Yesterday, Professor Jiang Jinsong came to Chengze Garden to give a talk titled “Observations and Reflections on the Flush Toilet,” and Professor Tian Song offered comments. Professor Jiang did not say very much, and Professor Tian’s comments were also rather hurried, but the discussion was still very lively.
Indeed, the flush toilet can be counted as one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization. It is not only a device that makes “going to the bathroom” more convenient, but also a hub that helped assemble the whole modern urban way of life and the entire urban system.
Professor Wu commented that Professor Jiang’s presentation should be divided into the issue of excretion and the issue of the flush toilet, and that the former part was a digression. The toilet embodies people’s demand for cleanliness and their disgust toward excrement, but this attitude toward excrement seems “human,” and is not necessarily related to the flush toilet. Here, Professor Wu’s point is reasonable, but the accusation that Professor Jiang strayed off topic is not appropriate. For whether these attitudes toward excrement existed before the flush toilet or not, the flush toilet before our eyes still embodies them, and moreover makes these issues stand out more strikingly; to trace people’s conception of cleanliness through observing the flush toilet is of course also a worthwhile approach. Besides, disgust toward excrement and the demand for cleanliness, and so on, although they seem very natural, were in fact greatly strengthened with the popularization of the flush toilet.
Professor Wu’s comments were later suspected by Professor Jiang of having a flavor of “theory of human nature,” or in other words anthropocentrism. In my view, that is indeed so. But we should also note that so-called opposition to essentialism does not mean completely abolishing the concept of essence; the phrase “human nature” can still be used, only one must add a historical perspective to it. For example, when we say that the rise of humanity itself is historical, we do not mean that there is a pre-defined prototype of “man” and a set of fixed criteria, and then humans who meet these criteria suddenly appear. But we can still regard humanity as a whole and examine the general habits of this animal. It is just that we need to note that this examination is historical rather than conceptual: we arrive at certain summaries and clarifications of “human nature” through examining concrete, actual human activities and traces, rather than deriving a normative definition by speculating on the concept of “man.”
In short, we can indeed say cautiously: embracing the flush toilet is in fact human, and is an irreversible trend in the historical development of humanity.
But the reason this trend is irreversible lies not only in the fact that the flush toilet lets us quickly part company with excrement; it is also much more closely related to urbanization. In the traditional countryside, excrement has always been a valuable fertilizer; even when it is not always used for fertilizing, it is relatively easy to dispose of on the spot. It is in densely populated big cities that excrement becomes a headache-inducing problem. The scenes of streets full of dung in ancient European cities were by no means accidental. Even if dung was still a valuable commodity, the efficiency of collection was generally not very high, and people in ancient times often suffered terribly because of this.
Of course, what really solved this problem was not the flush toilet itself, but the whole advanced urban sewer and sewage-treatment system that developed after the flush toilet; and when the flush toilet first became popular, because sewage increased severalfold, it instead caused outbreaks of plague. Still, one can also say that it was precisely the invention of the flush toilet that compelled people to build sewage systems and sewage-treatment institutions.
The question I asked the two teachers at the time was this: they often used the three concepts of urbanization, industrial civilization, and modernity interchangeably, but are there distinctions among them? For example, the production of “garbage” and the demand for flush toilets can both be seen as tendencies inherent in “urbanization,” but are they necessarily products of industrial civilization or modernity? When I commented on Professor Tian’s theory of “garbage” at the time, I mentioned:
In my view, the production of “garbage” is less something that accompanies industrial civilization than something intimately tied to “urbanization.” For garbage is first and foremost something discarded, and so-called “discarding” involves an “outside” place, a place that no longer belongs within my lifeworld. And “the city” first establishes precisely such a spatial separation, separating urban life from the “natural world.” In the rural world, of course, there are also spatial separations—for example, my field and your field, my house and your house—but even though your house does not belong to my property, it still belongs within my lifeworld. The residents of the countryside live together in the same world. Whether it is a friend’s home or an enemy’s field, every place has meaning. When I move a thing to a certain place, such an act is always meaningful; it is still a kind of arrangement and handling of things, and they do not disappear from my lifeworld. But urban life for the first time establishes such a “boundary”: rural people view the entire city as a “black box,” while city people view the whole world of fields as a “non-set.” The ways of spatial division within the city itself—garbage trucks, sewers, and so on—also strengthen the existence of this “outside world,” and people can for the first time throw something beyond their world.
At the time, I wanted to distinguish industrial civilization from urbanization, and this time I also expressed that idea. I said that, in my view, urbanization is roughly a good thing, whereas industrial civilization may be a bad thing—but can a city have only one cultural form (industrial civilization)? Is it possible for there to be some non-industrial, plural urban cultures?
Of course, saying that industrial civilization is a bad thing was, in the context of my reply to Professor Tian at the time, an added clarification; the wording was actually not very rigorous. In fact, I have never been clear about what exactly is meant by “industrial civilization.” Generally speaking, I do not uniformly oppose “industry,” much less all those concrete industrial products. But if industry becomes a cultural mode that flattens everything out, if “mass production” is not only a technical means but also shapes a certain value notion of efficiency, then I am opposed to this kind of “civilization.”
In short, what I oppose is the stereotype-ification of “civilization,” not civilization itself. I do not hope to retreat into a barbaric, primitive, anti-civilizational way of life; rather, I am trying to seek the richness of civilization.
And what is called “civilization” (Civilization), in its very root, is related to urbanization and citizenization; in archaeology too, “civilization” is marked precisely by urbanized settlement, so one can say that “civilization” was at the outset already some kind of “urban culture.”
Of course, this does not mean that “civilization” is merely the privilege of “city people” and has nothing to do with rural people. In fact, city and countryside are a pair of mutually constitutive concepts; without cities there would also be no countryside. “Rural culture” is indeed the “margin” of civilization, but it is also a positive constituent part. For what we call civilization, what we call a city, means a structuring of the human lifeworld, means a series of spatial separations, and different “geo-positions” mean different ways of life. A “civilization” is always assembled out of multiple ways of life rather than a single way of life.
In ancient times, the “status” of life often carried a distinction between noble and lowly; urban people seemed inherently superior to rural people. This is problematic. But it may well be possible to break the noble/lowly distinction while preserving the diversity of statuses. For example, rural culture in the United States has considerable force; pastoral life is often longed for, and “country folk” are by no means looked down upon. There are not only rural people and urban people, but also workers, merchants, men of letters, scholars, officials, and so on—many different “statuses.” Within the same way of life there are differences of competence and accomplishment, but there is no distinction of nobility and lowliness between different ways of life. It is just that the urban person–rural person relation is one of the most central structures of “civilization.”
The significance of urbanization lies in the refinement of social structure—that is to say, in making large-scale division of labor and cooperation possible. A small-farmer society can indeed be self-sufficient, but the price of self-sufficiency is that the possible space of its life will not be very large. The larger the self-sufficient unit that is brought together, the greater the diversity that may exist in each individual’s life; each person will have more room to arrange their own way of life, their circle of social relations will also be larger, and thought will become more open and richer.
Of course, “anti-civilizational” romantics may still extol the way of life of primitive people, thinking that all these differentiations of life-forms are meaningless and that a peaceful, quiet, unchanging way of life is better. As for this view, I do not wish to refute it, and cannot refute it, because the rational arguments I would use in trying to refute it are themselves, in the eyes of romantics, something bad. What I want to emphasize now is only that this process of urbanization and civilization does not necessarily amount to the same thing as industrialization and modernization. We can see that the significance of urbanization is precisely to make diverse ways of life possible; but one of the crises of modernity is the flattening of diversity, whereby originally different ways of life have now all become nothing more than different ways of “making money.” The virtue of professions has been lost; the only meaning of a profession is to make money, and the form of professions has also become increasingly assembly-line-like, dull, and irritating, to the point that they can no longer serve as a constituent part of “life,” while “life” has become a purely “pleasure” activity after work, thereby losing its diversity.
Therefore, I am opposed to modernity, but I am not opposed to urbanization; and of course I am not opposed to the existence of garbage or sewers, which urbanization necessarily brings along. Professor Tian Song keeps bringing out his entropy theory—that matter is not destroyed, energy is conserved, useful resources are becoming fewer and fewer, and garbage will also become more and more. Indeed, that is correct, but what does it mean? It only means “equivalent exchange,” means cost or condition—death is the cost of time being precious, aging is the cost of youth being radiant. If you were to lie in a hospital bed all day, unable to do anything, only able to look at the ceiling and drink thin porridge, but in that case you could live ten years longer, and you would be safe; whereas if you want to go to school, go to work, go outside—then there is the danger of being hit by a car at any moment, not only shortening your life but also making misfortune possible at any time—what way of life would you choose? Or rather, would you imprison your child in bed from a young age in order to let them live a few more years?
Although excessive adventure is not advisable, in general, the meaning of life lies in adventure; the meaning of life is something one can obtain only at the cost of life itself.
This is true for an individual, and it is also true for “human civilization.” If everyone remained in primitive society, hunting and gathering, perhaps they would indeed live more safely and longer on Earth, and the flow rate of entropy might indeed be slower—but would that make it meaningful? A primitive culture that reproduces itself for tens of thousands of years without changing its way of life, and Greek civilization that created immortal achievements through its fleeting and unique way of life—would we really say the former is the success, and the latter the failure?
Of course, restraint and prudence are important, but avoiding too-rapid disappearance is precisely so that one may have greater room to create and to take risks. We certainly should take the problem of “garbage” seriously, just as we should take excretion seriously and face aging and death squarely. But this does not mean that we therefore negate the city or negate civilization. The key is not whether we have a few more risks or lose a few years of our lives; rather, it is: at the cost of these things, what have we created?
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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