fall — deliberately, rhythmically, and with trust.

Each step begins not in balance, but in its surrender. The body leans forward, shifting weight off center, abandoning the temporary stability of the present for the possibility of motion. The swing of the leg is a moment of liminality: unsupported, uncertain, midair. Then, the foot strikes down, and a new point of equilibrium is found — not a return to the old, but a resolution forward.

The human gait is not a preservation of balance, but a pattern of controlled disequilibrium — a repetition of self-disruption and reintegration that moves us through the world.

So it is with growth.

Equanimity is valuable, but it is not where growth begins. Growth begins in the lean — the tilt into surprise, discomfort, or ambiguity. It begins when something nudges us off balance: a challenge, a loss, a confrontation, or even a question we cannot quite answer. In that moment, we are weightless, unmoored from what we were — and not yet what we are becoming.

The trick is not to avoid the wobble, but to learn its rhythm.

In friendships, in learning, in becoming ourselves, we must sometimes be the one who leans — and sometimes the one who nudges. Not to push others into collapse, but to invite movement. Not to destabilize for its own sake, but to participate in the dance of unfolding.

To live liminally is not to freeze at the threshold, but to walk it — step by step, off balance and becoming.

Interlude: Submission

Submission may seem like an odd topic to tackle. The word carries social, interpersonal, religious and even sexual baggage. But if we strip that all away we can see the important role it plays in our lives and see if there is anything we can learn from it.

Socially, submission seems at odds with Enlightenment values and today we rebel against the once commonplace assertion that one person, or group, should naturally submit to the will of another. Slaves submit to masters, serfs to lords, prisoners to their captors, and, historically, wives to their husbands. Submission goes hand-in-hand with oppression and we like to think of ourselves as beyond all that. Even the idea that children should submit to their parents, uncontroversial not so long ago, is contentious today.

Interpersonally, submission is what you are forced to do when you lose a conflict. We fight hard not to have to submit to our co-workers, our friends, our parents, our spouses. Submission implies giving up the fight, quitting, giving in. And we will pay a high cost to avoid it in our interpersonal relationships.

Religiously, submission refers to the will of God. But too often, demands to submit to God’s will are just barely disguised demands to submit to the will of a certain group of people. We may be able to get comfortable with an individual’s personal commitment to submit to God’s will, but our alarm bells go off when we start to hear that, actually, we all should. Because exactly whose God are we talking about here? And who interprets this will?

And finally, sexually, submission seems deviant, a fetish, something that, at best, can be difficult to comprehend or empathize with and, at worst, can cause one to write off a person as perverted or broken or a joke – especially a man.

But if we can put aside that baggage for a moment and look a bit closer, we might see that submission is closely tied to an understanding and acceptance of things as they are rather than things as we’d like them to be. And this is where the concept can recover its value for us humans trying to make our way in the world.

The Stoics placed a great deal of emphasis on the correct discernment of those things that are in your control and those things that are not. (The astute reader might recognize this as an essentially taxonomic task.). They contended that the former category was much, much smaller than the latter, containing, ultimately, only your own thoughts, feelings and actions. A large part of the practice of Stoicism revolved around improving your perception, so that you could clearly see which category events and situations fell into.

They emphasized this skill because they believed that people, by nature, almost always get it wrong – we think we control, or can control, much more than we do. We put things in the wrong category, over and over again, never learning from our mistakes. And they believed that much of the pain and suffering we face as human beings is caused by this failure of classification. By our fight to control things we have no control over, by the ways we deceive ourselves into thinking we do control them or that we must control them to be safe or happy, by the blame we shoulder or credit we take for things outside our control, by the ways we ignore the things we do control and waste our power on things we don’t.

This ancient concept has echoes in the Serenity Prayer from the 1930’s:

God, grant me the serenity to 
accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

But this serene acceptance is another way of saying submission to things as they are. When you truly have no control over something, the sane response is to give up trying to control it. Accept it. Submit. And focus your powers on those things that are in your control.

Once you realize this, the question naturally becomes, what is the area under my control and how should I exercise my power there? I’ll have more to say on that in future posts, but you can see why correct discernment becomes so important. Accepting things, submitting to circumstances you could change is almost as bad as railing against things you can’t.

But if we assume for now that proper categorization is possible, that, as the Stoics believed, it is something you can practice and improve at, then we might be able to also see that submission to the things we cannot control is freeing. We don’t have to carry regret for not changing them or stress that we will be required to. We don’t have to exhaust ourselves in futile fights to control the uncontrollable. And we don’t have to lie, to ourselves and others, to maintain the illusion of control.

This can definitely be scary. The big lie that we are in control of most things that matter makes us feel safe. It banishes uncertainty and the anxiety it causes. If we have grown accustomed to thinking we have power that we don’t, taking the fiction of it away can make us feel defenseless, helpless, powerless. But seeing through the lie is how we begin to see the power that we do have – to decide how we feel about things, to be the author of our own character, and to act with authority within our limited domain.

Another poem, recently shared with me, captures not just the fact that we deceive ourselves about this, but also the sublime joy we can feel when we finally give up the ghost and surrender. It casts it in religious terms, but it works as metaphor even if that’s not your personal framework.

Tripping Over Joy

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?
The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God
And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move
That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, “I Surrender!”
Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.

Hafez, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy

Here, surrender brings not only relief at not having to counter the uncounterable, but also the freedom to appreciate the Fantastic Move itself. If we stop fighting against things we cannot beat, we have the opportunity to see the beauty, or logic, or wonder, or meaning in the thing that is no longer our opponent.

So practice your perception, categorize things correctly, and allow yourself to submit. Because that, at least, is in your control.

Practices

Liminalism does not prescribe a rigid set of practices but encourages modes of life that align with its principles:

Tend your boundaries: Be mindful of what you allow in, and how you respond to it. Let the self evolve without losing coherence.
Spend attention deliberately: Practice noticing, focusing, and especially witnessing. Let your life be shaped by what you truly attend to.
Embrace your multitudes: Articulate your ambivalence and craft your narrative in a way to incorporate it.
Honor the usefulness of stories: Craft your self-narrative with integrity. Revise it without shame.
Engage the gaps: Seek conversation, not consensus. Let misunderstandings be the beginning of meaning.
Accept surprise: Welcome what escapes your control or expectation. Let it teach you.
Live asymptotically: Strive not for perfection, but for deeper alignment with values, meaning, and connection — knowing the limit will never be reached.