The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage

Those who discuss the problem of garbage from a philosophical perspective are, domestically, mainly some essays by Professor Tian Song; in the West, a rather distinctive work is Scanlan’s book On Garbage [ Scanlan(2005)]. But overall such works are few and far between: the problem of garbage has been discussed very seldom as a serious philosophical topic.

Even in history or the social sciences, the issue of garbage has received little attention. The twentieth century saw the rise of many historical perspectives concerned with material culture, such as the history of private life, environmental history, urban history, history of technology, and so on, but even scholars in these fields rarely took garbage as a special topic of close concern.

For example, not until the end of the twentieth century did environmental history focus more on the natural environment, without bringing cities into its research scope; meanwhile, urban history has always focused on affairs within the city and its suburbs. [ 毛达（2008）：“垃圾：城市环境史研究的一个重要主题”北京师范大学学报207（3）] The zones of interaction between cities and the natural environment, and the garbage problem therein, became a blind spot of research.

As for the history of technology, in the most representative monumental work, the seven-volume History of Technology edited by Singer [ 辛格（2004）], aside from the final volume mentioning a little sewage-treatment technology, there is virtually no mention of garbage and the technologies related to its treatment.

Of course, as the environmental crisis has become increasingly evident, and as people have reflected more deeply on urban life, the problem of garbage has gradually entered scholars’ field of vision. For example, in the 1970s the “Garbage Project” was launched at the University of Arizona in the United States [ 拉什杰（1999）：17], and from this there developed garbology. Garbology holds that garbage honestly reproduces many kinds of information about human life; it systematically collects and analyzes the garbage discarded every day by city dwellers, and excavates from it information of many dimensions such as sociology, psychology, and economics.

Around 2000, more scholars focused on the problem of garbage from the perspectives of social history and civilizational history, for example Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999) [ Strasser(2014) First published in 1999; this article refers to the revised 2014 edition.] and Melosi’s Garbage in the Cities (2004) [ Melosi(2004)].

But compared with the ancient history and grim reality of the garbage problem, these studies are undoubtedly quite belated. If the problem of garbage is indeed worth attention, and clearly not a new problem that emerged only at the end of the twentieth century, then why have scholars’ responses been so sluggish?

Wu Guosheng has the phrase “the historical absence of philosophy of technology” [ 吴国盛（2009）：120。]. He believes that, relative to the antiquity of “technology,” the lag of philosophy of technology has a historical necessity, and that its causes are twofold: first, “technology” itself has a self-concealing characteristic; for example, a pair of glasses, when functioning properly, is often not clearly noticed by the person wearing them, and only when it malfunctions does it stand out glaringly; second, the inherent character of “philosophy” has avoided technological questions. The Western philosophical tradition’s pursuit of immanence and invariance from the outset excluded technological questions from serious inquiry. Therefore, the rise of philosophy of technology also has two corresponding backgrounds: first, modern technology itself has developed certain problems, and technological issues have begun to stand out; second, some modern philosophical currents (such as phenomenology) have reflected on and transcended traditional metaphysics.

The absence of a “philosophy of garbage” has similar roots. In fact, garbage and technology happen to be a pair of opposing concepts. The reasons why traditional metaphysics ignored technology likewise apply to garbage. Yet even if philosophy has already begun to pay attention to technology, that does not necessarily mean it will become interested in garbage. This is because modern technology stands out as powerful and useful; people praise or warn against the power of technology. Garbage, by contrast, seems from ancient times to today to have no power whatsoever. On the contrary, it is precisely a thing that has lost its power: it rots and decays, and has no astonishing force. At most, what deserves attention is pollution, not garbage.

Philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy have both flourished; people have realized that modern technology causes environmental problems. But as for the “garbage” that fills the space between technology and the environment, philosophy still turns a blind eye, rarely taking garbage as a topic of inquiry, and even when discussing technology or nature, it rarely mentions garbage. For example, we criticize instrumental rationality and technological rationality, and investigate views of nature and views of the environment, but few people speak of garbage rationality or a view of garbage.

In any case, if we need to reconsider the relationship between human beings and “technology,” to reconsider the meaning of “nature,” then we also need to reconsider “garbage.” And the neglect or evasion of “garbage” by various philosophies of technology or environmental philosophy hints that their thinking and critique are still not thorough enough.

The lag in philosophers’ attention to the issue of garbage is not accidental, because “ignoring garbage” is precisely where traditional philosophy has failed. Philosophy ought to raise and confront the problem of garbage; the problem of garbage is not merely a philosophical topic that happens to deserve a bit of incidental attention. A philosophy that misses the problem of garbage is incomplete.

2. How Is Garbage Possible?

“…How is it possible?” is a typical philosophical question. Philosophers are always happy to seek wonder in things people take for granted, and to inquire into the premises and sources behind concepts and thought. “Garbage” is undoubtedly also a concept, and the formation and use of this concept have certain premises or conditions.

As an everyday concept, we seem very clear about the meaning of this word; yet, like any concept, we do not understand it innately. We learned this concept under a particular historical circumstance.

Learning the concept of “garbage” is obviously related to our way of life. Even today, in some rural areas less affected by modernization and urbanization, “garbage” remains an unfamiliar concept. Leftover rice and dishes are simply called leftover rice and dishes; torn clothes are simply called torn clothes. There is no need for a concept of “garbage” to subsume them. [ 田松（2011）]

It is only in urban life that we frequently come into contact with “garbage.” On the one hand, urban life contains more things that need to be “discarded”; on the other hand, there are specialized places all over the city for holding what has been discarded—namely garbage cans, dumps, and the like.

The places that hold garbage, in turn, define “garbage,” bringing together a whole variety of discarded things. But on the other hand, most of these places for holding garbage are also human-made; they did not appear out of thin air, but were produced according to human ideas and needs.

“Garbage cans, as containers of garbage, materially undertake the function of gathering it together. Various kinds of garbage coexisting in a garbage can are, on the surface, a collection; but they are not made into a collection merely because they are in the same can. In people’s consciousness, they have already been gathered together in advance. The garbage can is the materialization of the idea of ‘discarding.’” [ 田松（2011）]

Ideas and technological environments are always mutually constitutive. People transform the environment according to fixed ideas, and human ideas are in turn disciplined and solidified under corresponding environments. The ability or habit of “throwing away garbage” is not fixed by nature; it is learned in an environment filled with garbage bins. But at the same time, this environment is not naturally given either; it is jointly created by people accustomed to discarding things.

People who grow up in modern cities do not find garbage or garbage cans strange at all, but that itself is the strangest thing of all—unlike the “collection” of other things such as “clothes” or “food,” the category “garbage” does not seem to gather things together on the basis that they share some common function or typical feature. This collection is more like a “non-collection”; every piece of garbage has its original “collection,” such as “clothes” or “food,” and because of different reasons is ultimately discarded, thereby leaving its original collection. “Garbage” is the belonging of things without belonging.

However, the fact that a thing breaks away from its original determination does not mean that it must become “without belonging.” For example, a tattered garment may become cloth, a rag, fuel, raw material for papermaking, and so on; leftover food may become swill or dog food. Different things often have different destinations, and do not necessarily have to converge in what is called “garbage.”

The word “discard” can designate a class of formally similar behaviors, but the commonality of discarding behavior does not necessarily mean that what is discarded can also be classified together. In fact, the behaviors opposite to “discarding,” such as “accepting” and “retaining,” do not have a nominal form like “waste matter,” to say nothing of behaviors such as “hitting,” “stroking,” “being enthusiastic about,” or “pursuing.” The objects toward which these behaviors are directed do not, as a matter of course, get subsumed under a single concept.

So what makes garbage possible is not merely the behavior of “discarding,” but also a certain unique idea and perspective, in order to distinguish “garbage” from all kinds of beings. In a certain sense, this idea must even precede specific discarding behavior, because before we decide to discard something, it has already been distinguished as “garbage.” To abandon a garment and turn it into a rag, and to throw a garment into a garbage can, are two different behaviors; modern city dwellers familiar with the concept of garbage are more likely to choose the latter.

Nothing is garbage by nature, but nothing cannot be garbage either. What makes garbage garbage does not depend on its physical structure, but on people’s intentional structure.

So the question becomes: how is this intentional mode of “seeing” certain beings as garbage possible? That is precisely the question the following text seeks to answer. I will use a phenomenological attitude to “reduce” this intentional structure.

3. Garbage Has Existed Since Ancient Times

The “technology” discussed by “philosophy of technology” generally has two layers of meaning. One is technology in the broad sense, including the making and use of various artifacts, and also encompassing non-materialized meanings such as language technology, bodily technology, social technology, and so on. “Technology” in this sense is as old as humanity; no human way of life can be separated from 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 under the background of industrial civilization. This kind of technology is very different from ancient craft; its powerful force seeks, on the one hand, to conquer nature, and on the other hand, to govern human society in return. The “technological rationality” or “technological society” accompanying industrial civilization has become an object of celebration or criticism for scholars.

Philosophy of technology therefore also has two corresponding faces: one is to begin from technology and reflect on human nature, the other is to begin from technology and criticize modernity. But these two faces are not unrelated, because modern technology is, on the one hand, specific, and on the other hand, after all, the development of ancient technology.

If modern technology is the inevitable result of the history of technology, then its roots need to be sought in ancient technology; if modern technology is not inevitable, and the development of the history of technology might have taken other directions, then different possibilities also need to be excavated from ancient technology. Therefore, in any case, critical reflection on modern technology necessarily has to introduce a broader and more comprehensive examination of technology.

For “trash” there is also a similar double meaning: trash is, just like technology, both ancient and young. If we say that primitive people’s stone tools and pottery are “technology,” then they must also have discarded broken stone tools and shattered pottery; these, one could say, were already “trash.” But if we say that “technology” only came to the fore in modern industrial society, then “trash” also came to the fore at almost the same time. Just as with the two faces of philosophy of technology, we can also ask about trash on two levels: first, trash in the broad sense, with which every person, indeed every living being, must be accompanied; second, trash in the narrow sense, a product of modernity, accompanying modern technology.

The similarities and differences between “trash” in these two senses is itself a question worth examining. But before going further, we should note that we cannot simply deny the modernity of the trash problem by saying “trash has existed since ancient times,” nor can we wishfully assume that returning to a premodern way of life would once and for all avoid the trouble of trash.

In what sense, then, can we say that “trash has existed since ancient times”? William Rathje, one of the initiators of the “Garbage Project,” was an archaeologist famous for his studies of Maya culture. He discovered that archaeology is essentially the search for information in the “trash” of ancient people. What we dig out of ruins (apart from tombs and the like) is for the most part what ancient people discarded. Broken pottery shards, food scraps, and even fossilized feces, thrown away by ancient people as if they were so much refuse underfoot, can make modern archaeologists feel as though they have found a treasure trove, because these discarded things contain countless bits of information about the lifeworld of the ancients. If that is so, then do modern people’s trash not also contain countless bits of information about modern life? Rathje therefore launched the “Garbage Project,” collecting modern people’s trash and studying it in archaeological fashion.

What Rathje saw was precisely the commonality of ancient and modern trash: that which has been discarded in human activity. In this sense, trash is as old as humanity itself.

We say that making tools is the hallmark of humanity (the animal genus Homo), and “trash” is almost the inevitable byproduct of “tools.” For human beings are not omnipotent gods, and the materials with which humans make things are not eternal, indestructible things of ideas; thus any human work is finite, and cannot, once made, be used forever. It is fated to decay. Therefore the making of artifacts must be accompanied by the discarding of artifacts; in this sense the history of trash is as old as the history of technology. If we further take into account food scraps and excreta, then given that the basic characteristic of life is metabolism, “trash” in the sense of “metabolic byproducts” is even as old as life itself.

Of course, for ancient peoples, trash did not yet become a prominent problem. Hunter-gatherers were without fixed abode, and before they had piled up trash around their dwellings they would already have moved on. Moreover, the trash generated by primitive agricultural life was small in amount and could easily be recycled or dissipated into the natural environment. Only with the emergence of cities did trash become a problem requiring specialized handling, and every city had its own way of dealing with trash.

For example, “the ancient Maya had special sites for separately piling up or burying organic waste and broken pottery or stone tools. In cities in the Indus Valley around 2500 BCE, residences were planned with garbage chutes and garbage bins.”[ Melosi(2004)] Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Carthage, and so on all had sewage systems, and there were also professional ragpickers or sweepers active in the major cities.

Ancient China was no exception. According to the *Han Feizi*, as early as the Shang dynasty there were laws forbidding people from “littering”: “The law of Yin imposed punishment on those who cast ashes into the road.” The laws of the Qin dynasty continued this provision. By the Tang dynasty, there are explicit records of people whose professions were collecting scrap and cleaning excrement; for example, the *Taiping guangji* records: “Pei Mingli of Hedong was skilled in managing affairs. He collected what people in the world had discarded, accumulated it and sold it, and thus amassed a family fortune of several million.”

By the Song dynasty, the word “laji” (垃圾, trash) had already appeared, as in the twelfth juan, “River Boats,” of Wu Zimu’s *Dreams of Splendor of the Capital* (*Meng Liang lu*): “There are also boats carrying trash, dung, and soil, moving away in groups.”[ 田松（2011）] Its usage is close to today’s.

As for the ways of dealing with trash, there seems likewise to have been no great change from ancient times to the present. As Rathje says, “For thousands of years, the way human beings have handled trash has shown no essential novelty. The basic methods of waste disposal are four… dumping, incineration, recycling, and source reduction”[ 拉什杰（1999）：46] The Maya piled trash into heaps; the Egyptians dumped trash into the Nile; Troy, because it continually covered trash with new earth, saw the city’s elevation rise by 1.5 meters per century… Even today, aside from somewhat more sorting in incineration and somewhat more consideration in the siting of landfills, “waste treatment” has indeed seen little innovation. It is no wonder that *A History of Technology* says not a word about it.

4. The Modernity of Trash

Trash is always bound up with the flourishing of human civilization. It is easy to imagine that the more prosperous a city is, the more artifacts it produces, the more people eat, drink, defecate, and urinate, and thus the more trash it will inevitably generate.

Trash is certainly ancient, but is the difference between the trash faced by ancient people and the trash problem faced by modern people only one of degree and scale? If that were all, then we would seem not to need to worry about the trash problem, because it would simply be the inevitable result of civilizational prosperity. Ancient people dug a small pit to dump trash into, and modern people merely need to dig the pit a little larger—nothing more?

Or is it that the trash problem also has its own modernity, and that the reason modern people face a graver trash problem is not merely that there is more trash? Might it also be that the role trash plays in the human lifeworld, as well as people’s ideas about how to regard trash, have also changed?

In fact, people’s conception of “trash” is related to their conception of “tool” or “value,” and further to their conception of things in general. If trash is “useless things,” then it corresponds precisely to tools or technology as “useful things.” Therefore the modernity of trash is closely related to the modernity of technology.

Some changes are obvious. For example, in 1955 *Life* magazine introduced the concept of the “throwaway society,” describing a certain consumerist lifestyle and value orientation in modern life. “Durability” no longer serves as the principal standard for measuring the value of artifacts; on the contrary, ideas such as “disposability” and “constant replacement” have increasingly become popular. For the sake of profit, producers, and for the sake of fashion, consumers, often actively shorten the lifespan of things, and even set up measures such as “shelf life” and “service life,” forcibly discarding things that are still effective in order to maintain a stable “production cycle”[ Scanlan(2005):38].

When modern people regard many things as trash and discard them, it is often because they are “expired” rather than “rotten.” An expired food may still be delicious, and a building beyond its service life may still be solid and reliable. The reason they are discarded is merely that they have gone beyond human control and become “unsafe.”

What is involved here is not only so-called consumer attitudes, but also people’s view of technical things in general, or of beings in general. The concept of “shelf life” reflects the demand for “advance control.” People do not wish to wait in ambiguity and anxiety for things gradually to slip beyond control; they always want to precisely “preset” every thing, including its use and lifespan. When something begins to escape control, putting it into the trash can is the correct choice.

“Decay” is a fate that both ancient technology and modern technology cannot escape. The difference is that the “fate” faced by ancient people was one of impermanence, whereas modern people try to take fate into their own hands in advance—if things cannot be made imperishable, then discard them before they decay. As long as chaos and uncertainty are thrown into the trash can, the lifeworld becomes orderly.

This is precisely Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology. In his view, modern technology, like ancient technology, is a “mode of revealing truth,” and the distinctive mode of revealing proper to modern technology is “challenging-forth.” Things are “set upon” and “pre-ordered” as “standing-reserve” (bestand), and the essence of modern technology is Gestell, or “enframing.”

Heidegger’s use of the concept of “standing-reserve” has puzzled many people. In fact, “standing-reserve” happens to correspond to “waste”; “standing-reserve” and “waste” are conditions of one another and come into being together.

Modern technology turns everything into “standing-reserve,” but that is after all only the delusion of proud human beings. Modern technology has not truly liberated people from the fate of impermanence, nor made them gods who govern all things; it has merely buried everything that slips out of order and control in the “dump,” sweeping it out of the sight of modern people, and thereby making possible the reality in which everything appears as “standing-reserve.”

In Heidegger’s view, modern technology differs from ancient technology, but it did not arise out of thin air. In fact, the rise of modern technology is closely related to the Western metaphysical tradition that sought truth. Heidegger believed modern technology to be “completed metaphysics,” and therefore traced the origins of modernity and sought the possibility of transcendence from within the whole metaphysical tradition.

If modern technology is the realization of metaphysics, then modern trash is the byproduct that necessarily accompanies this metaphysics; and the existence of trash in turn reveals that this so-called “completion” or “realization” has always been merely an illusion. We may “complete” the “clarification” of a room by sweeping “trash” out the door, but we can never carry out the clarification of the whole world in the same way; yet that is precisely what traditional metaphysics has tried to accomplish.

To pursue the metaphysical basis of trash is, on the one hand, to understand the roots of the trash problem; on the other hand, it is also to understand where metaphysics goes astray.

I. The Ideal World That Rejects Decay

1. The Age of the World Picture

As for the failings of traditional metaphysics, the popular Chinese Marxist philosophy textbooks long ago reached a conclusion: namely, that it looks at problems from the standpoint of being “isolated, static, and one-sided.” Such a conclusion is of course extremely simplistic, but if one is merely making a caricatured summary, these three labels are not entirely off the mark.

“Isolated” means lacking lateral connections; “one-sided” means lacking vertical depth; and “static” means lacking the flow of time. Taken together, “isolated, static, and one-sided” simply refer to a certain “pictorial” mode of thinking.

This mode of thinking reaches its peak in modern metaphysics represented by Descartes: subject and object stand opposed to one another, and the object-world unfolds before the subject’s eyes like a picture. This is what Heidegger calls “the age of the world picture.” He says: “The world picture does not change 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.”[ 海德格尔（1996）：899]

As Professor Wu Guosheng says:

Modern metaphysics, which begins with Descartes, defines beings as the objectivity of representation, truth as the certainty of representation, and the human being as “subject.” Human beings are subjects insofar as they have become the primary basis for interpreting all beings; they have become the center of beings. That beings are beings lies in their being placed before human beings, becoming human objects, being represented by human beings. This makes the relation between human beings and beings fundamentally a relation of representation; thus the world, as the totality of beings in which beings come into their being as beings, is fundamentally a picture. The so-called world picture does not mean picturing the world; rather, it means that the world as a whole fundamentally exists in the mode of picture.[ 吴国盛（2004）]

In such a world picture, every being is an already-made “X”—before discussing the concrete “X is P,” beings within the world are already grasped as isolated, static, one-sided Xs. This is the basic feature of modern metaphysics.

What exactly “metaphysics” is has been disputed for ages, but basically it is nothing more than pursuing the question of “that in virtue of which something is what it is.” Before we discuss what some thing “is,” it must first “be”; metaphysics seeks the preconditions that make concrete knowledge or experience possible.

In the eyes of world-picture metaphysics, concrete knowledge or experience is the proposition of the form “X is P,” and its metaphysical premise is this prior perspective that first grasps things as “X.” In fact, the early analytic philosophers who opposed metaphysics not only failed to escape this metaphysics, but expressed it in its most extreme form. When they grasped things as X, time as T, or properties as P in formal language, they were already firmly standing on the basis of this metaphysics. Formal language sought to sweep away the obscure and filthy trash in human language and to grasp the world by means of a spotless linguistic system. This ideal was doomed to fail, because trash can never be swept outside the world.

In what follows I will elaborate on how this spotless world picture is grounded in the Western metaphysical tradition, and explore the possibility of reconstructing a metaphysics that “harbors filth and holds grime.”

Of course, like the superficial textbooks, my summary of the characteristics of traditional metaphysics here is also caricatured. In fact, perhaps no individual philosopher ever precisely held such views. This “metaphysics” is less something induced from the sayings of particular philosophers than something inferred backward from the consequence that is already the modern technological world. This metaphysics provides the intellectual foundation for modern technology, and has also been supported by modern technology’s continuing success in conquest and control. But the increasingly serious trash problem exposes the so-called success of modern technology as only a temporary illusion, and the world promised by this metaphysics is after all just a castle in the air.

2. The One-Sidedness of the World Picture

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 has been won by means of this metaphysics, but what has been excluded and obscured 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 eliminate the legitimacy of other methods; but a metaphysical idea is exclusive.

That is why Professor Wu Guosheng emphasizes: “The so-called world picture does not mean picturing the world; rather, it means that the world as a whole fundamentally exists in the mode of picture.”[ 吴国盛（2004）]

What is the difference? Let us make an analogy: modern science and technology are like photography, striving to capture and print the “image” of the world. If we merely regard these images as one of the methods for understanding and depicting the world, then this method is indeed effective. But if we take these images as the world itself, regard the outlines that finally appear clearly in the image as the essence of things, and refuse to acknowledge any dimension that cannot be captured by the image, then this “photography” is no longer merely a method, but has become a “metaphysics.”

As a method, or rather as a “medium” for knowing the world, “picturing” itself is effective. For example, we can point to a photograph and identify: “This is Zhang San.” We can talk about Zhang San’s various features by way of an image. Through advanced pictorial media, such as a high-definition camera, the photographs captured may clearly display all kinds of details of “Zhang San,” in a way finer than what the naked eye can see, and more objective and reproducible—countless people located in different times and places cannot deal with Zhang San in the same way at the same moment, but they can all face the same photograph, so talking while pointing to the photograph is always clearer and more effective than talking while pointing to Zhang San himself. In addition, photography allows more quantitative analysis, such as the proportion between a person’s head and body, and so on.

When we say that science captures the world as a picture, we must admit that this capture is effective. The thing we talk about while pointing to this picture really “is” the world. Even when we ask what the world “is,” we can properly hold up its “photograph” and say: “Look, this is what the world is like.” It is as if you ask me who Zhang San is, and I can take out Zhang San’s photo and point it out to you: “This person is Zhang San.”

In these situations, it is not that there are two Zhang Sans, a “Zhang San in the photograph” and a “real Zhang San,” somehow hooked 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 photography is not the only or the highest way; we also have many other ways to know or speak of what Zhang San is. For example, I can tell a story and say that Zhang San “is precisely” the protagonist of this story, that this story “is” Zhang San. Here, “is Zhang San” is no more or less “is” than a certain photograph’s “is Zhang San.” If we identify one particular form of expression as the only or fundamental form, thereby ignoring and denying other rich forms, that is dangerous.

Besides media-based acts of designation such as taking photographs and telling stories, is there not some most primitive and most essential way in which a thing presents itself as what it is? Is it not the case that if I look at something “directly” with my “naked eye,” that is somehow more “real” than looking at it through a photograph? In fact, even direct visual perception with the naked eye always occurs within a corresponding environment; its background and context affect the way things are presented to the naked eye. That is to say, “seeing with the naked eye” is likewise media-based or environment-based; seeing with the naked eye is not necessarily more comprehensive or more one-sided than a photograph. You may be looking at Zhang San at work and have no idea what he is like in family life; you may be looking at Zhang San when he is in a cheerful mood and have no idea what he is like when he loses his temper. Any actual act of “seeing” is partial and limited.

The error of traditional metaphysics does not lie in its support for one particular mode of cognition, but rather in its exclusion of other modes of cognition. Phenomenologists oppose the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics and hold that the “lifeworld” is more foundational.

The so-called “lifeworld” does not refer to “one” mode of presentation alongside a “world of images”; “life” does not mean some “direct” contact detached from all technology or media. Rather, it is the “sum total” of all media. Life itself is rich: the day before yesterday I heard about Zhang San’s deeds, yesterday I saw Zhang San’s photograph, today I met Zhang San in class, tomorrow I will see Zhang San at the dinner table, and the day after tomorrow I will talk with Li Si about Zhang San’s story… This whole set of experiences of dealing with Zhang San belongs to my “life”; therefore, “life” is not some one particular medium.

3. Plato’s World of Ideas

Although the “world-picture” is a modern product, its roots were already planted in Plato. Plato divided the world into the world of ideas and the real world: the real world is deficient, mortal, and full of uncertainty, whereas the world of ideas is perfect, motionless, and absolutely certain. The real world is a shabby imitation of the world of ideas, and because the human being is burdened by the flesh, one cannot gaze directly at the truth in the world of ideas and must struggle instead in the real world. The immortal soul can indeed, like directly facing an image, grasp all certain and unshakable knowledge without obstruction; it is only after being embodied in flesh that it becomes constrained and thus forgets the truth.

Plato called what is seen by the eye of the immortal soul “ideas” (idea). This Greek word comes from the verb “to see”; its original meaning is “that which is seen,” and Plato uses it specifically to refer to what is seen by the eye of the soul.

Thus “idea” has no “thickness”; it is clearly outlined, letting the soul take it in at a glance. Here Plato’s choice of the word “see,” rather than “hear” or “touch,” is not accidental. In fact, both hearing and touching require movement. To hear something requires that thing to “emit” a sound, and therefore implies that the thing is undergoing or causing some change; to touch something usually means that my hand or body is in motion. Only the intention of “seeing” allows a motionless object to stand before a motionless subject.

Modern science inherited this Platonic “seeing.” Science’s mode of observing the world takes the form of a majestically unmoving neutral observer facing an eternally unchanging object. On the one hand, scientists must do their utmost to eliminate private opinions (subjectivity); on the other hand, they must also eliminate all the noise of the object of study (control variables), so as to achieve this kind of “motionless seeing.” The difference is that although modern science arose from a revival of Platonism, it abolished the division between the real world and the world of ideas; what modern people “see” is this real world.

This is because the Christian God, unlike Plato’s demiurge, does not create all things only by imitating already given ideas. The Christian God creates the world out of his own free idea, and because of God’s omnipotence, his creation must be perfectly in accord with the idea, and cannot be a flawed imitation. Thus Platonism, revived in the Christian world, merged the real world and the world of ideas; consequently, the real world also became an “image.”

4. Aversion to Mortality

As mentioned above, the key issue is not what is gained by means of this metaphysics, but what is excluded and obscured by it. And as we can see, the Western metaphysical tradition represented by Plato, from the very beginning, clearly made one kind of division in the world or in knowledge: it separated the immortal from the mortal. So the problem with this metaphysics lies less in its pursuit of immortality than in its aversion to mortality.

In Plato’s view, the only thing worth pursuing is true knowledge obtained when the immortal soul faces eternal ideas; as for what the mortal body obtains when it faces the ever-changing real world, all of that is merely “opinion,” which ought to be excluded.

Plato’s famous “allegory of the cave” illustrates this division: a group of people in a cave are bound up and can only stare at the cave wall in front of them. On the wall, many images move about busily, and some wise people can even infer a great deal of “knowledge” from them and predict how the images above will move. But there is one person who breaks free of his shackles and turns around, only then realizing that those images are all shadows cast by the firelight behind him. Step by step he walks out of the cave, sees all things under the sunlight, and finally sees the sun itself, and only then does he discover the real world.

The empirical knowledge gained by watching images in the cave is regarded by Plato as mere “opinion,” false knowledge, because it is changeable, temporary, and ambiguous. True knowledge must be certain and eternal.

In short, Plato in fact distinguishes between two kinds of knowledge or two kinds of being: the immortal and the mortal. The former is worth pursuing; the latter must be discarded. The former is essence; the latter is “garbage.”

In Plato’s dichotomy, the entire real world is subsumed under the category of the “mortal,” and both the human body and technical creations are “garbage” to be thrown away on the road to truth. But modern philosophy has eliminated the division between two worlds, yet modern people still try to bring the distinction between the immortal and the mortal into this one and only real world. The empiricist distinction between primary and secondary qualities is one such scheme: some experiences or kinds of knowledge (for example, those concerning shape or extension) are certain and eternal, whereas others (for example, those concerning color, fragrance, and taste) are ambiguous and changeable. The human body and human emotions have remained outside the philosopher’s field of vision, until the more recent turn in Continental philosophy brought some change.

What traditional metaphysics has always sought is what the eye of the immortal soul sees—whether this “soul” is located in the world of ideas, in heaven, or within the mysterious pineal gland. This pure soul is always out of place in the real world. Traditional metaphysics’ aversion to mortality is, in essence, an evasion of death, a sidestepping of the “actuality” or “finitude” of the “mortal human being.”

Traditional philosophy holds that only eternal things are meaningful; yet an eternal state outside time deprives everything of meaning. In an infinite eternity, everything will happen, or everything will not happen; so what is there worth pursuing? Even the act of “pursuing” is impossible in the world of ideas.

To face up to human mortality does not mean denying the pursuit of immortality. On the contrary, the longing for immortality, like any human desire or dream, is rooted in human finitude. The more clearly we recognize the mortality of the world, the more we yearn for immortality; and the longing for immortality drives all kinds of human creative activity—for example, striving to make one’s mark in the world so as to live forever in the histories, or creating immortal literary or artistic works.

Mortality is precisely the source of meaning, because of human finitude, because of the finitude of things and implements. We cannot simply have our wishes come true; we cannot do everything at once. Therefore we need action, creation, choice, and pursuit.

The pursuit of immortality does not mean aversion to one’s own mortality. Looking up at the sky does not necessarily mean turning a blind eye to the earth, just as pursuing a woman does not mean aversion to being a man oneself. Human beings, because of their mortality, yearn for immortality; but this yearning should not, in turn, make one lose oneself.

II. The Thought Hygiene of Excluding Ambiguity

1. Binary Oppositions

The immortal world of ideas and the mortal real world form a “dichotomy.” The way of thinking characteristic of Western traditional metaphysics is often called “binary opposition,” but the very act of establishing two opposing concepts to measure things is in itself not unusual. The real characteristic of Western philosophy lies, in fact, in the attitude it takes after the “split”: discarding one side. As Scanlan says, “This way of thinking, common to Western philosophy… encourages one to ignore those things that do not fit it.”[ Scanlan(2005):80]

From ancient times to the present, Western philosophy has established many dichotomies: immortality versus mortality, reality versus ideas, opinion versus truth, body versus soul, sense versus reason… But no matter which dichotomy is established, the habitual practice of Western philosophers is to simply cast aside the unsatisfactory side in one sweep. Anything that cannot be grasped clearly and distinctly as an “image,” anything defective, ambiguous, and unstable, should be discarded as quickly as possible.

As Scanlan says, this metaphysical tendency toward division is not only used to organize knowledge, but also to structure the relation between human beings and the material world.[ Scanlan(2005):81] Modern people skillfully establish a distinction between useful things and useless things, and then lump the latter together under the category of “waste”; this too is in the same line of descent as the metaphysical tradition.

Of course, in more recent times, especially with the rise of phenomenology, Western philosophers have reflected extensively on their metaphysical tradition, and fields such as “technology,” “emotion,” and “body” that had been abandoned or ignored by traditional philosophy have received new recognition. In this context, “garbage” has finally had the chance to enter the philosopher’s field of vision. But even under such circumstances, philosophy that focuses on the body or emotions is often still categorized as “irrationalism,” or even regarded as literature and poetry, rather than acknowledged as serious philosophical thought.

Dichotomies such as “mind-body” and “reason-sense” can indeed be established, but this cannot simply be equated with a split between “reason” and “irrationality.” It is just like the difference between the dichotomy “cold-hot” and “cold-non-cold”: they are entirely different things. “Cold-hot” is a pair of relative scales; it is valid to measure things by means of this scale, but this does not necessarily require an absolute determination that everything must be either cold or hot.

The binary oppositions of Western philosophy are never satisfied with establishing a relative scale of measurement; instead, they hope to complete an exact “boundary drawing,” and this requires philosophers, while excluding the other side of the opposition, also to exclude all the ambiguous and blurred intermediate zones and marginal areas.

The pursuit of cleanliness does not necessarily lead to a pathological scrupulosity that cannot tolerate a grain of sand in one’s eye. Philosophers strive to clarify concepts and distinguish confusions; this is the philosopher’s proper duty. But if one turns the activity of clarification and distinction into an either-or choice, then one has fallen into pathology.

Recognizing and facing up to the plurality and ambiguity of any scale is often denounced as “relativism.” This label may not be inappropriate, but if one thinks relativism means abandoning rational discrimination and doing whatever one pleases, that is a grave misunderstanding. Relativism first of all respects human mortality, or rather finitude, because human beings are not omniscient and omnipotent gods, and so no one has the right to hold absolute standards. The pursuit of truth, or the pursuit of clarity, is in either case an act of self-knowledge and self-transcendence starting from finite human beings, not an absolute judgment starting from an absolute God.

2. What Is and What Ought to Be

Among various dichotomies, the distinction between fact and value is quite important; this is also one of the conclusions of traditional metaphysics. When metaphysics investigates the question of “what something is,” the dimension of “ought” is first excluded.

At least in Hume, this distinction was already explicitly articulated. Talking about what something “is” and talking about how it “ought” to be belong to different domains and cannot be mixed together. Yet in more recent times, whether in Continental philosophy or analytic philosophy, this dichotomy has already been heavily questioned.

In the question of “what garbage is,” we also see a clear counterexample: the very concept of “garbage” itself contains a value scale. When we classify something as “garbage,” we are at the same time making a value judgment.

Indeed, “nothing is garbage by nature.” Strasser cites a proverb: garbage is nothing more than “matter out of place”; “dirty things are relative. Food itself is not dirty, but food that falls outside the plate, especially on clothes or bedsheets, is very dirty…”[ Strasser(2014)]

An old and worn vessel, when it appears in the hands of a thrifty master, is still that implement; when it appears in a museum, it is an exhibit; when it appears in a garbage heap, even if it is brand new, it is garbage. It seems that when speaking of something “being garbage,” one is always speaking “relatively,” always relative to the “environment” in which it is situated.

When we point at something and say, “This is garbage,” we have already grasped in advance something about what that thing “ought” to be—it ought to be in what place, play what role, and perform what function. And when it deviates from these oughts, it acquires the qualification of becoming “garbage.”

On the one hand, no thing is garbage by nature; on the other hand, anything can be garbage, because every thing can in potential depart from its “place.”

To say that anything “is” anything has this kind of relativity: something placed on the dining table is tableware; placed in a shop counter, it can be merchandise; placed on a display stand, it is an exhibit; placed in a furnace, it can be fuel; placed in a trash bin, it is garbage. Every kind of “is” implies a corresponding “belonging”: things are placed within the appropriate environment and regarded as some “what.” And when they lose all proper forms of belonging, things with nowhere to belong can only become garbage.

Every kind of “is” corresponds to a scale of “what ought to be done.” To “be a plate” means one ought to be able to hold dishes, and thus there arise scales for plates such as capacity and heat resistance. And if it “is fuel,” then there arise scales such as whether it is combustible and how efficient its combustion is.

Simply put, when we use some scale to measure the value of something, we have always already first grasped what it “is”; and when we talk about what something “is,” we have always already understood where it “ought” to be.

So, can we completely free ourselves from these relativities, step out of concrete environments, ignore concrete “uses,” and talk about what a thing “is” purely on the basis of the thing “itself”?

This is precisely what traditional metaphysics has painstakingly devoted itself to—the ontology. Plato called it “ideas”: to say that something “is a horse” does not first of all mean that it can be ridden or domesticated, but rather that it corresponds to the absolute “horse” in the world of ideas. And the “horse” in the world of ideas has no “place” or “environment”; it exists independently and self-subsistently, eternally unchanged. Modern people, by contrast, replaced the world of ideas with the mathematical world: everything is first of all something whose boundaries can be precisely defined mathematically. Mathematical objects do not change, time is also calculated as a mathematical parameter, and anything measured in a concrete environment is first of all a determinate “X.” This X has no external environment, only its own displacement and extension, and thus can be precisely grasped by the mathematical sciences.

3. Identity and Garbage

This notion of a thing’s “ontology” apart from its environment has been put on trial in modern philosophy. The key point is that even if we concede that there is such an ontology, or that we concede some “environment/context,” or that some way of seeing things is the most fundamental and absolute, this still does not solve the problem of relativity in “being.”

That is, why are we still able to regard things known in different ways as the same thing? We say that garbage is merely a thing not in its proper place; a thing plays different roles and is measured by different scales in different places. Yet after all, we are talking about one particular thing. Its “what it is” changes according to the environment in which it is situated, but the reason “change” is possible is that there must be something unchanged, so that we may still regard the changed thing as the original thing.

Parmenides said, “What is, is; what is not, is not.” Change is impossible. If a thing changes, then how do we recognize that the thing after change is still the original thing?

If this new thing and that old thing are the same thing, then whence change? If this new thing and that old thing are not the same thing, then what we have is the successive appearance of two things, not “change.”

From the very beginning, Western philosophy has tried to solve the question of how change is possible, or rather how identity is possible. Plato’s strategy was to posit an unchanging prototype in the world of ideas; the myriad different things in reality are all imitations drawn from this prototype. Yet this scheme still does not solve the problem of identity. That is to say, how is it possible for us to “recognize” some real thing as that ideal thing?

Plato held that the real world is perishable, but his solution was merely to turn one’s face away from perishable things, never truly confronting the question of how “decay” is possible. Philosophers imagine that they are devoted to knowing and understanding eternal things, but in truth philosophy’s most original question is rather “trash philosophy,” that is, “How is decay possible?” If the flawless Idea is the starting point of everything in the real world, then the revolting garbage is the end point of everything. The question, then, is: since this starting point and this end point are so utterly different, how is motion or change between them possible? How can we take something that comes from eternity and something that is heading toward rot and regard them as one and the same thing? If the drop from eternity to trash leaves no room for maneuver, if eternal things and decayed things are forever sharply divided and irreconcilable, then in the murky and ambiguous middle ground—that is, in the real world—the problem of the identity of things will remain perpetually unresolved.

This most original problem in the history of Western philosophy is at the same time the “transcendental problem.” What “transcendental” means is that which comes prior to experience and makes experience possible—in other words, the problem of “how knowledge is possible” in this experiential world. The reason this problem arises is that its full form is this: in this perishable world, how is it possible for human beings to obtain certain knowledge from things that will always end up as trash?

Plato regarded the body and the entire real world as things to be discarded, but all his philosophical questions still revolve around them, because there is no need to investigate how the soul obtains knowledge from the world of Ideas; for Plato, that is straightforward and unimpeded. So the whole of philosophy must always investigate how, while still not having escaped the flesh and the present world, one can learn knowledge from these things that are destined to be cast aside.

Plato raised this transcendental philosophical problem with the famous Meno problem: “How will you look for a thing when you don’t in the least know what it is? What sort of thing among the things you don’t know will you set before your inquiry? And if you do happen to meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing you didn’t know?”[ Plato (2004): 170–171 (80D) ]

As Stiegler puts it: “Trying to answer this problem is itself the motor force of all thought in the history of philosophy, especially modern thought: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and so on—all of them investigate this question. Modern philosophy, beginning with Kant, names this problem the problem of transcendentality.”[ Stiegler (2000): 115 ]

Plato responded to Meno’s problem with the immortality of the soul:

The soul is immortal and has been born many times; some times here in this world, some times in the underworld, and it has seen all things and there is nothing that is not in its experience. So it is no wonder that it can recollect virtue and all the rest, since it already knew them before. For the whole of nature is knitted together, and the soul has learned all things; so if a person is able to recollect one thing—what people call learning—… investigation and learning are nothing but recollection.[ Plato (2004): 172 (81D) ]

In short, the reason we are able to “recognize” things is nothing but that we truly “remember” them. These memories precede all the experiences of this life, indeed precede my very life; they are innate to me from birth, and these innate memories come from the knowledge the soul possessed in previous generations.

Yet we soon discover that the problem has not been eliminated—if knowing is recollection of knowledge already possessed in a previous life, then how were we in that previous life able to obtain knowledge in the first place? Before the soul’s “many rebirths,” how was its original knowledge acquired?

In the Phaedrus Plato offers a supplement, or rather a correction: the soul does not acquire knowledge through its experiences in “this world and the underworld,” but through what it saw while it was traveling “above the heavens,” detached from the dust of the world and not yet reincarnated, when it beheld true knowledge and beheld the “Forms” that are the prototypes of all concrete things. And what seekers of knowledge in the world aim at is nothing but the reawakening of the soul’s memory of those prototypes.

In this way Plato takes a mode of cognition that cannot be realized in the perishable present world and treats it as the most original mode of cognition. As noted above, even if we do not doubt whether such cognition is possible, our problem still remains: whatever this original mode of cognition may be, how can the various plural modes of actual cognition possibly be unified with it? Plato replaced learning with recollection, but the problem still remains: how is identity in recollection possible? How is “reawakening recollection” possible?

The philosophical tradition after Plato mainly continued to pursue the source of knowledge by following the Phaedrus—and not the Meno. That is to say, it set aside the question of previous lives and also sidestepped the question of recollection, trying instead to seek the “prototypes” of things above the heavens as the source of all knowledge. Yet this wish to seek certainty in an immortal world, whether it is a self-deceiving fantasy or not, can never replace the question of how certainty is to be sought in a perishable world.

4. Kant’s “throw-away method”

It was not until Kant that chaos was set right and the transcendental problem was once again put forward.

Kant finally confronted the perishability of the body and the world, no longer fantasizing about entering an immortal world to face immortal things directly. Kant denied that the soul could leap out of all conditions and directly touch the “thing in itself.” Our living in this perishable world means that it is impossible for us to escape human finitude and directly experience the thing in itself. What human experience touches is the so-called “manifold”; within the manifold there is no identity. The reason people can recognize “one” thing is not that there has long existed, behind various modes of cognition, a prototype of “one” thing; rather, the oneness of things is bestowed by human modes of cognition.

Yet for Kant, while the prototype thing cannot be known, prototype cognition is still possible. The certainty of knowledge does not lie in the object itself having some basic element independent of any mode of cognition; rather, it lies in some basic form implicit in every mode of cognition.

Earlier we noted that in different “environments” or “positions,” what a thing is differs and changes. How to identify what remains unchanged amid change, the same amid difference, is a difficult problem. Kant’s approach is not to begin from the thing itself and find the “core” that remains unchanged under changing circumstances, but rather to start from the “environment” and find the basic form shared by all environments. This environment, as a prototype of environment, is the source of a thing’s certainty, and for Kant this environment is “space-time.”

Kant believed that time and space are the basic forms common to the innumerable different modes by which humans perceive things, and this “space-time,” as the environment of all environments, happens to be exactly the Cartesian-Newtonian “absolute space-time.” This is not because Kant’s space-time is Euclidean geometry or the like; rather, it is because this “space-time” is completed a priori starting from the “I think,” with the coordinate system of analytic geometry set up in advance by the intellectual mind prior to any specific object, so that all objects must appear against this absolute background.

All things are first of all a sharply delimited shape within this “world-picture” or “cosmic coordinate system”; this mathematically determined absolute boundary is the key to keeping a thing as “one.” And the shape in this cosmic coordinate system does not change, because time itself has also become part of the coordinates, so things, insofar as they are “four-dimensional manifolds,” do not change. As for change in reality, it is nothing more than some layers attached to this absolute background, layers that can be peeled off at any time.

So how did Kant find this basic form of “space-time” amid plural cognitive activities? His method was nothing other than the “throw-away method”: that is, to strip away those things in experiential activity that can be discarded, throw them all away in one sweep, and in the end what remains is the thing sought.

For example, Kant urges us: “Even if from your empirical concept of a body you gradually remove everything empirical: color, hardness or softness, weight, even impenetrability, still space remains, which you cannot remove.”[ Kant (2011): B5]

But why can’t “space” be removed? Is this inability merely limited by Kant’s personal imagination, or is it an inborn limitation of all human beings? Kant of course thinks this is not merely a matter of his own ability, but a problem of “man” in the general sense—“we can speak of space only from the standpoint of a human being.”[ Kant (2011): B42] “We know nothing but the way we perceive them, a way peculiar to us, though it must necessarily belong to every human being, it does not necessarily belong to every being.”[ Kant (2011): B59]

But why is Kant’s “we” precisely all humankind, and not “primates,” “Germans,” “modern people,” or Kant himself? Why should those things that do not necessarily belong to every being happen nevertheless to belong necessarily to every human being? Here Kant probably still needs a kind of “transcendental anthropology,” namely, a prior determination of which sensory dimensions are beneficial and worth preserving, and which sensations are useless and ought to be discarded.

For example, it seems I could remove from my concept of “an apple” its color, hardness or softness, weight, even its size and shape, leaving only its aroma and taste. Why should that not be possible? Is taste not precisely the most non-negotiable element of an apple as an apple? Why should we not take taste as the basic form of the outer senses, and then take satiety as the basic form of the inner sense?

This is not a joke. Taste and smell are indeed also included by Kant among the five outer senses. If so, then we must ask: is space also the “pure form” of taste and smell? Kant did not seriously investigate these sensations. In his view, taste and smell are two “lower” outer senses; as for sensations such as satiety, where they should be classified was not considered at all.

For Kant, sight and touch are also regarded merely as senses concerned with shape; as for sensations of “hot and cold, dry and wet” (which, for Aristotle, were the basic properties of things), or “color, fragrance, and taste,” these are merely “vital” or “enjoyment” senses rather than “perceptual” senses. But are these sensations really irrelevant to cognition of things? Is our cognition of an apple really unrelated to taste?

For Kant, these sensations are excluded because they are relatively vague and ambiguous and make it hard to reach precise agreement. He points out that the subject’s feelings regarding hot and cold or taste “may be quite different”[ Kant (2008): Practical Anthropology, §17 [154]] , whereas senses such as sight “contribute more to knowledge of external objects” and make people more “inclined to agree with others.” But does that mean the sensations that make “less contribution” and are harder to bring into consensus can definitely be excluded from “perception”? Are not concepts such as “more” and “easier” themselves vague and ambiguous?

We can see that modern philosophy, represented by Kant, on the one hand brought back the experiential world that Plato had discarded, but on the other hand it still inherited Plato’s “throw-away method” in full measure: by simply stripping away and discarding those parts that cannot be clearly grasped, and then holding forth grandly in the neat and bright space that has been cleaned out.

Distinguishing and emphasizing are in themselves unobjectionable; they are not only a feature of philosophy but also, more generally, a feature of language and thought. But the essence of the “throw-away method” lies not in the painstakingly rigorous act of cleaning, but in the irrevocable act of discarding. What has been cleared away is not temporarily parked at the margins for later reexamination, nor transplanted into another different environment; it is thrown into the “trash can” and henceforth becomes unseen.

The problem is that if what is cleaned away is cleaned away because of vagueness, rather than because of insignificance, then must the vague and unclear have no value, and must the important always be clear and distinct? Here philosophy’s original intention is overturned—in the beginning, we hoped that through philosophy’s work of clarification, important things would be shown more distinctly; now, we take it that only where we can clarify things ourselves do important things exist.

III. The foundationalism of exclusion and recycling

1. Threefold synthesis

Let us suppose that Kant discovered the basic form among “our” many modes of cognition—whether this “we” means all humankind, or modern German intellectuals, or Kant himself—but this still does not solve the problem of identity.

Only God can survey those determinate manifolds from outside space-time; perishable human beings cannot. Human senses can touch only a fragment of concrete space-time. Take a plate, for example: God, from outside space-time, can directly see the whole process from its making to its use to its disposal, but each time a human sees it, only one side is visible. A human cannot see its front and back at the same time, much less its past and future at the same time. When I turn it over to look at the back, the front is no longer in my field of vision. So how do I unify the new sensation with the sensation in memory?

Kant believed that this unification is completed in the activity of consciousness. In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he expounded the concept of the “threefold synthesis”—“the apprehension of the manifold of a sensuous intuition, its reproduction in the imagination, and its recognition in a concept.”[ Kant (2011): A97] Kant thought that the manifold of experience is ultimately unified in the understanding through these three syntheses. But this section was completely rewritten in the second edition. This was not because there was any error in the first edition’s view—at least not in Kant’s own opinion—but merely because the strategy of argument and the wording were adjusted.

Yet the extent of the rewriting suggests that even in Kant’s own view there was indeed some confusion in the first edition’s discussion of the “threefold synthesis.” Stiegler points out that what Kant called “apprehension” and “reproduction” roughly correspond to Husserl’s “primary retention” and “secondary retention,” but Kant “confused the ability of ‘reproduction’ with the ability of primary retention.”[ Stiegler (2012): 55]

In Kant’s account, apprehension and reproduction are both nothing more than taking the manifold and surveying it in successive time, arranging it into a unified and complete presentation. The difference seems only to be that the first synthesis occurs in intuition and the second in imagination. But what Kant says about the first synthesis is not limited to representations coming from external stimuli; it also includes things produced from within. Thus Kant ultimately says, “the synthesis of apprehension is inseparably combined with the synthesis of reproduction.”[ Kant (2011): A102] In the second edition this division between the two syntheses was simply eliminated.

Husserl, however, successfully distinguished these two retentions. The first retention produces the “immediate” impression. For example, when we listen to a piece of music, the notes appear one after another; they do not suddenly emerge as a disorderly series of noises one by one. This is because the notes that have “just passed” do not disappear from consciousness, but rather “retain” themselves in some way, while the notes about to come are also included in the present “halo” as “protention.” In this way, the first “synthesis,” or “primary memory,” is in fact the synthesis of retention, primal impression, and protention. And when I recall this piece of music again the next day, I can reproduce these notes in consciousness. This reproduction of course is also because they still “retain” themselves in my memory, but this retention differs from the retention mentioned above, which establishes the unity of experience in the present.

Stiegler thinks that Husserl’s problem is precisely that he emphasizes too much the difference between primary retention and secondary retention. Husserl too early “gave up the piece of music” and turned instead to the continuous unity of the “single note,” and this caused “everything to go astray, because the single note has no meaning whatsoever in the piece of music.”[ Stiegler (2010): 236]

The unity of hearing a single note differs from the unity of hearing a piece of music. When listening to music, the notes are not heard as isolated sounds, but as sounds within “the same piece of music.” In analyzing the unity of a piece of music as a piece of music, the boundary between primary retention and secondary retention becomes blurred again.

I am listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos—I hear each note as a note in this set of concertos; each note in the past retains itself as a note in this concerto, and the notes to come are also anticipated by me as notes in this concerto. It is still retention and protention that determine the wholeness or individuality of the piece of music I hear (rather than the notes), making it possible for me to “be listening to the Brandenburg Concertos right now,” rather than listening to a jumble of “sounds” or one “note” after another.

What kind of synthesis is this? It seems not to be a retrospective reproduction. I do not “hear out” the Brandenburg Concertos by repeatedly recalling the preceding music at every moment; if that were the case, I would in fact find it difficult to listen to a complete piece of music. Yet the retention in this synthesis also does not seem to be the same as the retention I have when I hear a sustained single note as a single note. Each note is not retained in my consciousness as one isolated single note after another. If I retained more strongly each note as a single note, I would also fail to hear a complete piece of music.

The key is that even in this first, most original “retention,” there is still relativity; the mode of retention always bears an appropriate context, that is to say, retention is always retention “as…” The retention of sound as a single note and the retention of sound as a piece of music are not the same thing.

Therefore, this first retention is at any moment also “updated” by the second retention. For example, after listening to music for a while, I suddenly remember that this is precisely the Brandenburg Concerto I had heard before; from that point on, I begin to listen to this piece of music as a Brandenburg Concerto. I no longer need, at every moment, to recall the concerto I had heard before; instead, I continue listening to the concerto now before me in a new way. Of course, the piece heard before can also be made to reappear in different ways from moment to moment: I can listen to the piece now as a new version to be compared with yesterday’s piece.

Listening to “this concerto” as an individual, unified “this concerto” depends on the first synthesis; “remembering” yesterday’s “that concerto” is the second synthesis. So listening to “this concerto” as “that concerto” heard yesterday is the result of the interweaving of the first and second syntheses: on the one hand, the first synthesis is of course the precondition of the second synthesis; but on the other hand, the reason the first synthesis can occur is precisely that we can listen to present music as the re-presentation of some past piece. If I had not remembered the piece I heard in the past, I could not complete such a synthesis in present listening, and might only listen to it as scattered notes or melodies. If we can still listen to it as a complete “concerto” or “piece of music,” that is because we have heard similar pieces.

Of course, we can hear a “brand-new” piece. In fact, theoretically speaking, even when we hear the same piece, each time we hear it we are hearing something new. But the so-called “new” is always new only “as something,” for example, something heard by me as a new version of the Brandenburg Concerto is not new as a Bach concerto; it is still that set of Brandenburg Concertos I already know very well. And what is new as a Bach concerto—for example, I hear a Bach concerto I have never heard before—is not new as a musical style or form; it is still a concerto in the Baroque style that I already know very well… Anything new I may encounter is, at the same time, always something old as something. If nothing long familiar had been retained in my consciousness, if I could not remember anything similar, then I would not be able to recognize anything new.

2. Memory and Its “Recycling”

We have gone around in a circle and returned to the question posed by Meno: we cannot recognize what we know nothing about, so the reason it is possible to know something as something must be that we have already known it, and thus are able to “remember” it. Whether it is Plato’s scheme of the soul’s immortality, Kant’s idea of the threefold synthesis, or Husserl’s theory of “retention,” none can escape the problem of “memory.”

The key to the problem lies in what, exactly, “evoking memory” is.

I listen to music and suddenly remember that this is the Brandenburg Concerto I heard before—what has been remembered? What is being “re-presented”? Clearly it is not this: the Brandenburg Concerto I heard yesterday—some tens of minutes in all—being reproduced intact in my consciousness, including every single note and its infinite details, one after another.

The fact is that I merely take a small phrase that arises in my mind, or even just a small phrase I am hearing at the moment, to be the re-presentation of the Brandenburg Concerto.

Just as cognition is always limited by the mode of knowing that takes a thing as something, memory of something is always memory of something as something; that is to say, we can always recall only one side of something from some specific angle, in some specific way. Memory is always limited. Stiegler calls this fate “the finitude of retention” — “any recollection is a kind of forgetting”: [ Stiegler (2012): 23 ]

To remember yesterday, to have a moment of the past, is, put another way, to simplify yesterday so that it is shorter than today… We can only possess finite memory. This is the finitude of retention; it is the condition of consciousness, … the correct analysis of secondary memory applies to any type of memory, and likewise to primary memory. This is why primary memory can only be a selection… only according to criteria of selection. [ Stiegler (2012): 24 ]

Thus, what we can remember about something depends on the way we can select and edit it, thereby discarding the redundant parts. But this memory that has been discarded is not thrown away once and for all; rather, it can always be “recycled” in certain ways.

When a certain melodic phrase is remembered as the “cut-down version” of an entire piece, it means that this phrase will at any moment be supplemented by the next phrase; I remember something that happened yesterday, which means I can always continue recalling other scenes related to that thing. Even if in practice I do not always complete these supplements, and indeed cannot pick up every lost fragment, it is precisely the “recyclability” of these lost memories that sustains the wholeness of cognition.

Memory always depends on forgetting, and what can be forgotten is always what can be remembered. Forgetting, unlike a simple “discarding of memory,” is not burying memory in a garbage heap to be seen no more under heaven; rather, it is in some way leaving memory “behind” somewhere near me, so that at any moment it may be “recycled” by me in some way.

3. Learning and Technology

The capacity for memory or forgetting is not wholly innate; it is a skill that needs to be learned. People who often listen to classical music can of course remember more details from a concerto; primitive people who live by eating raw meat and drinking blood find it hard to recognize plates or tableware; Chinese people are more likely to confuse and fail to distinguish the appearances of foreigners…

How human beings integrate their cognition of things in memory is not a ready-made fixed simple mapping: as if the world were a flat image, and human consciousness too were a flat screen, and then the world projected a sharply contoured image onto this screen. The ways in which human beings cognize or remember things are gradually acquired through long-term interaction between human beings and the world.

“Recording” is the way memory is disciplined, and the activity of recording is a typical kind of “forgetting.” What is called “recording” is precisely such an activity of leaving “forgettable” memory behind us in some way, so that it can be “recycled” by us at any time.

And the finitude of the recording medium means that every recording medium also selects memory in some way; thus, on the one hand, people design, make, and choose recording media in a “way that can be forgotten,” while on the other hand they always “forget” in a “way that can be recorded,” and at the same time recycle their memory from the recording media at any moment. The result is, on the one hand, that recording media are continuously transformed according to the way human memory works; on the other hand, the ways human memory works are continuously reshaped in accordance with changes in memory media.

In the Phaedrus, Plato’s famous parable that “writing damages memory” is precisely about this matter of recording media reshaping the way memory works. The invention of writing made people lazy in memory and more prone to forgetfulness; this is true, but the emergence of writing technology, while bringing about new kinds of forgetting, also reconstituted the way people remember. “Writing makes memory precisely formalized.”[ Stiegler (2010): 126 ] Literate people will organize their memories in new ways, and the way they know things will also be entirely different from that of people in oral cultures [ see Ong (2008)].

The “recording media” referred to here are not limited to writing, books, and other communication technologies in the usual sense. In fact, every artifact, every “technology” that can be inherited and continued, is a carrier for recording memory. The material and form of every hammer contain knowledge and memory concerning the activity of hammering—for example, how to grasp it, how to exert force, what needs hammering, and so on. The design, manufacture, and improvement of every technology is the process by which human beings leave memory outside themselves; and the inheritance, learning, and training of every technology is the process by which human beings recycle memory from around them and discipline anew the way they remember.

Stiegler calls memory’s “remaining outside me” “tertiary memory” or “tertiary retention,” which also corresponds to Husserl’s “image consciousness” and Kant’s “third synthesis” — “The third synthesis arranges and edits the first two syntheses, making them become one unique single flow of time.” [ Stiegler (2012): 59]

For Kant, the third synthesis is the determination of knowledge, in which intuition is finally fixed onto concepts through transcendental apperception. But if concepts belong to language, and language in turn is nothing other than a medium technology, then we may say that the third synthesis is in fact precisely “technologization”; what constructs the internal unity of human consciousness, what constitutes this “self,” is precisely this “externalization” toward technological objects. Technology, as “the extension of man,” constructs human nature precisely in this outward-extending way — “human existence is existence outside itself.”[ Stiegler (2000): 227]

4. The Cycle of History

When we ask what something “is,” we always first take it into account and measure it within a relative environment; and for the many relative modes of cognition to be unified, we must organize and synthesize our experience in memory. The possibility that this memory can be reorganized ultimately comes from the possibility of forgetting, and thus depends on concrete, corresponding technical objects as external memory.

—At this point, we have completed a “cycle.” We ask after the conditions under which “things” can be known, and after layers of deepening inquiry into origins, the answer returns to “things” again — the transcendental conditions of experience of concrete things lie in concrete technical objects.

But this cycle is not logical; it is historical. The technical object that serves as the “end” of cognition (its content), and the technical object that serves as the “condition” of cognition (its medium), are not the same logical operator, not the same “X,” but actual, fluctuating objects of history.

Just as Plato’s answer in the Meno is that the memory of a “previous life” is the source that makes present knowledge possible; and just as described in the Phaedrus, what makes forgetting and memory possible is precisely the soul’s cyclical experience of transcending beyond the body and then returning into the body. Yet the place of this journey outside the body is not some realm of Ideas above the firmament, but precisely our “technical environment”; it is precisely through the technical environment that people, once born, can possess endless “memory.” We are always thrown into a concrete historical situation and technical environment; as something we are born already possessing, the memory carried by the technical environment is the a priori condition of our knowledge. And these technical objects, as products manufactured in the history of human invention, are all, after all, “a posteriori.” A priori and a posteriori, memory and technology, knowledge and objects, mutually construct one another in history, endlessly recurring.

Metaphysicians of foundationalism would not agree with this cycle. They believe that some memory received by human beings from heaven (the world of Ideas, God, human nature…) is the condition that makes all knowledge possible, but they will reject the next proposition: that the creations of human knowledge in the earthly world (the technical environment) in turn become the transcendental precondition of knowledge.

For no matter where they set the starting point, they always believe there is such an absolute, pure, eternal, unconditional foundation, and that knowledge is the product of some one-way construction from above or from below. Behind plural, relative knowledge there is always a single, absolute ground, and this ground has nothing to do with fluid, rich technology or history. But the cycles we find are historical, in motion, and therefore never fixed, ready-made things.

However, this does not mean that we abandon philosophical pursuit; we have even never abandoned the pursuit of “eternal” truth. It is just that we finally realize — precisely the flowing cycle, not a fixed foundation, is what sustains the “eternal.” Much as the constancy of a river lies not in the fixity of its source, but in the water cycle that is forever flowing through mountains, seas, and clouds.

The identity and objectivity of objects, the unity and certainty of knowledge, are precisely rooted in the cycle of history. For these coincident consistencies are also never something already realized in advance. Just as the identity of human consciousness is also “the not-yet-arrived, the about-to-arrive within consciousness, consciousness’s future, which can only be realized at the end of consciousness.”[ Stiegler (2012): 83 ] Human beings are precisely such defective beings; they always need the aid of technology or communication to supplement themselves, and technology too is constantly perfected through human creation — human history is the cycle of mutual supplementation between human beings and technology. We need to continuously reconstruct ourselves through technology, moving back and forth in “a dimension between things and human beings,” “passing beyond things and returning to human beings.”[ Heidegger (2010): 216 ]

This intervening dimension that transcends human beings and precedes things is precisely the space illuminated by transcendental philosophy; and here, what we encounter is precisely technology as environment and history.

Above, I spoke of the passage from “decay” and “discarding” to “recycling” and “circulation”; all of it is linked to “garbage,” and this link is not merely rhetorical or metaphorical, because the problem of technology and the problem of truth have always been two sides of the same coin. The ways of remembering and thinking have always mutually shaped the ways of making and production. Thus it can be said that the modern technological system is the completed form of metaphysics, and that metaphysics’ deep-seated habits of discarding and its foundationalist attitude will ultimately expose themselves in the technological environment in the form of a garbage crisis.

Modern technology takes “natural science” as its “foundation,” and the profound significance of this fact does not lie in the common idea that high technology is often the “application” of theoretical science, but in the fact that the image of nature pre-set by natural science becomes the starting point of the entire technological world: “nature” is portrayed as “resource,” and the exploitation and use of “resource” is a one-way line, the two ends of which — nature and garbage — do not belong to the “present world,” while everything in the present world is properly controlled by plastic boxes or cling film.

The following discussion will turn to Heidegger’s concept of “Gestell,” which is also an interpretation of this metaphysics.

IV. Total Control that Rejects Darkness

1. Ends and “Coming-to-Presence”

Heidegger is one of the most famous critics of modern technology, and his attitude is often classified as “pessimism,” even called “the source of many technological pessimisms” [ Hanks (2010)].

If so-called optimism means believing that the various risks and crises of modern technology can be controlled, and that humankind can ultimately safely enjoy the benefits brought by modern technology, while pessimism means having no hope that human beings can control their own destiny, then Heidegger indeed belongs to the latter. However, such a judgment can easily make us miss Heidegger’s profound insight into modern technology.

Heidegger does not think human beings are powerless. The key is: what, exactly, is the danger of modern technology? In Heidegger’s view, the greatest danger of modern technology is precisely its logic of “total control.” When we try to “control risk” and “grasp destiny,” we are already deeply caught in the logic of technology. The problem is by no means how human beings in the technological age can control destiny; rather, it is that human beings in the technological age begin to demand control over destiny.

In Heidegger’s view, “philosophy was replaced by cybernetics” [ Heidegger (1996): 1308], and people even hope that philosophers will prescribe remedies for social transformation. Heidegger, however, believes that thought still has its power; the mission of thought is not to discover a way to control the whole, but to help people recognize their own situation.

The distinctive situation of the technological age must be sought in its metaphysical foundation. Below, I will sort this out along the lines of Heidegger’s “question concerning technology.”

Heidegger begins the “question concerning technology” from everyday definitions. In ordinary concepts, technology is understood as a kind of “means to an end” and as a kind of human activity. Heidegger does not deny these understandings. These explanations are correct, but if one is satisfied with them, one will miss the essence of technology. Heidegger proceeds from the everyday understanding of technology and asks further:

Since technology is a means employed by human beings to achieve ends, this reveals a causal connection: “human — (through) — technology — (realizing) — end.” “End” is always the “result” of a technological activity, but what is the “cause”? In the structure above, the “human” at the other end, the one handling the technology, is the “cause,” isn’t it? But Heidegger points out that this is one-sided. In Aristotle, people’s understanding of “cause” was far richer than it is today: besides the “efficient cause,” it also included the “material cause,” the “formal cause,” and the “final cause.” “These four causes are closely linked together in the way of responsible indebtedness (Verschulden[ Sun’s translation of ‘招致’ is not good. ‘A招致B’ is nothing more than a shorthand way of saying ‘A, as cause, leads to B as effect’; whereas Verschulden originally means responsibility and debt, first of all marking a certain relational status among things, and suggesting the relation of burden and indebtedness between things. Heidegger also mentions that the word has a tendency to be understood as ‘fault,’ but ‘招致’ does not have that feeling at all. Moreover, the corresponding transitive and intransitive terms in German are rendered quite well through the pair ‘responsibility—indebtedness.’ By contrast, ‘招致’ is hard to render in the reverse direction. In Sun’s translation, there is a sentence like ‘silver招致silver plate……silver plate is attributable to silver,’ which is awkward, and also exposes the fact that ‘招致’ is just a contraction of ‘cause leads to effect.’ ‘To be indebted to the silver plate’ is much better. Besides, 招致 sounds more like an actual action, still dominated by the model of ‘efficient cause,’ whereas responsibility/indebtedness is a relation; what actually performs the action is the ‘bringing-forth’ or ‘bringing-into-being’ as a kind of ‘gathering.’] )” [Heidegger (2001): 7]; together they are “responsible” for the coming-into-presence of things.

For example, the production of a silver plate is indebted to the silver as material, the “appearance” as form, and the “definer” [Heidegger clearly says, “People often translate it as ‘goal’ and ‘purpose,’ and thereby misunderstand it.” Translating it as final cause is obviously not quite suitable; final cause is better.] as end (which can be understood as how the final product ultimately comes into use). There is also another cause, namely the silversmith, usually taken to be the “efficient cause.” But Heidegger says: “The silversmith is not the efficient cause” [Heidegger (2001): 7], because “the silversmith does not act upon the finished silver plate as the result of making.”

“The silversmith considers and gathers the aforementioned three modes of responsible indebtedness.” In Heidegger’s view, “considering” is “letting … emerge into view”; the silversmith “gathers” the material of the silver, the form of the plate, and the sacrificial use into one, thereby “bringing forth” the “thing” that is the silver plate. And the difference between artifacts and natural things is that artifacts are brought forth by human beings, whereas natural things bring themselves forth, emerging spontaneously of themselves.

After this round of inquiry: technology, as a purposive means, is bringing causes forth in order to realize results. Since the result of “bringing forth” is the thing’s state of “standing by and being ready,” and “standing by and being ready marks the presence of a present-at-hand being” [Heidegger (2001): 8], causality becomes the thing’s “mode of coming into presence.” Thus, “bringing forth” is also “bringing out of concealment (non-presence) into unconcealment (into an open locale)” [Heidegger (2001): 10. Re-translate.]

“As things now stand,” Heidegger says, “technology is a mode of unconcealment.” [Heidegger (2001): 10] Technology appears where unconcealment and concealment happen, where [unconcealment] and truth happen [Heidegger (2001): 12].

Ever since his early philosophy, Heidegger has been associating “truth” with “unconcealment,” consistently stressing that truth is not some ready-made set of propositions, but an activity of revealing and disclosing (of course, in his later thought the concept of “truth” itself is also downplayed).

2. Clearing the Ground

For the phenomenologist, truth is nothing other than things presenting themselves as they are. But how is such presentation possible? As discussed earlier, every presentation is mediate, or rather situational and environmental—that is, it is always presented “through …” and “within …”

When Heidegger interprets Plato’s “allegory of the cave,” he points out: “The visible and the capable of seeing are thus of necessity yoked under the same yoke. The yoke that first makes possible the mutual opposition between the two is light, brightness.” [Heidegger (2008): 97] Of course, the meaning of “light” is symbolic; Heidegger notes that the word “light” derives from “loud, bright,” and its characteristic lies in “penetration” — “light is not merely that which penetrates, but penetration itself” [Heidegger (2008): 54].

Heidegger distinguishes between “beings” and “the being of beings.” Beings are those present-at-hand things standing there in the light, whereas the being of beings is not those present things, but the appearing of beings, the “field” itself.

Traditional metaphysics thinks cognition is like an image of things mapped onto the curtain of consciousness, but Heidegger emphasizes that things are not initially ready-made, sharply contoured images; they always appear through some condition or other. Before appearance, there is not already some ready-made, unchanging truth or essence hiding in some place beyond space and time, waiting for human beings to excavate it. Truth happens in the corresponding historical situation.

Heidegger says: “Truth is not first of all something that is somehow present in advance in some unforeseeable place and then sets itself down somewhere in beings. That is absolutely impossible, because it is the openness of beings that provides the possibility of some place and the possibility of a locale filled with present things. The ‘clearing’ (Lichtung, also translated as luminosity or forest clearing[ Translating it as ‘luminosity’ is not appropriate. ‘Forest clearing’ first of all stresses the sense of some ‘locale’; ‘luminosity’ sounds either like an action or like a state, with not the slightest flavor of a place. Unless one says ‘the realm of luminosity,’ which is a bit better, but verbose, and may also make people think of some state attained by human beings. Translating it as ‘open ground’ is also fine, but too ordinary to suggest the tension, and many passages then become hard to read (luminosity is actually even harder to read). ‘Clearing and presence’ is much better. ‘Clearing’ is close to the English clearing; the German Lichtung also carries the sense of clearing away. Although clearing sounds more like a verb, Chinese does not distinguish verb from noun, so it still reads smoothly. Moreover, what forest clearing is meant to convey is precisely such a dynamic condition that is not ready-made but interplays between concealment and clearing. ‘Clearing,’ as the term suggests, is a cleared or clearing place; the ground is cleared in order to let beings step onto the stage and appear, which accords with the meaning of Lichtung.]) and the setting-up in the open belong together. They are one and the same essence of the happening of truth. The happening of truth is historical in its many and varied ways.” [Heidegger (2004): 48-49]

To seek truth therefore means to clear such an open space so that things may take the stage within it. The essence of technology lies in “clearing.”

3. Garbage and Darkness

The relation between unconcealment and concealment corresponds exactly to the relation between technology and garbage; this is not merely an analogy. Heidegger’s line of thought linking technology with unconcealment likewise applies to the question of garbage. Garbage is precisely the shadow of “technology.” If “technology” is the thing relied upon to achieve an end, then “garbage” is the unavoidable by-product of technological activity. As said earlier, this stems from the finitude of the real world: because human beings are not God, and the real world is not pure idea, people cannot simply “get what they wish for” in this world. Human beings cannot directly obtain the ends they want, and therefore always need to rely on “purposive means,” that is, technology. If we were immortal gods, then we would not need to borrow any means from outside ourselves at all.

Of course, technology is not always able to do exactly as one wishes; it can never perfectly match the end. When I do certain things, there cannot possibly happen to be just the right amount of tools and materials for me to use. Moreover, the things thus used can neither be completely annihilated immediately after use, nor can they remain forever without wear. In short, human utilization of things always leaves room, either as deficiency or as redundancy. Thus there is always something unsuitable or no longer suitable that needs to be discarded in the corresponding context of use.

As the shadow necessarily accompanying technology, “garbage” suggests that while technology helps us approach our ends, it is always also obstructed; while it brings things forth so as to let them appear, it always encounters hindrance. Hence “bringing forth” is always “unconcealment,” and there has never been some always-pristine, bright, unobstructed clearing where one can view things’ original appearance without hindrance. We always have to sweep those obstructing things to the outside of the field before things can appear smoothly on stage.

So is this “sweeping method” the same thing as Kant’s “discarding method”? Obviously not. Heidegger’s “clearing” is not aimed at once and for all establishing a universal, all-purpose, forever-determinate basic platform. No clearing can be accomplished once and for all, so that all things may appear in the same field. Heidegger’s clearing is not meant to leave behind a bare, utterly silent Cartesian space, but rather to arrange appropriate stages for different things amid the interplay of light and dark.

At the same time, the dark zone outside the field is not discarded once and for all either; on the contrary, the boundary between light and shadow is open, and we are always ready to recall other things from the dark. In fact, anything summoned into appearance was originally also in shadow, and any clearing activity is simultaneously a rearrangement of place.

Unconcealment does not mean moving some being that had originally stood ready-at-hand all by itself somewhere onto a newly opened clearing; before beings enter the field, we are precisely bringing things in from the juncture between clearing and forest, from the gap between clearing and concealment.

But once certain beings are gathered onto the clearing and set up, the clearing is no longer the same clearing as before. The beings that have been disclosed and stepped forward occupy the original clearing, becoming new veils, waiting for a new round of clearing. “That is to say, the open place among beings, that is, the clearing, is by no means a fixed stage with the curtain forever drawn back, so that beings may play their good drama upon it. Quite the contrary, the clearing comes to pass only as this double concealment. The unconcealment of beings is never a merely ready-made state.” [Heidegger (2004): 40]

Therefore Heidegger says: “The essence of truth is original strife (the opposition between clearing and concealment), and that open center is won in this original strife.” [Heidegger (2004): 41]

Light and darkness, clearing and concealment, are always locked in struggle; if either side overwhelms the other, people fall into confusion. Complete brightness and complete darkness are equally blinding. Moreover, excessive brightness may make one dizzy, causing one to shut one’s eyes and refuse to look, or to see and yet not see. By contrast, concealment “may give what exists in possibility; darkness refuses visibility, yet it can likewise preserve vision: in darkness we see the stars” [Heidegger (2008): 55].

4. Seamless Gestell

Since the essence of truth is the “strife” of light and shadow, technology as the occurrence of truth carries this struggle. Every technology is both a kind of unconcealment and a kind of concealment; while technology illuminates certain things, it always sweeps others into darkness.

So the question is: what is different about modern technology? Isn’t it also a mode of the happening of truth? Is it not gathering and clearing?

Indeed it is. Modern technology “is also a mode of unconcealment” [Heidegger (2001): 12]. Just as the shadows seen by the prisoners in Plato’s cave are also “unconcealed” for them, that does not mean people therefore need not be liberated from bondage. “Unconcealment has levels and ranks; ‘truth’ and ‘the real’ are not the sort of thing that is, in itself, fixed and unchanging for everyone, in every horizon, universally available.” [Heidegger (2008): 32]

“Truth is neither something ready-made and beyond human beings in every case. Nor is truth in human beings as some psychological subjective thing. Rather, human beings are ‘in’ truth.” [Heidegger (2008): 73] Thus, to seek truth is to ponder one’s own situation. Through continual reflection on our situation, we may free ourselves from an initial truth and discern a higher truth. This higher truth is not a negation of the lower truth, but an understanding of its conditionality. For instance, the prisoner who breaks free from his chains and sees the candlelight, by regarding the shapes he formerly saw on the wall as shadows, comprehends the conditions under which those shapes could appear, and then understands the conditions of those conditions as well. This is precisely a repeated affirmation of the most primitive truth.

Heidegger also had no intention of negating the unconcealing power of modern technology; he does not deny that modern human beings, within the “cave” built by technology, do indeed have accurate, reliable, and genuine knowledge of the things appearing on the flat “canvas” unfolded by technology.

Precisely because these nearest truths are so clear and reliable, that is where the danger lies. Like Plato’s prisoners, modern human beings are simply unwilling to shift their gaze away from that “which has no pain, does not become an obstacle, does not bring frustration, does not produce confusion” and “which he is competent to handle” [Heidegger (2008): 35].

Modern technology certainly clears a space that is extremely clean and transparent, but the cost is that it carelessly sweeps too much out of the way. What appears in this space is by no means illusory; on the contrary, it is the clearest truth imaginable. The problem is that if we are too satisfied with this and no longer care about what science has swept into shadow, allowing the open boundary to become a permanent confinement, then that would amount to sitting in a well and gazing at the sky.

Modern technology has by no means exhausted all the ways truth happens; “science is nothing but the expansion of an already-open domain of truth, and it expands this domain by grasping and proving the correct things that manifest within it as possible and necessary” [Heidegger (2004): 49]. And how is this domain of truth opened? In modern technology, “the prevailing unconcealment is a challenging-forth (or, alternatively, a provocation). This challenging-forth makes a brutish demand on nature, demanding that nature supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” [Heidegger (2001): 12]. “We use the word ‘Gestell’ to name that challenging demand, that demand which gathers human beings together so as to order them to frame the self-unconcealing as standing-reserve.” [Heidegger (2001): 18]

So, compared with ancient technology, modern technology “clears” by means of Gestell, “gathers” by means of challenging-forth, “brings forth” by means of ordering, and replaces “summoning” with “demand.”

The key point is not environmental destruction by human beings, since ancient people also destroyed the environment; nor is the key point even the degree of interception and storage—dams intercept and store river water, but ancient people long since knew how to store river water using canals or even artificial lakes. The key point is not how great technology’s control power is, but how much room is left, how much “space for maneuver” there is in that gap between light and dark.

In Heidegger’s view, the modern age has entered the “age of the world-picture,” in which all things are presented as a flattened image, laid out before us without reservation: “‘We know something inside out’ not only means that beings are in general set before us, but also that beings … stand before us as a system. The phrase ‘in the picture’ means ‘to know something, to be prepared, to have made preparations for something.’ Where the world becomes picture, beings as a whole are determined as that for which human beings have made preparations…” [Heidegger (2004): 91].

But what we have prepared ourselves for is only that static world-picture, things appearing under the specific mode of unconcealment that is modern technology. Thus, like the prisoners in the cave, we “stray onto the wrong path,” while “stubbornly facing toward what is readily accessible” and “turning away from the mysterious” [Heidegger (2000): 226]. We are willing to face only what has long since been prepared, and thus we lose the ability to understand and respond to change.

The difference between “bringing forth” and “ordering” is that the former, at the boundary between light and shadow, in ambiguity and mystery, calls out to other things, calls out to their gifts (and thereby becomes indebted to them); whereas the latter, like a slave owner, commands the slaves to hand over what has already been requested in advance—and what is offered as tribute never exceeds the preordered design. The slave owner never hopes to see anything unexpected in the tribute; everything is already prepared, with no pain and no confusion.

Because things in the technological world are all gathered together by preordered demands, they lose their ambiguous boundaries. They have lost distance, and thus also lose genuine intimacy. The image of things is grasped so clearly that no ambiguous “gap” can be tolerated. Things no longer open onto one another or point to one another; instead they are all placed into a total, single framework. The water wheel merely carries the flowing water toward the millstone; the millstone gathers wheat and flour, linking the fields and the table… whereas the dam intercepts the whole river without reservation, and the entire flow of water is revealed without reservation as “joules” — the meaning of things has been set from the very beginning.

In the modern world all things appear as ordered installations, become sharply contoured, and no longer have shadowed places where they can “hide dirt and harbor filth.” Modern people cannot tolerate a grain of sand in their eyes; yet this is not because we have really swept away all obstruction and filled in all gaps, but only because we rely on just one technological environment to disclose things, namely modern science and technology, which takes the world as a flat image. All things not conforming to this platform are not so much swept to the margins or into the gaps as directly “buried.”

Conclusion: Instrumental Rationality That Excludes Waste

1. From Discarding to Waste

The “being” of every thing is always lodged in some relative place, and the concept of this “place” has itself been modernized. In ancient thought, a certain place was located by its “boundary”; each technique cleared out a patch of ground, and the different patches overlapped and linked with one another. What Heidegger calls the “tool-reference network” is precisely this kind of thing: no technique is isolated or insulated. The waterwheel connects the river to the mill; roads connect market towns and fields; techniques are always referring to and nesting within one another. 。

But in the modern world, just as Descartes’ “space” replaced Aristotle’s “place,” every modern technology still has its location; however, this location is no longer a place within a network of referential relations, within a certain surrounding. Rather, it seems that outside the specific technique there is a general, panoramic, image-like frame that has already “customized” the position of each thing in advance. Each thing can be separated from its environment and measured under this unified framework. Each thing acquires a kind of absolute position, and yet at the same time each thing is also placeless—that is, extracted from its corresponding surroundings.

This all-encompassing, seamless total framework is what Heidegger calls “Gestell.”

In the technological environment of antiquity, this “container” had not yet been fully sealed. Something swept out of one place would not be directly expelled beyond the whole world. What was cleared out of a given place might soon appear on stage in another, neighboring context. Even if it did indeed enter into obscurity, it would be hiding in the cracks between places, waiting at any moment to be summoned back.

These scattered cracks did not join together to form a unified place; this is why the general concept of garbage always comes into being after the vocabulary for discarded things in specific contexts. Even when a concept is formed to subsume the things swept into these cracks, such a concept often, like the concepts of “mediocre people” or “bad people,” remains relatively vague and broad.

In modern times, however, technology constitutes a unified Gestell that leaves no “room to spare.” The light of modern science shines everywhere; all shadows and obscurities are flattened out, allowing no cracks in which dirt and filth may hide. It is only then that what is swept out of Gestell is subsumed as “the non-set.”

The development of the concept of “garbage” is indeed like this: from the specific to the general.

In the Modern Chinese Dictionary, “garbage” means “waste, useless, or filthy and broken things,” while in English the corresponding words include garbage, rubbish, refuse, trash, and so on, all of which roughly revolve around the meanings of “discarded” and “useless.”

The present meaning of the word garbage is universal, referring to refuse in the general sense rather than refuse in a particular context. But all of these words developed out of specific contexts. For example, the Chinese word “laji” originally referred specifically to clods of earth, garbage referred specifically to animal entrails, and rubbish was originally related to rubble.

As mentioned earlier, in light of human concreteness, “discarding” is unavoidable in human technical activity. Human use of things always leaves room to spare: there is always something lacking or something excessive, and thus always something that no longer fits, or never fit in the first place, which needs to be removed in the relevant context of use.

So after a house is built, the surplus rubble must necessarily be cleared away; when roasting chicken or duck, the entrails and other scraps must also be thrown out. Precisely because of the characteristic of these things as “being thrown away,” the specialized concepts used to designate these particular thrown-away things evolved into words for general “waste”: that is, garbage.

2. Homelessness

What is the big deal about grouping together waste slag, waste firewood, waste cloth, waste scraps, and all kinds of things discarded in specific circumstances, and giving them a common name? To take an analogy: people are also discarded and left unused in all kinds of situations. Those who fail the university entrance exam are called unsuccessful applicants; those who do not find work are called the unemployed; those who are laid off are called the downsized; those who are dumped by their partners are called the heartbroken… But do we need to group all these people together and give them a common name, say “waste people,” and then build waste-people bins, waste-people trucks, waste-people dumps, waste-people recycling stations, and so on, to house this class of people separately?

Some thing or some person will always be “unfit” in certain situations, even “harmful”; that is perfectly natural. But to group all the unfit together and process them collectively is an entirely different matter. The act of “discarding” certainly always exists, and the acts of discarding under different environments do indeed share a similar structure: some thing is abandoned because it does not fit the relevant use. But the existence of this common structure does not mean that we can group all the discarded things in every act of discarding into a single class. Such classification contains more meaning than that. For example, we may say that there are “opponents” in various concrete scenes, but to reduce all opponents to “reactionaries” is not merely a verbal game; it may well mean that a hard and forceful social order has begun to operate.

Rubble is discarded as rubble in construction activities; scraps are discarded as scraps in cooking activities. They are not discarded as general “garbage.” And today, as Professor Tian Song has said [田松（2011）], when we throw something into the garbage bin, it immediately becomes “garbage.” It is severed from its own category and becomes a new kind of thing, or rather a thing without category, becoming the “non-set.”

Of course, we can still go on to do “garbage sorting,” but that is like distinguishing a “black fifth category” within the “reactionaries” and formulating different “transformation” (recycling) plans. That is already something operating under a new order.

From “things discarded” in specific contexts to “garbage” in the general sense; from “unfit” relative to a specific use to “useless” or “worthless” in the general sense—this universalization of meaning is not a matter of course. In fact, the word “value” has also undergone a similar process of universalization. In Western languages it originally meant more often “worthy of,” whereas today it seems to have become a universal standard that every thing inherently possesses.

Compare the following three statements: “making wood burn” — “wood is combustible” — “wood has phlogiston.” Are these three statements equivalent? “Making wood burn” is a concrete action; the word “making” points to the environment in which this action takes place and to the presence of the person who lights the fire. Wood can be made to burn in air, but if you put it in water it will not burn. “Wood is combustible,” however, does not clearly indicate the background conditions on which wood’s burning depends. In fact, wood can only be made to burn in certain specific environments (with oxygen), at specific temperatures, humidity, and pressure, and only if it is ignited; the statement “wood is combustible” omits all of these default conditions. Omission is not wrong, but if one says too much, there is obviously a danger of causing people to ignore and forget these background conditions. The phlogiston theory, by contrast, leaves aside the background conditions entirely and attributes the possibility of combustion to certain “things” contained in the wood itself. The evolution of ethics from virtue ethics to value theory is, in fact, intentionally or unintentionally a way of ignoring background and contextual factors, as if after separating a person or thing from its context there still remained some absolute inner or absolute outer standard of measurement.

In this brightly lit world-picture, “garbage” has certainly been stripped of its place, but things that have not yet become garbage have likewise become “homeless.”

“Home” provides a kind of neighboring surrounding, a surrounding that is neither infinitely large, so as to encompass all things (except garbage), nor infinitely small, so that it can contain only insulated individuals. Such a surrounding can only be arranged within the network of places linked by segmented rings, and is difficult to arrange within an absolutely flattened space-time.

Heidegger’s “homelessness” of modern human beings is precisely this. Heidegger says that “homelessness… is the sign of the forgetting of Being.” This sounds abstruse, but the meaning is not hard to understand. Heidegger holds that modern philosophy mistakes beings for Being, and thereby forgets Being. What are called “beings,” in fact, are the roles that appear in unconcealment; what is called the “being of beings” is precisely the “field” in which such appearances take place. Thus the state of homelessness is what I said earlier: the flattening of the gaps, the dissolution of relative places into absolute space-time.

What survives under Gestell are only two “fields”: one is the omnipresent and all-encompassing “field” revealed by modern science, and the other is the “garbage dump” into which everything cleared away is buried.

Things lose their place, and people lose their position. Homeless people cannot find a scale of appropriate size to situate themselves, and thus become either infinitely tiny or infinitely inflated. In the first case, they turn themselves into a tiny screw within the whole social system and devote themselves selflessly; in the second, they take themselves as the whole meaning of the world and seek selfish pleasure. Hence extreme collectivism and extreme individualism are both consequences of modernity.

Evolution theory is distorted into “the survival of the fittest,” and this logic justifies the operation of the entire modern order. Another way of saying “the survival of the fittest” is: “either existence, or garbage.”

3. Garbage Dumps and Concentration Camps

Nazi concentration camps were nothing more than human garbage dumps, and garbage dumps are concentration camps for things. Their basic logic is to eliminate useless or harmful things with maximum efficiency. Chinese reeducation-through-labor camps are a little more advanced: they do not simply bury things and be done with it, but instead operate as garbage recycling stations. But this is by no means an improvement to be happy about.

Scholars have long reflected deeply on the occurrence of the Holocaust. In Modernity and the Holocaust [鲍曼（2011）], Bauman reveals that the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews was neither an accidental aberration nor yet another repetition of the countless tragic killings in history, but a possibility inherent in modernity itself. “It was precisely the spirit of instrumental rationality and the modern bureaucratic forms that institutionalized it that made solutions such as the Holocaust not only possible, but especially ‘rational.’” [鲍曼（2011）：25]

What made the Nazi Holocaust possible was also what made modern garbage landfills possible.

First, the Holocaust was regarded as one solution to a social problem.

In the eyes of modern people, “society” is “regarded as an object of management, as a collection of many ‘problems’ that urgently need to be solved, as a kind of ‘nature’ that needs to be ‘controlled,’ ‘mastered,’ and ‘improved’ or ‘reshaped’.” Society is like a “garden,” and through horticultural work, people “divide plants into ‘cultivated plants’ that need care and weeds that ought to be cut down” [鲍曼（2011）：25].

What needs to be “cut down” is not because it is ugly or sinful, but because it is “uncontrollable.” “In a modern society that is distinctive in its ambition for self-control and self-management, racism nonetheless proclaims the existence of a certain group of people who stubbornly and irredeemably resist all control and are unaffected by any effort at improvement.” [鲍曼（2011）：88]

What the Nazis used was the method of “division — discard”: they “divided human life into valuable life and worthless life; valuable life would receive painstaking cultivation and be given ‘living space,’ while worthless life would be ‘kept at a distance,’ or exterminated.” [鲍曼（2011）：91]

The Jews’ tragic fate was not so much because they were regarded as bad people, evil people, or enemies, but because they were regarded as “persistent things”—either each in his or her own proper place, or homeless; either existence, or garbage.

4. No One Is Responsible

What the Jews encountered in Germany was less hatred than indifference. Bauman repeatedly reminds us that the participants who helped build the machinery of the Holocaust were for the most part not bloodthirsty monsters; they were rational, calm, orderly, and diligent in carrying out their duties at their respective posts. The actual executors who directly shot Jews or released poison gas into the gas chambers were, after all, only a tiny minority, and the contribution of this tiny group of petty underlings to the whole Holocaust was also insignificant. In more of the links, what participants did was nothing more than sort files, design plans, transport personnel, lay pipes, just like the most ordinary workers and civil servants… “Did they know the ultimate result of those activities that seemed harmless on the surface? — Such knowledge could at most exist in the remotest depths of their thoughts.” [鲍曼（2011）：33]

When ancient people used technology, the direct object of action was often not far away, and the agent could easily distinguish between striking a nail with a hammer and striking another person’s head with a hammer. Yet modern technology is enclosed into huge systems, and before each person the technological system makes them a tiny screw; they are only responsible for a small, clear, and definite section of the assembly line. They need only wait for things that have already been arranged to come before them in the already arranged manner, and then carry out the predetermined action. Under the whole technological system, everything is neat and orderly, with no ambiguity whatsoever.

But in the end, who is responsible for the result? A factory assembly line may still have a legal representative to be found, but the whole modern technological system often cannot find that one overall person in charge.

The countless intermediate links on the assembly line block the workers’ view, preventing them from facing the final result directly. But does that mean they bear no responsibility at all? In fact, their fault does not lie in choosing the wrong action, but in “not choosing.” They entrust truth to an already existing order, do not care about the “edges” that cannot be grasped at a glance, and do not mind what lies beyond their control. Thus they can evade responsibility after the Holocaust, because they had never assumed any responsibility beyond completing their assigned work in the first place.

The tragedy of the Holocaust has long since come to an end, but its logic has not been broken. People simply direct the blame for the Holocaust toward “racial discrimination” and try to use “equality” to prevent tragedy. Once the difference between good grass and weeds is denied, the work of uprooting weeds naturally no longer stands.

But the problem is: suppose there really are obvious weeds—what then? For instance, suppose we truly discovered significant evidence proving that Black people are inherently stupider, worse, or more inclined to cause trouble; then how would we treat them?

Contemporary people simply do not consider such “politically incorrect” questions. Even if I merely mention it here as a fictional hypothesis, I may perhaps be cursed by some readers. But in the end, they have not really solved this problem; they have merely avoided it. Fundamentally, the modern way of dealing with “weeds” has never changed: isolation, expulsion, extermination.

Because equality is compulsorily mandated, the methods of isolation, expulsion, and extermination are indeed applied less and less to human beings. But what about nonhuman beings? For example, when it comes to “pests”? The Nazi method is still the most “rational” answer. For example, today scientists are working to use genetic engineering to drive mosquitoes to extinction.

When directed at “garbage,” the logic of the Holocaust is extended in its most complete and forceful form. Isolation, landfilling, and incineration have always been the fate of garbage. As for the problem of pollution caused by garbage, no one is responsible for it. Although everyone, at their respective posts, is adding their own bricks and mortar to the production of garbage, very few people care about its ultimate fate.

Of course, many people do not obey order, such as by littering carelessly; but the ones who contribute the most to the final garbage pollution are precisely those who obey order, those who honestly participate in production and consumption, those who lawfully and dutifully throw garbage into the trash bin. Countless acts of obedience to order ultimately produce countless piles of chaotic, out-of-control garbage.

No one is responsible for this, and neither can Plato be. Philosophers, too, cannot lead people to control the situation and get out of the predicament. But philosophy at least helps us draw our gaze away from what is bright and safe before our eyes, to attend to the obscure places, and to understand our situation.

References

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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.

Tagstechnology media Heidegger phenomenology environment modernity paper ontology Stiegler Tian Song garbage finitude