This is the postdoctoral exit report I did together with Teacher Tian Song. To be honest, it was done somewhat half-heartedly; many interesting threads were not able to be developed in depth. But the question itself should still be a pretty good one.
First let me explain the title. In the article I did not explicitly spell out what this title meant, and some of the wording may well have caused misunderstanding. I only noticed this omission after seeing Teacher Wu Tong’s review comments, so my live report began with a remedial explanation.
My “The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage” obviously imitates Bert’s work The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, which was my introductory book in the history of scientific thought. What dissatisfied Bert was that the traditional narrative of philosophy’s history omitted Newton, while the traditional narrative of the history of science did not take philosophy seriously; and Bert believed that the scientific revolution in modern physics and the epistemological turn in modern philosophy had to be examined in connection with one another, so he tried to investigate the metaphysical foundations of physics.
And my title likewise expresses, in a Bert-like way, this idea: the tradition of philosophical history has neglected the problem of garbage, while people who care about garbage have not pursued philosophical history, and I want to connect philosophical history with garbage.
But readers may have a question: Bert was talking about “physical science” itself as something conceptual, whereas what I am talking about is “garbage,” something concrete. So can one also speak of the “philosophical foundations” of concrete, man-made things?
In fact, if we replace the words garbage and metaphysics with some other artifact and some other idea, we can very easily discover that we really can legitimately talk about the conceptual foundations of a certain kind of artifact. For example, we can talk about the electromagnetic foundations of mobile phones, the thermodynamic foundations of internal-combustion engines, the historical knowledge behind a certain mural, the political foundations of the Forbidden City, and so on.
It is obvious that no artifact appears out of nowhere. Since human beings know how to make and use it in a particular way, this means that for any artifact, its existence always implies that we have already made certain preparations at the conceptual level.
So the reason we feel that the phrase “the metaphysical foundations of garbage” is somehow jarring is not that garbage is an artifact, but that garbage as an artifact seems to have too little “technical content”; such a lowly thing seems as if it requires no lofty ideas in order to be made, whereas metaphysics is precisely the most “high-end” layer among all ideas. Garbage, something so commonplace, actually requires such a “sophisticated” precondition, and so we feel the dissonance.
And this sense of dissonance is precisely what I am trying to unravel. The reason it seems so ill-fitting with garbage is not that metaphysics is really that noble, but rather because of the shortcomings of metaphysics itself. The profound connection between garbage and metaphysics has been deliberately or inadvertently concealed by metaphysics itself.
In fact, modern garbage can be produced by people in the corresponding way, or can be used by people in the corresponding way (thrown into a trash can), and none of this is self-evident. The conceptual preparation required behind it is no less than that required for airplanes and cannons. The ancients could not produce garbage, not merely because they lacked the corresponding technical means, but because their conceptual world did not leave garbage a corresponding place; thus even if we put “garbage” in front of them, they would not be able to “recognize” it.
For example, we can look at the scene in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy [play 3 minutes of the film clip], where one day a Bushman (San) tribe picks up a Coke bottle discarded by a pilot. Clearly, they did not regard it as “garbage”; instead, they first took it to be a gift from the gods. At first it is played with like a toy, then admired like a work of art, and only gradually are some practical uses discovered. From beginning to end, the bottle is out of joint with their lifeworld, unable to find an appropriate place. In the end, when it seems about to destroy their traditional way of life and social relations, the wise among the tribe finally realize that it should be thrown away. But it is still not discarded as garbage; rather, it is taken to be an “evil thing.” Then we find that they have not found an appropriate way to dispose of things. The bottle is first thrown into the air—returned to whence it came—and then buried in the ground (later dug up by wild beasts and taken back by children). Finally, a member of the tribe decides to take it to the “end of the world,” where, in the course of the long journey, he comes into contact with other modern people, and this forms the plot of the rest of the film. By the end of the film, he has finally found the end of the world and completed the mission of disposal—it is a cliff, not a trash can.
This film sequence has many implications for the history of technology, which I will not dwell on here. I only want to make one point: recognizing garbage as garbage is not a simple matter. When we casually toss away a Coke bottle, we may not realize that this act requires a great deal of conceptual sedimentation before it can be done.
First, we need to regard certain things as useless waste; this is extremely difficult. We notice that the Coke bottle discarded by modern people still contains infinite possibilities for use in the eyes of “primitive” people. Second, we need to find garbage an appropriate resting place, namely the “end of the world,” but for primitive people, every place around them is meaningful and is part of their lifeworld. Although they know how to bury things, once they decide to get rid of something completely, they also know that burying it nearby is not responsible enough. Their lifeworld has no “end”; they believe the end of the world is far away. For modern people, however, the trash can is his “end of the world.” Once we throw something into the trash can, we suppose that we have gotten rid of it.
So the starting point of my research is to ask: when we are able to casually toss a bag of trash into a roadside trash can, what has actually already been prepared at the conceptual level? How is this possible? In this regard, I of course was inspired by Teacher Tian Song. He pointed to the historical nature of the concept of “garbage,” pointing out that the way modern people produce and deal with garbage is not self-evident, but has its historical background.
In Teacher Tian’s view, the most primary source of modern garbage is industrial civilization, or modern technology. I agree with this, but modern technology likewise has its conceptual preconditions, so I specifically advanced Teacher Tian’s work from the conceptual level.
Regarding the conceptual preconditions of modern technology, Heidegger and the philosophy of technology thinkers influenced by him have long carried out profound investigations. Heidegger said that modern technology is “completed metaphysics,” and thus he attempted to trace the roots of modernity and the possibility of transcendence from the entire metaphysical tradition.
And my work is in fact an extension or completion of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology—if modern technology is the realization of metaphysics, then modern garbage is the by-product that necessarily accompanies this metaphysics, and the existence of garbage in turn reveals that this so-called “completion” or “realization” has always been merely an illusion. We can “complete” the “clarification” of a room by sweeping “garbage” outside, but we can never realize the clarification of the whole world in the same way, and that is precisely what traditional metaphysics attempted to accomplish.
To investigate the metaphysical foundations of garbage is, on the one hand, to understand the roots of the garbage problem, and on the other hand, to understand where metaphysics goes astray.
When we think from the conceptual level about how “garbage” is possible, we notice that the concept of garbage is peculiar. It seems to refer to a set of things, but it is very hard to define it in something like a “genus and differentia” form. The category “garbage” differs from the “sets” of things like “clothes” and “food.” “Garbage” does not seem to be grouped together because its members share some common function or typical feature. This set is more like a “non-set.” Each item of garbage originally belonged to some “set”—for example, “clothes” or “food”—but is ultimately discarded for different reasons, thereby leaving its original set. “Garbage” is the belonging of that which has no belonging.
Teacher Tian points out that anything can be garbage, so long as it is thrown into the “trash can”; the moment it enters, it becomes garbage. But obviously, people do not first recognize something as garbage merely because it is in the trash can. Before we actually carry out the act of throwing away garbage, we have already recognized garbage as something that ought to be discarded, and so we take the trash can to be the proper place for these things. Teacher Tian says: “Various kinds of garbage being in the trash can at the same time is intuitively a set, but they are not simply a set because they are in the same can; in people’s minds they have already been set together in advance. The trash can is the materialization of the concept of ‘discarding.’”
The concept of “discarding” is easy to understand. It can refer to a series of formally similar acts, but the commonality of discarding behavior does not necessarily mean that the discarded things can then, as a matter of course, be classified into one category. In fact, the behaviors opposite to “discarding,” such as “receiving” and “retaining,” do not seem to have noun forms like “waste matter,” let alone behaviors like “hitting” or “stroking”; the objects those behaviors point to are not automatically unified by some concept.
When a thing is severed from its original determinacy and is abandoned and excluded from its original “use,” that does not mean it must necessarily become “without belonging.” For example, a shabby piece of clothing may become cloth, a rag, fuel, papermaking material, and so on; leftover food may become swill or dog food. Different things often have different destinations and do not necessarily converge into what is called “garbage.”
So what makes garbage possible is not just the act of “discarding,” but also a distinctive concept and perspective that allows “garbage” to be distinguished from all kinds of beings. In a certain sense, this concept must even precede the specific act of discarding, because when we decide to discard something, it has already been distinguished as “garbage.” Abandoning a piece of clothing and turning it into a rag, and throwing a piece of clothing into the trash can, are two different acts. Modern urban people who are familiar with the concept of garbage are more likely to choose the latter.
Nothing is born garbage, but nothing cannot be garbage either. Garbage as garbage does not depend on its physical structure, but on people’s intentional structure. We need a “phenomenological reduction” of the phenomenon of garbage.
It should be noted that when we have already subsumed the general category of discarded things under the concept of “garbage,” and then look back, we will find that garbage “has existed since ancient times,” because of course the ancients also discarded things. But this is just like saying that ancient China also had “science”: it may not be wrong, but it still needs further specification. In the broad sense, if science means knowledge in a general sense, then there is science in ancient and modern times, in China and abroad; but in the narrow sense, modern science, which emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is indeed something new.
The “technology” discussed by “philosophy of technology” also generally has two meanings. One is technology in the broad sense, including the making and use of various artifacts, and also covering nonmaterial meanings such as language technology, bodily technology, social technology, and so on. “Technology” in this sense is as old as humankind; no human way of life can do without technology, and in a certain sense technology is human nature itself.
The other layer is technology in the narrow sense, referring specifically to modern technology in the context of industrial civilization. This technology is vastly different from the arts and crafts of the ancients. On the one hand, its powerful force seeks to conquer nature; on the other hand, it in turn governs human society. The “technological rationality” or “technological society” that accompanies industrial civilization has become the object of scholars’ adoration or criticism.
Philosophy of technology therefore also has two corresponding faces: one starts from technology and reflects on human nature; the other starts from technology and criticizes modernity. But these two faces are not entirely unrelated, because modern technology, on the one hand, has its particularity, and on the other hand, it has after all developed out of ancient technology.
A similar twofold meaning also applies to “garbage”: garbage, too, is either as old as technology or as young as technology. If we say that the stone tools and pottery of primitive people are “technology,” then they must also have discarded broken stone tools and shattered pottery, and these can be said to be “garbage.” But if we say that “technology” only became salient in modern industrial society, then “garbage” also became salient almost at the same time. Just like the two faces of philosophy of technology, we can also investigate garbage on two levels: first, garbage in the broad sense, which anyone and even any living creature must live alongside; second, garbage in the narrow sense, which is a product of modernity and accompanies modern technology.
In what sense can we say that “garbage has existed since ancient times”? William Rathje, one of the initiators of the “Garbage Project,” was an archaeologist famous for his study of Mayan culture, and he discovered that archaeology is essentially the search for information in the “garbage” of the ancients. Most of the things we excavate from ruins (apart from tombs and the like) are things discarded by the ancients. Broken pottery shards, food scraps, and even fossilized feces that ancient people cast aside as if they were something foul, can all make modern archaeologists feel as if they have found a treasure, because these discarded objects contain countless pieces of information about the lifeworld of the ancients. If that is so, doesn’t modern garbage likewise contain countless pieces of information about modern life? So Rathje launched the “Garbage Project,” collecting the garbage of modern people and studying it in an archaeological way.
What Rathje saw was the commonality of garbage across ancient and modern times: things discarded in human activity. In this sense, garbage is as ancient as humankind.
We say that making tools is the mark of human beings (hominid animals), and “garbage” is almost the inevitable by-product of “tools.” For human beings are not omnipotent gods, and the materials used in human making are not eternal, imperishable things of the realm of ideas. Thus any human work is finite; it cannot, once made, be used forever, and is destined to decay. Therefore the making of artifacts is necessarily accompanied by the discarding of artifacts. In this sense, the history of garbage is as old as the history of technology. If we also consider food waste and excrement, given that the basic characteristic of life is metabolism, then “garbage” in the sense of metabolic products is even as ancient as life itself.
Of course, for ancient peoples, garbage was not yet a prominent problem. Hunter-gatherers had no fixed dwelling, and before they had piled up garbage around their shelters, they would already have moved on. In addition, the garbage produced by primitive agricultural life was very little, and could easily be recycled or dissipated into the natural environment. Only with the emergence of cities did garbage become a problem requiring special handling. Every city had its own way of dealing with garbage, and the ways of dealing with garbage, from ancient times to the present, seem not to have changed much. As Rathje put it, “For thousands of years, the ways humans have dealt with garbage have shown essentially no novelty. The basic methods of garbage disposal are four… dumping, incineration, recycling, and source reduction.”
Garbage has certainly existed since ancient times, but is there only a difference of degree and scale between the garbage faced by ancient people and the garbage problem of modern people? If that were all, then perhaps we would not need to feel worried about the garbage problem, because this would simply be the inevitable result of civilizational prosperity. Ancient people dug a small pit to dump garbage into; modern people merely need to dig the pit a little larger—is that all?
Or is the garbage problem itself also modern, and modern people’s encounter with a more severe garbage problem is not necessarily due merely to the fact that there is more garbage? Have the role that garbage plays in the human lifeworld, and the ideas through which people view garbage, also changed?
In fact, people’s ideas about “garbage” are related to their ideas about “tools” or “value,” and further to the general idea of “things.” If garbage is “useless stuff,” then it is precisely the counterpart of tools or technology as “useful stuff.” Therefore the modernity of garbage 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 way of life and value orientation among modern people. “Durability” is no longer the main standard for measuring the value of artifacts; instead, ideas such as “disposable” and “constant renewal” increasingly become fashionable. For the sake of profit, producers, and for the sake of fashion, consumers often actively shorten the lifespan of things, even setting standards such as “shelf life” and “service life,” forcibly discarding things that are still functional in order to maintain a stable “production cycle.”
When modern people treat many things as garbage and discard them, it is often because they are “out of date” rather than “rotted.” An expired food may still be delicious; a building beyond its service life may still be solid and reliable. The reason they are discarded is simply that they have slipped beyond human control and become “unsafe.”
What is involved here is not just so-called consumer attitudes, but also people’s general view of technical objects or beings in general. The concept of “shelf life” reflects the demand for “advance control”: people do not want to wait in ambiguity and anxiety as things gradually slip out of control; they always hope to precisely “preset” every thing, including its use and lifespan. When something begins to slip out of control, putting it into the trash can is the correct choice.
“Decay” is a fate that neither ancient technology nor modern technology can escape. The difference lies in this: the “fate” faced by ancient people was impermanence, whereas modern people attempt to seize control of fate in advance—if things cannot be made imperishable, then discard them before they decay. So long as chaos and uncertainty are thrown into the trash can, the lifeworld will become orderly.
This is exactly Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology. In his view, modern technology, like ancient technology, is also a “way of unconcealment of truth,” and the distinctive way of unconcealment in modern technology is “challenging-forth”: things are “ordered up” or “set upon” as “standing-reserve” (bestand), and the essence of modern technology is “enframing” (Gestell, also translated as “the frame”).
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 mutually conditioning, and arise together.
Modern technology makes everything into “standing-reserve,” but this is, after all, the delusion of an overweening humanity. Modern technology has not truly freed human beings from the fate of impermanence, nor made them gods who rule over everything. Rather, modern technology merely buries everything that slips free of order and control in the “dump,” sweeping it out of modern people’s sight, and thus makes possible this reality in which all things appear as “standing-reserve.”
Here, and in some parts of the later chapters, I am trying to introduce the concept of waste in order to “translate” certain key ideas in Heidegger. For example, in the end, in Chapter Four, I translate Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung as “clearance” (the English translation is clearing; the Chinese translation is usually rendered as 澄明 or 林中空地). Time is limited, so I will not go into detail here.
Let me say a little more here: I use Heidegger’s concept of “world picture” to identify the crucial misstep of Western metaphysics.
As for the flaw in traditional metaphysics, the popular Marxist philosophy textbooks in China long ago reached a conclusion: namely, that it looks at things from the standpoint of “isolation, stasis, and one-sidedness.” Of course, that conclusion is extremely simplistic, but if one merely wants a caricatured summary, these three labels are not entirely off the mark.
“Isolation” means a lack of horizontal connections; “one-sidedness” means a lack of vertical depth; and “stasis” means a lack of temporal flow. Taken together, “isolated, static, and one-sided” simply refers 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 objective world unfolds before the subject’s eyes like a picture. This is what Heidegger calls “the age of the world picture.” As he says: “The world picture does not change from a former medieval world picture into a modern world picture; rather, the fact that the world becomes picture at all marks the essence of the modern age.”
In such a world picture, every being is an already-given “X” — before we discuss the specific proposition “X is P,” beings within the world are already grasped as isolated, static, one-sided X’s. This is the basic feature of modern metaphysics.
What exactly “metaphysics” is has always been a matter of competing views, but in essence it is nothing more than the inquiry into the question of “what-ness.” Before we discuss what something “is,” it must first “be”; metaphysics inquires into the preconditions that make concrete knowledge or experience possible.
In the eyes of world-picture metaphysics, concrete knowledge or experience consists of propositions of the form “X is P,” and its metaphysical premise is precisely this prior grasp of things as “X.” In fact, the early analytic philosophers who opposed metaphysics did not escape this metaphysics at all; rather, they became its most extreme expression. When they grasped things as X, time as T, or properties as P through formal language, they were already firmly standing on the basis of this metaphysics. Formal language tries to sweep away the dark and filthy waste in human language, and tries to grasp this world with a spotless linguistic system. This ideal is doomed to fail, because waste can never be swept outside the world.
Of course, like shallow textbooks, my summary here of the features of traditional metaphysics is also caricatured. In fact, perhaps no particular philosopher ever held such a view exactly. This kind of “metaphysics” is not so much distilled from the statements of individual philosophers as it is inferred backward from the consequence of the modern technological world that has already become reality. This metaphysics provided the intellectual foundation for modern technology, and was also bolstered by modern technology’s continuing success in conquest and control. But the increasingly severe waste problem reveals that modern technology’s so-called success is merely a temporary illusion, and the world promised by this metaphysics is ultimately nothing but a castle in the air.
It is worth noting that when we raise doubts about or criticize the metaphysical basis of modern technology or modern science, this does not mean that we deny the validity of modern technology and modern science. The key issue is not what has been won through such metaphysics, but what has been excluded and obscured by it.
If “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.
So Wu Guosheng emphasizes: “The so-called world picture does not mean pictorializing the world; rather, it means that the world as a whole fundamentally exists in the mode of picture.”
Where is the difference? Let us make an analogy: modern technology is like photography, striving to capture and print the “pictures” of the world. If we merely regard these pictures as one of the methods for understanding and depicting the world, then this method is indeed effective. But if we regard these pictures as the world itself, take the outline that finally appears clearly in the picture as the essence of things, and refuse to acknowledge any dimension that cannot be captured by the picture, then this “photography” is no longer merely a method, but has become “metaphysics.”
As a method, or rather as a “medium” through which we know the world, “pictorialization” itself is effective. For example, we can point to a photograph and identify it by saying: “This is Zhang San.” We can talk about all sorts of characteristics of Zhang San on the basis of a picture. Through advanced pictorial media, such as a high-definition camera, the photo captured may clearly display various details of “Zhang San,” in finer detail than what the naked eye can see, and with greater objectivity and reproducibility — countless people in different times and places cannot possibly deal with Zhang San in the same way at the same moment, but they can all face the same photograph, so talking by pointing to the photo is always clearer and more effective than talking by pointing to Zhang San himself. In addition, photography allows more quantitative analysis, such as the ratio of the person’s head to body, and so on.
When we say that science captures the world as a picture, we must admit that this capture is effective. What we speak of by pointing to this picture is indeed “the world.” Even when we ask what the world “is,” we can properly hold up its “photo” and say: “There — this is what the world looks like.” It is like when you ask me who Zhang San is, I can take out Zhang San’s photo and point it out to you: “This person is Zhang San.”
In these cases, it is not that there are two Zhang Sans — a “Zhang San in the photo” and a “real Zhang San” — somehow linked together by some mysterious connection. Rather, what appears in the photo “is” that real Zhang San.
But the problem is that the medium of photography is not the only, nor the supreme, way. We 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; this story “is” Zhang San. Here, “being Zhang San” is no more “being” or “not being” than a certain photograph’s “being Zhang San.” If we designate one particular form of expression as the only or the fundamental form, and thereby ignore and deny other rich forms, that is where the danger lies.
Apart from mediating identifications such as photography and storytelling, is there a most original and most essential way in which things present what they are? Is it that when I “directly” look with the “naked eye,” that is more “real” than looking through a photograph? In fact, when the naked eye looks directly, it is always within a corresponding environment; its background and context affect how things present themselves to the naked eye. That is to say, “seeing with the naked eye” is also mediated or environmental; looking with the naked eye is not necessarily more complete or more one-sided than a photograph. You look at Zhang San at work and may never imagine what he is like in family life; you look at Zhang San when he is in a good mood and may never imagine what he is like when he loses his temper. Any actual act of “seeing” is one-sided and limited.
The mistake of traditional metaphysics does not lie in its support for one particular way of knowing, but in its exclusion of other ways of knowing. The key issue is not what has been won through such metaphysics, but what has been excluded and obscured by it. And this obscuration does not begin in modern times; its roots can already be found in Plato. We can see that the Western metaphysical tradition represented by Plato, from the very beginning, explicitly made a cut in the world or in knowledge: dividing the imperishable from the perishable. So, the problem with such metaphysics lies less in its pursuit of the imperishable than in its rejection of perishability.
In short, Plato in fact divides knowledge or being into two kinds: the imperishable and the perishable. The former is worth pursuing; the latter must be discarded. The former is essence; the latter is “waste.”
In Plato’s dichotomy, the entire real world is placed under the category of the “perishable.” The human body and technological creations are both “waste” that should be thrown away on the path toward truth. But modern philosophy abolished the division between two worlds, and yet modern people still try to bring the distinction between the imperishable and the perishable into this single real world. The empiricists’ distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities is one such scheme — some experiences or kinds of knowledge (for example, those concerning shape or extension) are certain and eternal, while others (for example, those concerning color, fragrance, and taste) are ambiguous and changeable. The human body and the emotions remained outside the philosopher’s field of vision until the more recent turn in Continental philosophy.
What traditional metaphysics has sought has always been what is seen by the eye of the imperishable soul — whether this “soul” is located in the world of Ideas, in heaven, or deep within the mysterious pineal gland, this pure soul is out of keeping with the real world. Traditional metaphysics’ aversion to perishability is, in essence, an evasion of death, a turning away from the “facticity” or “finitude” of the “mortal.”
Traditional philosophy believes that only eternal things are meaningful; yet a state of eternal stasis outside time strips everything of meaning. In infinite eternity, everything will happen or nothing will happen, so what is there worth pursuing? Even the act of “pursuit” itself is impossible in the world of Ideas.
Facing up to human perishability does not mean denying the pursuit of immortality. On the contrary, the longing for immortality, like any human wish or dream, is rooted in human finitude. The more clearly one recognizes the perishability of the world, the more one longs for immortality, and this longing for immortality drives all kinds of human creative action — such as striving for achievement and fame so as to live forever in the history books, or creating immortal literary or artistic works.
Perishability is precisely the source of meaning, because of human finitude, because of the finitude of things. We cannot have our wishes fulfilled just by thinking about them; we cannot complete everything at once. Thus we need action, we need creation, we need choice and pursuit.
To pursue immortality does not mean to abhor one’s own perishability; looking up at the sky does not necessarily mean turning a blind eye to the earth. It is like pursuing women does not mean abhorring the fact that one is a man. Because of our own perishability, human beings yearn for immortality, but this yearning should not, in turn, cause one to lose oneself.
The next three chapters are in fact all material from my doctoral dissertation. Here I reintroduced them with special emphasis on the connotations of “waste.” Since this is a retelling, I grew somewhat lax in refining the wording and logic, so the argumentative effect may not be very good. I will not say much more here. Let me just read the concluding section directly.【读结语】
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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