Throwaway Culture in Philosophy

Try recycling

There is now more gold in electronic waste than remaining in the Earth’s crust. It seems absurd that we continue to invest resources in increasingly difficult mining and exploration operations, rather than looking for ways to recycle the gold we’ve already thrown away. But I’m no expert on the economics of this.

What seems clear enough, in general, is that there is something deeply irrational about what Pope Francis called our “throwaway culture”. As he put it: “our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products.” Not only do we fail to reuse waste; we often barely use resources before they become waste. Millions of tonnes of consumer products travel, as René Girard once put it, from the shop to the bin, with hardly a stop in between.

We are uncomfortably aware of the effects of throwaway culture in the material realm. We get an unnerving reminder of it each time when, driving on a highway or sailing near the cost, we notice the sky darkened by an unnatural massing of seagulls and realise that we are passing a landfill. Where we have yet to notice it, I think, is in the intellectual realm. Our throwaway culture applies to ideas as much as to things.

I once heard a fascinating lecture by the historian Peter Burke on “intellectual rubbish”—the unseen ways in which knowledge is discarded and wasted. I wish I could remember the details (you can find some of the points here), but one thing that stuck with me was the crudely physical form this waste can take. Old editions of encyclopaedias, for instance, are pulped; the paper is rarely recycled, and likewise the knowledge contained. Even digital editions are often deleted to clear storage space or sent to some inaccessible archive. Sometimes newer editions reuse or update older entries, but just as often new entries are written from scratch, with little or no consultation of the past.

To prove that there is a real loss of knowledge involved in this waste, Burke documented how certain entries shrunk over time—the Encyclopaedia Britannica entries on King Charles I, Charles V, Raphael, Cicero, Goethe, Luther, and Plato, for example, grew much shorter over time, reflecting a declining public interest in Christianity and classical culture. The knowledge contained in the longer entries might end up being as lost as the Serapeum of Alexandria. Unlike any educated Victorian, you might have to look up what that is, but once you do you’ll see the point: public interest is fickle, and a time will likely come when we wish we hadn’t thrown away so much knowledge on then-unfashionable topics.

In philosophy, I think our throwaway culture results in a lot of wasted time and effort. Large research grants are awarded to researchers who use a priori methods, or consultation of only the most recent sources, to come the long way around to ideas, arguments, theories, and insights that are abundantly documented and discussed in historical texts. Vast sums are then paid to predatory publishing houses to digitally print these redundant results. It is like watching a government spend billions on new buildings, expanding cities into ecologically fragile hinterlands, while existing buildings in the centre of the city are abandoned to dereliction rather than being restored and updated at a fraction of the cost. This is, of course, not a thought experiment; it is a description of current urban planning policy. Throwaway culture is truly universal.

Sorting through e-waste to recover gold is probably a very expensive and hazardous procedure. With intellectual waste, there is no such excuse. For example, in the early days of analytic philosophy, a lot of time and effort went into “discovering” the various consequence relations that might hold between propositions besides material implication. A mountain of literature was produced—shiny new buildings on the edge of town—while Buridan’s Treatise on Consequences sat unread. Almost nobody thought to check what might be salvageable in this or hundreds of other medieval works on the topic. Since most philosophy degrees tended to divide the history of philosophy into “Ancient” and “Modern”, with the intervening millennium and a half unmentioned, the whole medieval tradition lay as unseen as an underground landfill.

Not only is this wasteful, it is self-defeating. What does anyone write philosophy for, if not to have it used and developed in the future? What is the point of writing it at all if the cultural norms of academia guarantee that in fifty years time the most anyone will say about your work is the box-ticking footnote, “(Smith 2025) is a pioneering study of the topic”, and in a hundred years time nobody will know it at all? Throwaway culture applies to your own products as much as any others. Unless you intend for their final resting place to be an underground landfill, you should work to cultivate a more respectful attitude towards past ideas.

There is an East Asian philosophical tradition that seems to exemplify precisely the opposite attitude to our throwaway culture. In this tradition, the standard way to present a philosophical idea is to draw it out of an older text, by way of selective commentary. This has given rise to a misleading impression among some Western philosophers that there is no progress East Asian philosophy. A pioneering study by Fung Yu-Lan (😉) tried to explain:

To call an old philosophy with a new name is a practice of the philosophers of the West. Philosophers of the East would usually call a new philosophy, when they had one, with an old name. If this practice were also adopted by the Western philosophers; if, for instance, the pragmatists would call themselves nothing more than commentators of Protagoras and their writings the commentaries to the saying: Man is the measure of all things; and if Bergson would call himself nothing more than a commentator of Heraclitus and his writings commentaries to the Heraclitean philosophy of change, a superficial observer will […] get the impression that in the history of Western philosophy there was little progress. […] I am not denying the fact that in the history of Western philosophy, especially in the modern period, because of the progress of science, there was more progress and variety than in the history of Chinese philosophy. I simply point out that in either case the progress and variety were not so great or so small as they appear to be. (Chuang-Tzu: A New Selected Translation with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 57).

Of course, the point of this passage will not be clear to you unless you know who the pragmatists, Bergson, Protagoras, and Heraclitus were and what they wrote. I shouldn’t assume that you do know this if you have studied philosophy formally within our throwaway culture. But maybe my thoughts here will encourage you to find out. You might save yourself the trouble of mining for gold that has already been extracted. And, even if you don’t, you would be showing your forebears a respect that you might hope future generations will show to you, when nothing remains of you but your writing.