This is the postdoctoral exit report I did with Teacher Tiansong. To be honest, it was done rather half-heartedly; many interesting parts were not developed in depth, but the problem itself should still be a good one.
First let me explain the title. I did not make the meaning of this title explicit in the article, and some of the phrasing may well have caused misunderstandings. I only noticed this omission after reading Teacher Wu Tong’s evaluation, so my live report began with a remedial explanation.
My “The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage” is obviously modeled on Bert’s book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, which was my introduction to the history of scientific ideas. What displeased Bert was that the traditional narrative of the history of philosophy left Newton out, while the traditional narrative of the history of science did not take philosophy seriously; yet Bert believed that the revolution in modern physics and the epistemological turn in modern philosophy had to be examined together, and so he tried to probe the metaphysical foundations of physics.
And my title, too, expresses a meaning that is formally similar to Bert’s: the history of philosophy has traditionally neglected the problem of garbage, while those who care about garbage have not pursued the history of philosophy, and I want to connect the history of philosophy with garbage.
But readers may wonder: Bert is saying that “physical science” itself is something ideal, whereas what I am talking about, “garbage,” is something concrete. So can one also speak of the “philosophical foundations” of concrete, man-made things?
In fact, if we replace the two words garbage and metaphysics with some other artifact and some other idea, we can easily see that we really can speak, in a reasonable and legitimate way, of the conceptual foundations of certain man-made things. For example, we can speak of the electromagnetic foundations of mobile phones, the thermodynamic foundations of internal combustion engines, the historical knowledge behind a mural, the political foundations of the Forbidden City, and so on.
It is quite obvious that no artifact appears out of thin air. Since human beings know how to make and use it in a specific way, this means that, for any kind of artifact, its existence always implies that we have already made certain preparations at the level of ideas.
So the reason a phrase like “the metaphysical foundations of garbage” feels off is not that garbage is a man-made thing, but that this man-made thing called garbage seems too lacking in “technical sophistication.” Such a lowly thing seems to require no profound ideas at all in order to be produced, whereas metaphysics is precisely the most “high-end” level among all ideas. So this commonplace thing called garbage actually requires such an “advanced” precondition, and that is why we feel the dissonance.
And this very sense of dissonance is what I am trying to crack open. The reason it sits uneasily with garbage is not that metaphysics is truly so noble, but rather because metaphysics itself is defective. The profound connection between garbage and metaphysics has been hidden, intentionally or not, by metaphysics itself.
In fact, for modern garbage to be produced by people in the appropriate way, or to be used by people in the appropriate way (thrown into a trash bin), this is by no means self-evident; the conceptual preparation required behind it is no less than that required for airplanes and cannons. The ancients could not produce garbage, not merely because they lacked the relevant technical means, but because their conceptual world had not made room for garbage. So even if we put “garbage” right in front of them, they would not be able to “recognize” it.
For example, we can look at the scene in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy [play 3 minutes of film clip]. One day a Bushman (San) tribe picks up a Coke bottle discarded by a pilot. Obviously, they do not take it as “garbage,” but first regard it as a gift from the gods. At first it is handled like a toy, admired like a work of art, and only gradually are some practical uses discovered. From beginning to end, this bottle is out of place in their lifeworld; it cannot find a proper position. Finally, when it seems on the verge of destroying their traditional way of life and their relationships, the wise among the tribe finally think they should throw it away. But even then it is not discarded as garbage; it is taken to be an “evil thing.” Then we find that they still have not found an appropriate way to discard things: the bottle is first thrown into the air—return it to where it came from—and then buried in the ground (later dug up by wild animals and picked up again by children). In the end, a member of the tribe decides to take it to the “end of the world,” and during the long journey he intersects with other modern people, which forms the later part of the film. By the end, he finally finds the end of the world and completes the mission of disposal—it is a cliff, not a trash bin.
This passage in the film has many implications for the history of technology, which I will not discuss here. I only want to make one point: recognizing garbage as garbage is not a simple matter. When we casually throw away a Coke bottle, we may not realize that this action requires a great deal of conceptual accumulation before it can be done.
First, we need to regard certain things as useless waste, and this is very difficult. We notice that the Coke bottle discarded by modern people contains infinite possibilities of use in the eyes of the primitive people; second, we need to find an appropriate destination for garbage, namely the “end of the world,” whereas among primitive people, every place around them is meaningful and part of their lifeworld. Although they know how to bury things, once they resolve to get rid of something completely, they also know that burying it nearby is not responsible enough. Their lifeworld has no “end”; they think the end of the world is very far away. For modern people, however, the trash bin is his “end of the world.” Once we throw something into the trash bin, we imagine we have gotten rid of it.
So the starting point of my research is to ask: when we can casually toss a bag of garbage into a trash bin by the roadside, what preparations have already been made at the conceptual level, and how is this possible? On this point I was of course inspired by Teacher Tiansong. He pointed out the historicity of the concept of “garbage,” and pointed out that the ways modern people produce and deal with garbage are not self-evident, but have their historical background.
In Teacher Tian’s view, the foremost source of modern garbage is industrial civilization, or modern technology. I agree with this, but modern technology also has its conceptual preconditions, so I have specifically pushed forward Teacher Tian’s work from the conceptual level.
As for the conceptual preconditions of modern technology, Heidegger and the philosophy of technology thinkers influenced by him have already conducted profound investigations. Heidegger said that modern technology is “completed metaphysics,” and thus he tried to trace the roots of modernity and the possibilities of transcendence from the entire metaphysical tradition.
My work is actually an extension or completion of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology—if modern technology is the realization of metaphysics, then modern garbage is the by-product necessarily accompanying this metaphysics, and the existence of garbage in turn reveals that this so-called “completion” or “realization” has always been merely an illusion. We can “complete” the “clarification” of a room by sweeping “garbage” out the door, but we can never realize the clarification of the entire world in the same way, and that is precisely the task traditional metaphysics tried to accomplish.
To probe the metaphysical foundations of garbage is, on the one hand, to understand the root of the garbage problem, and on the other hand, to understand the points at which metaphysics has gone astray.
When we think about how “garbage” is possible at the conceptual level, we notice that the concept of garbage is peculiar. It seems to designate a set of things, but it is very hard to define it in a form like “genus plus specific difference.” The category “garbage” differs from the “sets” of things like “clothes” or “food”; garbage does not seem to be grouped together because its members share some common function or typical feature. This set is more like a “non-set”: each piece of garbage originally belonged to some “set,” such as “clothes” or “food,” but was ultimately discarded for different reasons and thus left its original set. Garbage is the belonging of that which has no belonging.
Teacher Tian points out that anything can be garbage, as long as it is thrown into a “trash bin.” The moment it enters the bin, it becomes garbage. But obviously, people do not recognize it as garbage merely because it is in the bin; before we actually perform the act of throwing something away, we have already regarded garbage as something that ought to be discarded, and thus we take the trash bin to be the proper place for these things. Teacher Tian says: “Various kinds of garbage coexisting in a trash bin is, intuitively, a set, but they are not a set merely because they are in the same bin; in people’s minds, they have already been gathered together beforehand. The trash bin is the materialization of the concept of ‘discarding.’”
The concept of “discarding” is easy to understand. It can designate a series of formally similar actions, but the commonality of discarding behavior does not necessarily mean that what is discarded can thereby be naturally grouped into a class. In fact, the actions opposite to “discarding,” such as “accepting” and “retaining,” do not seem to have noun forms like “waste matter,” let alone actions like “hitting” or “stroking.” The objects toward which these actions are directed are not automatically unified under some one concept.
When something is detached from its original determination and is abandoned and excluded in its original “use,” this does not mean that it must necessarily become “unowned.” For example, a shabby piece of clothing may become cloth, a rag, fuel, paper-making material, and so on; leftover food may become swill or dog food. Different things often have different destinations, and do not necessarily converge into what is called “garbage.”
So what makes garbage possible is not only the act of “discarding,” but also a distinctive concept and perspective, so that “garbage” can be distinguished from the myriad beings. In a certain sense, this concept even has to come before the specific act of discarding, because before we decide to discard something, it has already been identified as “garbage.” Giving up a piece of clothing and turning it into a rag, and discarding a piece of clothing into a trash bin, are two different actions; modern urban people who are familiar with the concept of garbage are more likely to choose the latter.
Nothing is garbage by nature, but neither is anything unable to be garbage. Garbage as garbage does not depend on its physical structure, but on people’s intentional structure. We need to perform a “phenomenological reduction” on the phenomenon of garbage.
It should be noted that once we have subsumed ordinary discarded things under the concept of “garbage,” looking back, we will find that garbage has “existed since ancient times,” because of course the ancients also discarded things. But this is like saying that ancient China also had “science”: perhaps not wrong, but it still requires further specification. In the broad sense, if science means knowledge in the general sense, then science existed in ancient and modern times, in China and abroad alike; but in the narrow sense, modern science, which arose in the 16th and 17th centuries, is indeed something new.
The “technology” discussed by “philosophy of technology” also generally has two layers of meaning. One is technology in the broad sense, including the making and use of all kinds of artifacts, and also covering nonmaterial meanings such as language technology, bodily technique, social technique, and so on. “Technology” in this sense is as old as humanity itself; no human way of life can do without technology, and in a certain sense technology is human nature itself.
The other layer is technology in the narrow sense, referring specifically to modern technology in the context of industrial civilization. This kind of technology is vastly different from the skills of the ancients. Its powerful force, on the one hand, seeks to conquer nature, and on the other hand, turns back to govern human society. The “technological rationality” or “technological society” accompanying industrial civilization has become the object of scholars’ enthusiasm or criticism.
Philosophy of technology therefore also has two corresponding aspects: one starts from technology to reflect on human nature, and the other starts from technology to criticize modernity. But these two aspects are not unrelated, because modern technology, on the one hand, has its specificity, and on the other hand, after all, developed out of ancient technology.
There is a similar dual meaning with respect to “garbage.” Garbage is likewise either ancient or young, depending on the sense in which we speak of it. If the stone tools and pottery of primitive people count as “technology,” then they must also have discarded broken stone tools and shattered pottery; these can be said to be “garbage.” But if “technology” only comes to the fore in modern industrial society, then “garbage” has also come to the fore at almost the same time. Like the two aspects of philosophy of technology, we can also ask about garbage on two levels: first, garbage in the broad sense, with which any person and even any organism must be accompanied; second, garbage in the narrow sense, a product of modernity that accompanies modern technology.
In what sense can we say that “garbage has existed since ancient times”? One of the initiators of the “Garbage Project,” William Rathje, was an archaeologist famous for his study of Mayan culture. He discovered that archaeology is in essence the search for information in the “garbage” of the ancients. Most of what we excavate from ruins (apart from tombs and the like) are things discarded by the ancients. Broken pottery shards, food scraps, and even fossilized feces that the ancients cast aside like worn-out shoes all become treasures to modern archaeologists, because these discarded things contain countless bits of information about the lifeworld of the ancients. If that is the case, does modern people’s garbage not likewise contain countless bits of information about modern life? Thus Rathje launched the “Garbage Project,” collecting the garbage of modern people and studying it in an archaeological way.
What Rathje saw was the commonality between ancient and modern garbage: things discarded in human activity. In this sense, garbage is as old as humanity itself.
We say that making tools is the mark of humanity, and “garbage” is almost the inevitable by-product of “tools.” For human beings are not omnipotent gods, and the materials humans use in making things are not eternal, indestructible things of idea. Therefore any human work is finite; it cannot be used forever once made, and is destined to decay. Thus the making of artifacts is necessarily accompanied by the discarding of artifacts. In this sense, the history of garbage is as old as the history of technology. If we also consider food scraps and excrement, then in view of the basic characteristic of life as metabolism, “garbage” in the sense of “metabolic by-product” is even as old as life itself.
Of course, for ancient peoples, garbage was not yet a prominent problem. Hunters-gatherers had no fixed dwelling place, and before garbage could pile up around their habitation they would already have moved on. In addition, the garbage produced by primitive agricultural life was very little, and could easily be recycled or dissipated into the natural environment. It was only with the emergence of cities that garbage became a problem requiring special handling. Every city has its own way of dealing with garbage, and the methods of garbage disposal, from ancient times to the present, do not seem to have changed much. As Rathje said, “For thousands of years, the ways in which humans have dealt with garbage have essentially shown no innovation. The basic methods of garbage disposal are four… dumping, incineration, recycling, and source reduction.”
Garbage certainly has existed since ancient times, but is there really only a difference of degree and scale between the garbage faced by ancient people and the garbage problem of modern people? If that were all, then perhaps we would not need to worry about the garbage problem, because it would be nothing more than the inevitable result of civilizational prosperity. Ancient people dug a small hole to dump garbage; modern people merely need to dig the hole a bit bigger, and that is all?
Or is the garbage problem also modern in its own right? The reason modern people face a more severe garbage problem may not simply be that there is more garbage. Have the role garbage plays in the human lifeworld, and the concepts through which people view garbage, also changed?
In fact, people’s concept of “garbage” is related to their concept of “tool” or “value,” and further to “thing” in general. If garbage is “useless stuff,” then it corresponds precisely to tools or technology as “useful stuff.” Therefore the modernity of garbage is closely tied to the modernity of technology.
Some changes are obvious. For example, in 1955, Life magazine in the United States proposed the concept of a “throwaway society,” describing a certain consumerist way of life and value orientation among modern people. “Durability” no longer serves as the main criterion for measuring the value of artifacts; on the contrary, concepts such as “disposability” and “constant upgrading” increasingly become fashionable. Producers, for the sake of profit, and consumers, for the sake of fashion, often actively shorten the lifespan of things, even setting measures such as “shelf life” and “service life,” forcibly discarding things that are still effective in order to maintain a stable “production cycle.”
When modern people regard many things as garbage and discard them, it is often because they are “expired” rather than “spoiled.” An expired food may still be delicious, and a building beyond its designated lifespan may still be solid and reliable. The reason they are discarded is simply that they have slipped beyond human control and become “unsafe.”
What is involved here is not merely the so-called consumer mentality, but a reflection of how people view technological things in general, or beings in general. The concept of “shelf life” reflects the demand for “pre-control.” People do not wish to wait in ambiguity and unease while things gradually slip out of control; rather, they always want to precisely “preset” every thing, including its use and lifespan. When a thing begins to slip out of control, putting it into the trash bin is the correct choice.
“Decay” is a fate that neither ancient technology nor modern technology can evade. The difference is that the “fate” faced by ancient people was one of impermanence, whereas modern people try to control fate in advance—if things cannot be made immortal, then discard them before they decay. As long as chaos and uncertainty are thrown into the trash bin, the lifeworld will become orderly and well arranged.
This is precisely Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology. In his view, modern technology, like ancient technology, is also a “way of unconcealment of truth,” and the distinctive way of unconcealment proper to modern technology is “challenging-forth”; things are “set upon” as “standing-reserve” (bestand, standing-reserve), and modern technology’s essence is “enframing” (Gestell, or “skeleton frame”).
Heidegger’s use of the concept of “standing-reserve” has left many people puzzled. In fact, “standing-reserve” happens to correspond to “waste”; “standing-reserve” and “waste” are mutually conditional, arising together.
Modern technology makes everything into “standing-reserve,” but this is after all the delusion of an overweening humanity. Modern technology has not truly freed people from the fate of impermanence, nor made human beings the god who rules over everything. Rather, modern technology merely buries everything that has slipped free of order and control in the “junkyard,” sweeping it out of the sight of modern people, and thus makes possible this reality in which all things appear as “standing-reserve.”
Here and in some parts of the following chapters, what I am trying to do is introduce the concept of garbage and use it to “translate” some of Heidegger’s key ideas. For example, at the end of Chapter Four I translate Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung as “clearance” (English: clearing; Chinese translations usually render it as 澄明 or 林中空地). Time is limited, so I won’t elaborate further here.
Let me say a little more here. I use Heidegger’s concept of “world picture” to identify the key misstep of Western metaphysics.
As for the errors of traditional metaphysics, popular Marxist philosophy textbooks in China have long had a conclusion ready at hand: that one looks at problems from the standpoint of “isolation, stasis, and one-sidedness.” Of course, this is an extremely simplified conclusion, but if one is merely making a stereotyped summary, these three hats are not altogether off the mark.
“Isolation” means a lack of horizontal connections, “one-sidedness” means a lack of vertical depth, and “stasis” means a lack of flowing time. Put together, “isolation, stasis, and one-sidedness” amount to nothing more than a certain “picture-like” mode of thinking.
This mode of thinking reaches its peak in modern metaphysics represented by Descartes: subject and object stand opposed to each other, and the objective world unfolds before the subject’s eyes like a picture. This is what Heidegger called the “age of the world picture.” He wrote: “The world picture does not evolve from a medieval world picture into a modern world picture; rather, the fact that the world becomes picture at all marks the essence of modernity.”
Within this world picture, every being is an already-given “X” — before we discuss the specific “X is P,” beings within the world have already been grasped as isolated, static, one-sided Xs. This is the basic characteristic of modern metaphysics.
What “metaphysics” is has always been a matter of dispute, but basically speaking, it is nothing other than the inquiry into the question of “what-it-is-to-be what is.” Before we discuss what something “is,” it first has to “be” in the first place; metaphysics investigates the preconditions that make specific knowledge or experience possible.
In the eyes of world-picture metaphysics, specific knowledge or experience is a proposition of the form “X is P,” and its metaphysical precondition is precisely this prior way of grasping things as “X.” In fact, the early analytic philosophers who opposed metaphysics did not escape this metaphysics; rather, they were the most extreme expression of it. When they grasp things as X, time as T, or properties as P in formal language, they are already firmly standing on the basis of this metaphysics. Formal language tries to sweep away the dark and filthy garbage in human language, and tries to grasp the world with a spotless linguistic system. This ideal is doomed to fail, because garbage can never be swept outside the world.
Of course, like superficial textbooks, my summary here of the characteristics of traditional metaphysics is also stereotyped. In fact, perhaps there is no specific philosopher who precisely held such a view; this “metaphysics” is less an induction from individual philosophers’ statements than an inference drawn backward from the consequences of the already-real modern technological world. This metaphysics provides the intellectual basis for modern technology, and is also supported by modern technology’s ever-greater success in conquest and control. But the increasingly severe garbage problem reveals that modern technology’s so-called success is only a temporary illusion, and the world promised by this metaphysics is ultimately nothing but a castle in the air.
It is worth noting that when we question or criticize the metaphysical basis of modern technology or modern science, this does not mean that we deny the effectiveness of modern technology and modern science. The key issue is not what is won through such metaphysics, but what is excluded and concealed by it.
If the “world picture” were merely a research method, rather than a “metaphysics,” then there would be nothing objectionable about it, because the validity of one method does not abolish the legitimacy of other methods. But a metaphysical idea is exclusive.
That is why Wu Guosheng emphasizes: “The so-called world picture does not mean picturizing the world; rather, it means that the world as a whole fundamentally exists in the mode of a picture.”
What is the difference? Let us use an analogy: modern technology is like photography, striving to capture and print the “images” of the world. If we merely regard these images as one method among others for understanding and depicting the world, then this method is indeed effective. But if we take these images as the world itself, regard the outline that eventually appears clearly in the image as the essence of things, and refuse to acknowledge any dimension that cannot be captured by images, then this “photography” is no longer merely a method; it has become “metaphysics.”
As a method, or rather as an “image-making” medium for knowing the world, this picturing itself is effective. For example, we can point to a photograph and identify it by saying: “This is Zhang San.” We can talk about various features of Zhang San on the basis of an image. Through advanced imaging media, such as a high-definition camera, the photograph captured may clearly display all sorts of details of Zhang San, more finely than what the naked eye can see, and more objective and reproducible as well — countless people in different times and places cannot possibly deal with Zhang San in the same way at the same moment, but they can all face the same photograph, so talking by pointing to the photograph is always clearer and more effective than talking by pointing to Zhang San himself. In addition, photography allows more quantitative analysis, such as the proportional relationship between a person’s head and body, and so on.
When we say that science captures the world as image, we must admit that this capture is effective. What we talk about by pointing to this image does indeed “is” the world. Even when we ask what the world “is,” we can properly raise its “photograph” and say: “There, this is what the world looks like.” It is like when you ask me who Zhang San is, I can take out Zhang San’s photograph and show you: “This person is Zhang San.”
In these cases, it is not that there are two Zhang Sans — a “Zhang San in the photograph” and a “real Zhang San” — linked together by some mysterious connection. Rather, it is that what appears in the photograph “is” the real Zhang San.
But the problem is that the medium of the photograph is not the only or the highest way. There are many other ways for us to know or speak about what Zhang San is. For example, I can tell a story and say that Zhang San “is exactly” the protagonist of this story; this story is “about” Zhang San. Here, “is Zhang San” is no more “is” or less “is” than a certain photograph’s “is Zhang San.” If we take a particular form of expression as the sole or fundamental form, and thereby ignore and deny other rich forms, that is dangerous.
Apart from mediate identifications such as photography and storytelling, is there a most original and most essential way in which things show themselves? Is it that when I “directly” look with the “naked eye,” it is more “real” than looking through a photograph? In fact, even when the naked eye looks directly, it is always within a corresponding environment; its background and context affect how things appear to the naked eye. In other words, “seeing with the naked eye” is likewise mediate or environmental; seeing with the naked eye is not necessarily more comprehensive or more one-sided than a photograph. When you look at Zhang San at work, you may completely fail to imagine what he is like in family life; when you look at Zhang San in a good mood, you may completely fail to imagine what he is like when he loses his temper. Any actual “seeing” is one-sided and limited.
The error of traditional metaphysics does not lie in supporting one particular mode of knowing, but in excluding other modes of knowing. The key issue is not what is won through such metaphysics, but what is excluded and concealed by it. And this concealment did not begin in modernity; its roots already lie with Plato. We see that the Western metaphysical tradition represented by Plato, from the very beginning, clearly made a cut in the world or in knowledge — dividing the imperishable from the perishable. So the problem with this metaphysics lies less in its pursuit of the imperishable than in its rejection of perishability.
In short, Plato in fact distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge or two kinds of being: the imperishable and the perishable. The former is worth pursuing, the latter must be discarded; the former is essence, the latter is “garbage.”
In Plato’s binary division, the entire real world is placed in the category of the “perishable,” and both the human body and technological creations are “garbage” that should be thrown away on the road to truth. But modern philosophy abolished the division between two worlds, while modern people still try to bring the distinction between the imperishable and the perishable into this single real world. The empiricists’ distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities is one such scheme — some experiences or knowledge (for example, those concerning shape or extension) are definite and eternal, whereas others (for example, those concerning color, fragrance, or taste) are ambiguous and changeable. The human body and emotions have always remained outside the philosophers’ field of vision, until recent developments in Continental philosophy brought some change.
What traditional metaphysics has always sought is what the eye of the immortal soul sees, no matter whether this “soul” is located in the world of Ideas, in heaven, or inside the mysterious pineal gland. This pure soul is thoroughly out of place in the real world. Traditional metaphysics’ aversion to perishability is, in essence, an evasion of death, a refusal to face the “facticity” or “finitude” of the “mortal being.”
Traditional philosophy holds that only eternal things are meaningful. Yet an eternal state of static being outside time deprives everything of meaning: in infinite eternity, everything will happen or will not happen, so what is there worth pursuing? Even an act such as “pursuit” is impossible in the world of Ideas.
To face up to human perishability does not mean denying the pursuit of imperishability. On the contrary, just like any human desire or dream, the longing for imperishability is rooted in human finitude. The more clearly one recognizes the world’s perishability, the more one longs for imperishability; and the longing for imperishability drives all kinds of human creative action, such as building merit and achieving fame so as to remain immortal in the historical record, or creating immortal literary or artistic works.
Perishability is precisely the source of meaning. Because of human finitude, because of the finitude of things, we cannot make our wishes come true, cannot complete everything at once; therefore we need action, we need creation, we need choice and pursuit.
To pursue imperishability does not mean to loathe one’s own perishability; looking up at the sky does not necessarily mean turning a blind eye to the earth, just as pursuing women does not mean loathing oneself for being a man. Human beings long for imperishability because of their own perishability, but this longing should not in turn cause them to lose themselves.
The next three chapters are actually all material from my doctoral dissertation. Here I reintroduced them with an emphasis on the implications of “garbage,” and because this is a retelling, I became somewhat slack in working out the wording and logic, so the argumentative effect may not be very good. I won’t say much more about it here. Let’s just read the concluding section directly.【读结语】
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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