Lost or left behind

Philosophers write about all kinds of ingenious and difficult themes that are often remote from day life. They (and I must say that I am often among them) write about questions that only philosophers find interesting. It also happens that what they say or write what seems obvious to everybody, unless she or he is a philosopher. “The world is everything that is the case”, Wittgenstein famously wrote. What else could the world be? But he elaborated this in a little book that became one of the classics of modern philosophy. Heidegger even wrote “The nothing nothings”, which everybody, if s/he is not a follower of Heidegger, would call nonsense. Especially the first half of the last century was a period with many obscure and difficult to understand – for non-philosophers – writings. Was this the reason that there was a reaction to this in philosophy called “ordinary language philosophy” that wanted to bring back philosophy to what words mean in everyday life instead of constructing complicated structures of theoretical constructs? However, this attention for daily words and objects gradually faded away and abstract thinking became mainstream again, certainly in analytical philosophy, which still is one of the most important streams in western philosophy. Philosophical articles have become increasingly complicated and can usually be understood only by philosophical experts. Even if you are a philosopher but not an expert you often feel lost. In a sense it is normal. Although I exactly know how to keep my income in balance with my expenses, I am not a bookkeeper, and now and then I need one to help me. However, sometimes I wonder, whether themes from daily life that are actually normal for everybody are not too much neglected.
Take for instance the picture at the top of this blog. It shows a box with pastry on a bench. You may say: Nothing special. However, I didn’t take the picture, after I had put the pastry there for a picture. No, I found the box with pastry there on a bench near a road junction, left behind. When you know this, it may raise several philosophical or sociological questions: What has happened that the pastry was left behind? Why didn’t the eaters take it with them? Hadn’t what remained of the pastry any worth for them? Although pastry isn’t really expensive for most people, you don’t throw it away but keep it for later. Moreover, didn’t the pastry eaters care for the environment? You simply don’t leave your waste behind (and it can be fined, too). Certainly, if such things like people leaving behind their waste (or certain kinds of waste) often happen, it says a lot about society and the people who make up that society.
It is for such reasons that I have several series of photos of daily life and of objects lost or left behind on my Dutch photo website. Since bikes are popular in the Netherlands, you find there two series of bike photos (look for fiets of fietsen in the column left): How people park their bikes everywhere and how they turn bikes into objects of art or simply leave them behind, broken. I think that these photos are not only photographically interesting, but also philosophically and sociologically. They show that bikes are an integrated part of Dutch daily life and they show an aspect of this daily life and how bikes are used and treated.
Other objects I like to photograph are lost gloves and mittens (handschoenen and wanten). Also these photos have a philosophical meaning. It’s obvious that I seldom find them in summer. Gloves are lost in the cold season, when people wear them. When lost, some are lying on the ground for weeks. Nobody seems to care for them. The owner didn’t do any effort to get it back, or s/he didn’t know where s/he had lost it or lived too far away to make it worth the effort. But look! Sometimes a passer-by has taken up the glove or mitten and has laid it on a striking place, like a pole or a gate, so that the owner can easily find it and so that the glove or mitten doesn’t become dirty. This action says a lot about the mentality of people who find objects. They know that a lost object like a glove has worth and that the owner may want to look for it in order to get it back. In this way they take care of someone they don’t know, a stranger. Maybe they bring the lost object even to the police or a depot for lost objects. However, I am afraid that the latter happens less and less. But doesn’t this say something about our present mentality and how we were in the past? Be it as it may, have you ever heard about a monkey or a wolf that finds an object in the wood and thinks: “Hm, maybe someone of a neighbouring group has lost it. Let me put it on that pole, hoping that the owner will find it there”? Objects lost or left behind say a lot about who we are; more than you might think.