A heap of waste

Heraclitus wrote:
σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος.
The website “The fragments of Heraclitus”, where I copied this quotation, translates this text this way (see here):

“The most beautiful universe is (a) pouring out (of) sweepings at random.”

In a note it says that “The text for this fragment is very doubtful and should be handled extremely carefully”, and it explains why. Therefore, “with the text being such a problem to start with, any significant information pulled from this fragment will have to be conjecture.”

Nevertheless, I want to give it an interpretation. For this, I’ll use my Dutch edition of Heraclitus’ words (see Sources below). Here, the text quoted has been translated by Ben Schomakers in a somewhat different way (in which, just like in the translation above “φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος”, i.e. “Heraclitos says” has been ignored). Re-translated into English it reads:

“a heap of waste arbitrarily swept together
the most beautiful order”

Although translations by different translators are often different, in this case the difference is remarkable. However, I am not in the position to judge which translation or interpretation of Heraclitus’ words is best. My Greek has become rusty through the years and I am not a Heraclitus specialist. Anyway, Schomakers’ translation is in keeping with other translations I found elsewhere on the internet (for instance here (see #40), here (see #124) and a few more), so I’ll follow Schomakers’ version.
In a first interpretation, I think, one can take the text as it is: simple, banal things or events of everyday life are beautiful. Or: simple, banal things or events of everyday life are also beautiful. It is one reason (though not the main reason) why I take pictures of ordinary objects found on the street. See for example here on my photo website: Left or lost.
But let me look at the interpretation of Ben Schomakers’ of Heraclitus’ words. Following Schomakers, one interpretation of this text could say that the Greek philosopher wants to tell us that the cosmos has no order or structure. The cosmos is not more than a hotchpotch of things swept together. According to Schomakers, this interpretation of what Heraclitus says is unlikely. It is not in line with the other remaining fragments of what Heraclitus has said and with the little we know about him. More likely is, so Schomakers, that Heraclitus wants to ridicule this view. He wants to say: Isn’t is ridiculous that the cosmos is like a heap of things if not of waste simply swept together? There must be at least some order in the world. It is impossible that the cosmic order is like a heap of stuff swept together. Rather, we should see the cosmos as an orderly unity steered by a god.
Maybe this is so, but I think that an interpretation of the text depends also on which level the cosmos is considered. When one considers the physical cosmos, the idea that there is order in the world is inescapable. However, when one considers the human cosmos or even more the political cosmos, isn’t then the first idea that pops up in the mind that it is a mess? That there is no order? How else should we judge the present situation in the world?

Sources
- The fragments of Heraclitus, https://heraclitusfragments.com/files/e.html  
- Heraclitus, Alle woorden. Amsterdam: Boom, 2024.

Random quote
You're insane until you're a genius.

Johan Cruijff (1947-2016)

Fine-tuning the moral compass

I think that everybody has it (or so I hope): An internalized set of values and objectives that helps to navigate through life and to act ethically and to take moral decisions. In short: I think that everybody has a moral compass. However, how you fill it in, so what your individual moral compass is, is a personal affair. Fundamentally, each person has personal values and objectives, and they may be different from those of other persons, though broadly for groups of persons they more or less agree. But it is one thing to have a moral compass, it is another thing to act on the basis of it. For personal affairs and decisions that have only consequences for yourself, it’s an individual matter and you owe responsibility only to yourself. But much individual behaviour has social consequences. Then it is important that people act in the right way and sometimes that they act anyway, even if they have no personal interest in doing so. How can we make that people do so; so how can we influence their moral compasses?
In the Dutch daily De Volkskrant, I read an interesting article about investigations at the Utrecht University about this problem. Do people help others they don’t know, if it is not in their own interest? How to make car drivers adhere to the speed limit, which is useful for the group of drivers as a whole, but not for the individual drivers? How to make streets safer? In such situations, the moral compasses of individuals are relevant, and it is important to know how to change them in the right way, if necessary, or at least how to influence them so that people behave in the socially appropriate way.
Rewarding and punishing are important instruments for guiding behaviour, although they are not the only ones. What the investigators at the Utrecht University want to find out is how we can reward people best. Of course, during the years much research has been done already in this field, and what the investigators want to do is to fine-tune the rewarding approach for the problem at hand, namely public behaviour. Because the investigations just started, results are not yet known, but on the basis of a literature study something can already be said about it. In order to stimulate social behaviour, you can appeal to someone’s ideals or to his or her obligations. What is most effective? Although public campaigns often set out the obligations people have towards each other, investigations have shown that it is better to point to their ideals. For instance, in a recent campaign in the city of Utrecht street harassment is dismissed as loser’s behaviour, but maybe it should be better to stress that a harassment free city will make it safer for everybody and isn’t this what everybody wants? Or a charity campaign should not stress that you have an obligation to contribute to a better society, but it should point to the ideal that everybody wants a society free of misery. In my words, in order to stimulate socially desirable behaviour one should not point to the bad side of human beings or say that some things just have to be done, but one must point to the good side; to what people wish that will happen and to what they strive for. Be positive, not negative, but hasn’t this always been so?

Random quote
I find first, then I seek.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

The household revolution

Every household has it: a vacuum cleaner. For how could you clean your house without it? Especially your carpets? Impossible, you think. Nevertheless, until about 125 years ago, vacuum cleaners didn’t exist. Till then, you had to swipe your rooms and to beat out the rugs outside. You had a special instrument for that: the carpet-beater. It was a lot of work. At the end of the 19th century, the first vacuum cleaners were launched, but they were yet impractical. This changed with the invention of the portable electric vacuum cleaner in 1907 by James Murray Sprangler. One year later, the Hoover Suction Sweeper Company brought an i
mproved version on the market. Although it weighed 20kg, it was the start of the successful introduction of vacuum cleaners in every household.
The invention of the vacuum cleaner illustrates an important revolution that took place a hundred years ago: the Household Revolution. Although for centuries humanity had made progress in many respects, the organization of domestic work had hardly changed. The invention of agriculture had changed how people feed themselves, how they work, how they live together (the rise of cities), and so on. The use of metals for producing tools and weapons also had such an impact, as had many other discoveries and inventions as well. Although these innovations influenced also the daily life at home, one thing remained the same: all household work still had to be done by hand. From the time of the Roman Empire and far before till the mid-19th century all household work was done basically in the same way: peeling and cutting the vegetables; washing the cloths one by one; preserving the food; everything that you did at home had to be done by hand, for machines to make the work easier hardly existed. Only the tricks to do so were different from culture to culture. When you were rich, you could hire servants for doing the work or you could outsource the work to specialized firms, but the work itself was done in the same way: by hand. “What a slave work!”, as Henri Lefebvre remarks. There were no fridges, no washing machines, no vacuum cleaners; nothing. But this all changed around 1900. And not only the household work as such changed, because it became easier, the household appliances saved also much time that people could use for doing something else.
The revolution didn’t come suddenly. The introduction of new household appliances took decades and may not have been completed until around 1970, but in the end it changed the household work everywhere, even in that way that also rich people began to do it themselves. Moreover, the technological change was not limited to appliances that made the household work easier. At the same, time there were also many changes in the field of communication and amusement, like the introduction of the telephone, radio and television and cars. These products were not only introduced in the households, but they became also part of the world around. The result was that life at home didn’t only become easier, but life at home as such changed. People greatly changed their live patterns at home; housewives got more free time, which stimulated their emancipation; also the way people had contact with family and friends changed. While once long winter evenings at home were filled with board games, reading, talking, making music, etc., now people listened to the radio (and later watched TV). It had also become easier to go out and people had more time to go out. The amusement outdoors had become different, for instance by the arrival of the cinema and the rise of sport clubs and other clubs. Life got a new dimension.
Actually, I should call this household revolution the First Household Revolution. Not long after its end, a Second Household Revolution took place: The invention of the computer – especially the personal computer – and the internet, soon followed by the invention of the smartphone. Although this revolution is still going on, it is already certain that these inventions have revolutionized daily life. They have caused already such changes, that it is almost impossible to think how everyday life could go on without digital appliances. The essence of this revolution is that it revolutionized the way we communicate and the way we get and use information. Should I have to typify both revolutions, then I would say that the first one changed how we act, while the second one how we think. The first one made life easier, the second one fundamentally different. One main consequence of the second revolution is that humans have become more individualistic but also more impressionable.
What has been brought by the Second Household Revolution? Because it is still going on, I will limit myself to a few keywords and to brief indications: individualisation, globalisation; change in the way we communicate (that we are accessible at any time and for everybody, for instance); changes in banking, research, production, automatization, education, health care; entertainment. Should I add more? This revolution changes not only your way of life but also your style of life. Or rather, you don’t only express yourself in a different way, but this revolution makes you different as a person. With this also the household work changes. Soon, everything in your household will work fully via the internet. You only need to program your personal settings and all devices at home will work according to your wishes, unless the internet is down, of course. Oh, don’t forget the password, in case you need a new modem (but who will enter all passwords for you?)

Sources
- Wikipedia. “The vacuum cleaner”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_cleaner
- Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024 ; p. 667.

Random quote
It was accepted as a fact of civilization and an acquisition of culture that discussions degenerated when they used the argument “ad hominem”.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)

A priori reasoning

A priori according to Chat GPT

In these blogs, I have often paid attention to fallacies, so false or deceptive argumentations. Fallacies are often not committed intentionally, so as a deliberate way of manipulation. On the contrary, people usually usually believe in the truth of their false reasonings. This leads often to the drama of explaining the truth: It is one thing to unmask an imposter; it is another thing to disappoint someone. Often the latter is not more than that, but in extreme cases it can also happen that disproving a false argument makes that the world of the person who believed in it collapses. Nevertheless, it is important to expose fallacies, for a world based on false truths makes no sense, even if it is the little world of one person.
It is often difficult to convince others of the falsity of their reasonings. Besides that there may be psychological barriers to accept criticism, reasonings are often complicated, even to that extent that the most-expert minds sometimes make mistakes. Initially, persons not experienced in logical reasoning can also have problems to understand them. Reasoning has to be learned. And then there may be practical reasons why false reasonings cannot be uncovered. In political discussions, for example, the time each speaker gets is often limited, and how to convince each person of the public of the debate? In practice, personal appearance, debating tricks, etc. are more important for a speaker to convince others than what the speaker is saying, even in case what the speaker says is false.
One of the most difficult false reasonings is, I think, the a priori argument; not because it is so difficult to unmask but because of the emotional consequences that this unmasking may have for the person concerned, often leading to a psychological blockade to accept the falseness of his or her argument. The a priori argument – rationalization, dogmatism or proof texting, which are all varieties of this type of reasoning – is (see link above) “a corrupt argument from logos, starting with a given, pre-set belief, dogma, doctrine, scripture verse, ‘fact’ or conclusion and then searching for any reasonable or reasonable-sounding argument to rationalize, defend or justify it.” It is a kind of reasoning much used by ideologists and fundamentalists, but, in fact, saying so would give a false picture of this fallacy, as if only some unflexible minds would use this kind of false reasoning. Actually, any argumentation from unproved suppositions belongs to this category. Such a supposition is then believed but not proved, as a kind of Archimedean point. And this is just the weak point of this kind of reasoning: Why should the argument based on the supposition be true if we don’t know that the supposition itself is true? There is nothing against reasoning from suppositions as a kind of thought experiment, but a reasoning doesn’t become true by simply supposing or believing that its suppositions and the argumentation based on it are true, while in fact there is no evidence beyond this supposing or believing. At most, we can say that the reasoning is an option, not that it is true.
The a priori fallacy is related to the fallacy “appeal to ignorance”, discussed in another blog. This is (see here, #15) “the fallacy that since we don’t know (or can never know, or cannot prove) whether a claim is true or false, it must be false, or it must be true.” But if we don’t know whether a claim is true or false, how can we know then whether it is true or false? The website just quoted mentions this example of this fallacy: “Scientists are never going to be able to positively prove their crazy theory that humans evolved from other creatures, because we weren't there to see it! So, that proves the Genesis six-day creation account is literally true as written!” No, for what we don’t know (couldn’t see, in this case) cannot prove anything. Note that this quote includes some other fallacies, namely “appeal to ridicule” and “attacking the evidence”, and a few more (see the last link above; the “appeal to ridicule” is discussed in Bad Arguments by Arp et.al.).
There are some more fallacies to which the a priori argument is related. Especially, I want to mention yet “begging the question”: A conclusion is derived from premises that presuppose the conclusion. Often, in a priori reasonings the a priori supposition is considered reasonable or true because of the argument based on it, while the argument seems reasonable because of the suppositions. Fallacies seldom come alone.

Random quote
Economic values are the product of opinions

Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Chance

Fortune has many sides and can fall in many ways

The subject I am going to discuss in this blog is a bit tricky. It is not so that as such it is difficult (it is, but that’s not the problem), but the concept I want to treat is a bit difficult to translate into English. In Dutch we call it “toeval” and for this blog I have translated it as “chance”, which, to my mind, is the word that best covers the Dutch concept. However, actually both words do not cover exactly the same ideas. The internet translator reverso.net translates “toeval” also as coincidence and accident. So, if this blog is a bit confusing to you, it may have a linguistic background. Doesn’t the Sapir-Whorf thesis say that our language determines how we think? Although the strict interpretation of this thesis is not right, there is a kernel of truth in it.
Anyway, I want to try to understand what it means that things happen unexpectedly to us; that we did not foresee them; and that we couldn’t foresee them in our present situation. They are not predicted and not predictable, at least not at the moment they happen to us. They just happen and we don’t know why. If they are not random, they have at least an air of randomness. Therefore, we have to live with such ev
ents as they happen. They happen by chance or by accident.
Now you may think: “What happens happens and I can only adapt myself to what happens to me unexpectedly. If it is positive for me I have luck and if it is negative I have bad luck.” However, it is not as simple as that. For such an attitude supposes a unitary idea of chance (“toeval”), while in fact there is not one type of chance that happens and that’s it. Chance has many faces, or rather, there are several types of chance. Each type requires other reactions or makes other reactions possible. Following Jeroen Hopster in his recent book about chance (especially chapter1), I want to distinguish six types (and without a doubt you can find a few more).

1) Things happen as they happen because the world is shaped that way. Is your child a boy or a girl? You had no influence on it. It just happened. At least that is the present situation for most of us. Or take the colour of your eyes: Nobody had an influence on it. It was decided “by nature”. That such things happen is a matter of existential chance.
2) Chance as contingency. Things happen as they happen but could easily have gone in a different way. A footballer wants to score a goal, but just then a gull flies by and the ball hits the gull, so that the keeper can catch the ball. If the gull hadn’t been at the same place, because the wind was blowing a little bit harder, the match would have gone differently.
3) In a general way, I spoke already of “by accident”. However, chance as such can be accidental. In a narrow way we can say that something happens by accident or that what happens is incidental and doesn’t belong to the essence of what is happening. The steeplechase runner falls, not because he has touched one of the obstacles, but because there happened to be a stone on the track that he hadn’t seen. That he should jump over the obstacles belongs to the essence of the race, but the stone should not have been there and should have been removed by one of the officials.
4) Things can also happen by coincidence: Coincidental chance. Things happen to go together and are seen as meaningful for that reason, but they were not planned to go together. I take the train to Utrecht and meet by chance a friend in the hall of the Central Railway Station. However, my train was late and had it been in time, we hadn’t met, because we hadn’t appointed to meet.
5) Chance as a matter of statistics, so statistical chance (not to be confused with the next point). Population distributions often have a certain pattern. Statistically, pop concerts are more visited by younger people and concerts of early music more by older people. If you like both kinds of music and you want to meet young people, when you go to a concert this evening, go then to a pop concert. If you want to meet old people, go then to a concert of early music (but avoid there the musicians, since they are often young!),
6) Often we don’t know the determining factors of what happens, but we know that there are regularities in what happens. Then we can only resort to probability theory in order to explain what is happening, if we can. But I think that in the human sciences we can ignore this type of chance, since it is probably only a useful concept in physics and biology.

Chance has many faces. It is covered by many concepts: existence, contingency, accident (in a neutral meaning), coincidence, statistics and probability. In Dutch these faces are summarized by the word toeval. In English, we can call it “chance”, although this is maybe a little artificial. However, the idea is the same: What happens to us in an unforeseen way, unpredicted and unpredictably, without a known reason, or accidentally cannot be seen as the consequence of a general abstract phenomenon. For practical reasons we can say “it just happened” and we go on with what we are doing, but if we want to understand what happened, we must explain what we mean with this “it just happened”. There is no chance as such but there are only chances. But there are also chances in a different way, and not only in the way described above. For each chance is not only an event that just happens but also an opportunity and possibly a lucky coincidence you can profit by. What actually was a contingent coincidence that happened by accident and may have not been statistically very likely may turn out well for your existence, if you seize the chance.

Random quote
The learning of many things does not teach understanding

Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Montaigne in Innsbruck

“a very beautiful little town and well built, standing in the bottom of the valley..."

When the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was 47 years old, he decided to make a long journey through Europe. Why exactly he made this journey is not known. Was it only for pleasure? A kind of “Grand Tour”? Did he have a secret mission? We don’t know. What we do know is when he made the trip and which places he visited, for Montaigne kept a diary of his journey. It has apparently been written for private purposes only. He didn’t mention it in his Essays and it was found 180 only years after his death.
Montaigne didn’t travel alone. He was accompanied by four other gentlemen, including his youngest brother, plus a number of servants. After having arrived in Rome, Montaigne travelled without the company of the other gentlemen. They left Paris in September 1580, and went via Augsburg and Munich in Germany through Austria to Venice, Florence and Rome in Italy. From Rome Montaigne made also a round trip through central Italy. He returned to France in 1581, when the king had ordered him to do so, because he had appointed him mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne did so reluctantly and he didn’t hurry to reach Bordeaux. 

Fernand II

One of the places where Montaigne stayed during his travel was Innsbruck, in Tirol in Austria. This summer I spent a holiday near this town, and I decided to take photos of places visited there by Montaigne. After his stay in Seefeld in Austria, which I have described in another blog (see here), Montaigne’s next stop was Innsbruck, where he (and his company; but I’ll leave this mostly implicit) arrived in the evening. Innsbruck was (and still is) the capital of Tirol, and it was also the residence of Fernand II, Archduke of Austria. Montaigne describes Innsbruck as “a very beautiful little town and well built, standing in the bottom of the valley and full of fountains and running water… The houses are almost all built terraced, and we found lodgment at the ‘Rose’.”

The Golden Rose today

There are still many fountains in Innsbruck, and also “the Rose”, usually called “the Golden Rose”, is still there, although it is no longer an inn. Since about 40 years this old inn from the 14th century houses a shop of a well-known glass crystal company. The day after his arrival, Montaigne makes a trip to Hall, a town situated two miles east of Innsbruck and known by its salt industry. Hall has several beautiful churches, so Montaigne, and he tells us that he visited the church of the Jesuits there (just as he had visited the church of the Jesuits in Innsbruck).

Hall, Church of the Jesuites

When I was in Hall, I found the church closed, but an information board on the front wall told me that the present church dates from 1608, so it must have been the chapel of the Jesuits, built in 1573, that Montaigne visited. Also the church of the Jesuits in Innsbruck visited by Montaigne was another one than the present baroque church from the 17th century.
On their way back from Hall to Innsbruck Montaigne and his company decides to pay a visit to Archduke Fernand, who stayed at that moment in his castle in Amras, halfway Hall and Innsbruck. Also in the morning, on their way to Hall, Montaigne c.s. had tried to see the archduke, but the archduke had given the message that he was too busy to receive them. Actually, it was, as a court official told them, because the archduke didn’t like the French. They even didn’t get permission to visit the castle, built in 1563 and

The Ambras Castle

housing a large art collection. So, Montaigne returned a bit irritated to Innsbruck, where he turned his steps to the Hofkirche (Court Church): “We next saw in a church eighteen magnificent bronze statues of the princes and princesses of the house of Austria.” What Montaigne doesn’t tell us is that this church houses the tomb of the Austrian Emperor Maximillian I (1459-1519) (The tomb is a cenotaph and the body of the Emperor has been

Innsbruck, Hofkirche

buried in Vienna). It’s true that the tomb was then still under construction, so Montaigne will not have seen it in all its glory. The bronze statues, which Montaigne does mention, surround the tomb as a guard of honour. Maximilian’s idea was that he wanted to be surrounded by his ancestors and role models. Montaigne writes that he saw eighteen statues there, though in fact there are 28, the last one being cast already in 1550. A mistake?

Cenotaphe of Maximilian I surrounded 
by bronze statues

After having left the church, Montaigne “went to sup with the Cardinal of Austria and the Marquis of Burgant, sons of the archduke”. No, not as a guest but as a spectator, for in those days it was customary to watch the meals of princes, as if it were a spectacle, as my Dutch edition of Montaigne’s travel diary explains.
The next day Montaigne left Innsbruck and travelled via the Brenner pass to Sterzing (Vipiteno) (see here).

Random quote
The fool is fluttered at every word

Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Passing and waiting

More and more I am intrigued by the simple things of everyday life, for often they appear to be not so simple as they seem on the face of it. Many simply daily activities appear to be basic. Look, for example, at the photo at the top of this blog. It is a picture of the hall of the most important railway station in the Netherlands: Utrecht Central Railway Station. I have used this photo before in another blog, but then in another context. Actually, I should have put here a photo of the Central Railway Station of Amsterdam or the one in Rotterdam, as will become clear in a few moments, but I haven’t such a picture, and this photo will do as well. The hall of the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not just an ordinary station hall of an average railway station. So it’s not just a space where you enter a railway station, where you can buy tickets, where you find a shop where you can buy magazines and books and maybe flowers as well and which maybe has also a small supermarket, and that’s it. Actually, such station halls have become somewhat old-fashioned – at least in the Netherlands – but that’s not important here. I’ll concentrate on two characteristics of this modern station hall. You must pass it when you want to go to the platform for your train. You can buy there train tickets. You find there shops. All this is like in an old-fashioned station hall. New is that you must pass through this hall from one side of the town to the other side, also if you are not a traveller (if you don’t want to take a long detour). Or rather this was so, when I took the photo, but now there is an alternative route that avoids the station hall, when you want to go to the other side of the town. But in Amsterdam you still must walk through the station hall for doing so in order to avoid a long detour, and in Rotterdam it is the same. This makes that in the photo above you see many people moving there, travellers and people who want to go to the other side of the town. The travellers are passing the hall when they go to or come from the platforms. Some are standing still for a moment for looking at the information panels: They want to know at which platforms their trains will stop. Those who don’t go to or come from the trains are just crossing the hall. Both the travellers and those who only cross the hall use it for passing.
Not all people are walking through the hall or watching the information panels. Some are sitting on the benches. Why? There can be many reasons why people are sitting there in this public space. Since the space is the hall of a railway station, at least some of them, if not most, are waiting: Waiting until they must go to the platforms for catching their trains; or waiting for people who will arrive by train; or waiting for another reason. Since Utrecht Central Railway Station and other railway stations have no separate traditional waiting rooms any longer, as old-fashioned railway stations had, the benches in the hall replace the waiting rooms that are not there. It’s true that also the platforms have benches and simple spaces for waiting for your train or for passengers that will arrive soon, but many people prefer to wait on the benches of the station hall instead of on the platforms.
So, two important characteristics of the station hall in the picture are that the hall is a space where people pass, not only for going to the platforms but also for going from one side of the town to the other side, and that it is a place where they wait. As for this, the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not unique. There are more railway stations like that, for example the Central Railway Stations of Amsterdam and Rotterdam (but, for instance, not the one in Antwerp, Belgium, or Gard du Nord in Paris). A station hall like the one in Utrecht is, what I want to call, a passage and it is also a waiting room or waiting space. Most of its other characteristics are dependent on these two main characteristics. For instance, the small supermarket there doesn’t sell what you find in the average supermarket in your town, namely your daily shopping, but it sells what you need as a passenger or a passer-by: fast food, sandwiches, drinks in bottles, coffee, sweets and such things. It’s the same for the other shops there and for the restaurants: they focus on passers-by and on travellers who are in a hurry.
Passing and waiting belong to the life of a traveller and generally to the life of people on the move. It is no coincidence that the station hall is both a space for passing and a space for waiting. Passing and waiting are two sides of the same coin. Passing is about space and waiting is about time, and that makes them different. However, passing can also be seen as waiting in space or waiting on the move. On the other hand, waiting can be seen as passing at the same placing so while standing still. Both connect past events to future events in their own ways. And just this makes them basic in life. They are the infrastructure of life in the abstract.

 Random quote
Thought is common to all.
                                                                     Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Waste

Actually, it is possible to philosophise about everything; about what is lofty till about what is banal. Take Montaigne. He wrote about the education of children and about friendship but also about thumbs. Here I have written about Montaigne (of course), about the philosophy of Descartes (and criticized him) and about such an everyday event like passing a square (is it really a banal action?) or even about banality. Often, things appear to be not so banal and unimportant as they are at first sight. Take waste, trash, or garbage, or how you would like to call it. What could be more banal? For ultimately, we throw it away. But also in this case, the banality of waste (to use this word in this blog) is only superficial. Isn’t there a saying that “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? As for this, Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher, who founded the philosophy of everyday life in the francophone world, wrote: “A social group is characterized as much by what it rejects as by what it consumes and assimilates. The more economically developed a country is, the more it throws away and the faster it throws things away. We waste. In New York, the garbage cans are huge and all the more visible since public services, in the homeland of election and free enterprise, function poorly. In the underdeveloped countries, nothing is thrown away. Every scrap of paper or string, every box is used, and even the excrements are collected.” (p. 338) Lefebvre wrote this in 1961, and although since then the world has changed a lot, and although it has been recognized that we waste too much and that waste is a problem and a threat to the world, in essence the tenor is true: What you throw away says who you are. The difference with 1961 is that in New York and everywhere else we still waste a lot but we throw things away in a different way: We recycle. Or at least, we pay lip service to recycling, for here in the Netherlands, for instance, plastic refuse is collected for recycling, but in fact it is only about a third of the collected plastic refuse that is really re-used; the rest is allegedly impossible to recycle for several reasons, and as yet it is burnt in the incinerators (as if a need for recycling doesn’t exist). This use of plastic waste says something about the Dutch, though I wonder whether it is different in the countries around the Netherlands. Anyway, really recycling plastic waste is apparently not important for the Dutch, for otherwise a solution would have been found.
Waste is the mirror of the soul, in the way we as a society deal with waste, but also what we see as waste. If you don’t live in a big town, at least you have been there, I assume, and probably you’ll have seen there people, usually drifters, hunting around for something in the litter bins along the streets. A good chance that they’ll find something useful, for people throw away a lot that is still useful for others, and maybe for themselves, too. They don’t take the effort to have it repaired, or they don’t like it any longer, because it has become old-fashioned, even if the object thrown away is still almost new. This says something about society (“we are that kind of people: consumerists”) and even more about the individual, both the one who throws away and the one who collects what is thrown away (“that person is like that”). Waste as the mirror of the soul.
These two examples show both sides of the waste problem: The social side – society doesn’t handle its waste well; it still throws away what could be recycled – and the individual side – individuals who throw away things that are still usable (and others sometimes collect this “waste”). A problem it is, for waste contributes to the global warming. In order to solve the waste problem, recycling is seen as a kind of solution, and in a sense it is: It makes that waste products are used anew, with the consequence that less waste is produced. However, for a part recycling is also a kind of waste; at least it is waste supporting, for so long as we recycle what actually was already waste (i.e. a not useful product) when it was produced, it helps to continue our waste economy. It functions as a fig leap for the bad conscience. The only solution is to stop producing what is not necessary (I know, the word “necessary” raises many questions, but we have made already a step forward when we start to raise these questions). And we must simply stop throwing away, what is still useful. Only after this step has been made, recycling will be a partial solution and no longer contribute to the problem. Should we ever come that far? In older blogs, my answer was “no”. I am pessimistic about stopping the global warming, let alone about undoing the global warming. But that’s another problem. If we would stop wasting what must not be wasted, we would have taken a leap forward. Can we? The quantity of waste we’ll continue producing will tell us.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024.

Random quote
An image is more expressive than words and more often penetrates deeper into the heart.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

Changing the world

If you want to change the world, you must first interpret the world, for if you don’t know what you want to change and why, in what way then would you change it? But once you have found a good reason to change the world and once you have a good theory that describes what is wrong in the world the next step consists of the practical measures to implement the changes considered necessary. In short this is the problem we face in this world that is threatened by a serious climate crisis, a crisis that is so serious that it could mean the end of the human civilization as it is. This is why these days world climate conferences are organised and why national governments and international agencies are developing plans of measures to fight against the global warming and have started to execute these plans. However, as Henri Lefebvre has made clear, changes cannot be brought about without penetrating into everybody’s everyday life. For if everyday life doesn’t change and if not everybody – or at least most of us– cooperates with the measures proposed from above and acts in accordance with them, so if the measures that attack the threat of the climate change do not penetrate into what everybody every day does, in the end climate plans will be frustrated and thus fail.
In the past, the churches have understood the importance of everyday life and their power was based on this understanding. They “created both a ceremonial external to the human, an official sumptuousness, an extra-national state, an abstract theory; and on the other hand, a psychological and moral technique of extreme finesse and precision. In every act, however small, of immediate life, religion may be present; in the ‘interiorised’ form of a rite or in the external form of a priest who listens, understands, counsels, is moribund, or ‘forgives’ ”. (Lefebvre 2024, p. 262) Communist states tried the same and made a quasi-religious and political structure in order to penetrate the thoughts and actions of the people. Although they were more or less successful in building the required communist institutions, they didn’t succeed to penetrate everybody’s everyday life. Superficially they did, but in depth they failed and people secretly and sometimes openly found ways to circumvent an ideology that wasn’t theirs. In the end, this undermined the communist ideology and the communist practice and so toppled the communist states.
Today, climate activists and institutes and organisations that see the need and are actively trying to implement measures to stop and if possible to reduce the global warming that is clearly taking place face the same problem as once the churches and political ideologists and theoreticians faced: On the one hand they must present a science-based and credible theory of the need to fight global warming and on the other hand they must come with a good strategy to penetrate daily life. Although on a theoretical and scientific level the danger of global warming is well substantiated, as is the need to act as quickly and effectively as possible, still too many people don’t see the urgency to implement right now the measures needed. Moreover, too many politicians and others who are or should be involved in fighting global warming have hidden agendas behind their plans and measures; agendas that centre on power maintenance by paying lip service to the need to take measures, while in fact for these politicians these measures are only ways of maintaining their power instead of solving an urgent problem (while delaying or postponing measures that do the latter but not the former). Some politicians even deny the problem despite all evidence. But once enough people, especially people in strategic positions like politicians, have been convinced to act now, then the next question is how to take measures (and which measures) that penetrate daily life. One problem is mistrust of the government and other authorities (especially in authoritarian states but certainly not only there). Another problem is that even the right measures always will harm certain groups. Such measures can make that some groups feel themselves unjustly made responsible for what in fact is not their problem but the problem of society as a whole and of those who lived before them (and often they feel so with right); they may feel themselves even scapegoated. Even if they are compensated financially, this will not yet mean that they are also compensated psychologically, and just the latter is important for getting their support. Farmers are a case in point. Moreover, despite its urgency, climate measures must be balanced with other measures that are at least as important to keep life liveable; if not to say that even fast grinding mills grind slowly and that it takes time to penetrate everyday life, also in case of people of good will.
Is there a solution? There isn’t and there will not be if it is not realized that the transformation of life in the end involves the transformation of everyday life, not only superficially as among communism, but in its details. Moreover, people must not be forced but be convinced, but this is only possible if the changes needed are their own changes and not enforced changes. If humans do not create their own world, there will be no world. That’s what the past has taught us and that’s the challenge.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024; esp. pp. 262-4.

What are they waiting for?

Look at the photo. What are these people doing there? They are waiting. Apparently they are waiting for something special, for all have their faces in more or less the same direction, the direction where the object they are waiting for is or will come from. It is obvious what this object is: It is the tram in front of them. By they don’t go into the tram. Why not? It is because the doors of the tram are closed. So, these people are waiting till the doors of the tram will be opened, so that they can go into the tram. They are not so much waiting for the tram itself but for a certain event related to the tram. While waiting, some people are watching their smartphones. Others do nothing special. They are just waiting.
But look to the people at the right. They are looking at something: They are looking at the man near the front door of the tram. What is the man doing there? He is opening the door of the tram, for the man is the tram driver. Yet a few moments waiting and the doors of the tram will be open; people will enter and the whole scene has disappeared. And that was actually what these people were waiting for: for the end of the waiting.