Both ashtrays and public toilets are everyday items that we often take for granted, perceiving them as static objects with limited potential for analysis. Our connection to both typically hinges on our need to use them, and this connection usually ends there. However, their ordinariness and familiarity make them ideal starting points for a straightforward dialectical analysis.
A fact that reflects a much deeper philosophical consideration is this: the removal of public toilets at Copenhagen Central Station does not eliminate humanity’s biological need to defecate. Yet, they are not merely expressions of the simple biological relationship that living organisms require a place to dispose of their waste. They also signify a political decision that acknowledges this need. Their existence is a manifestation of a governmental authority recognizing a necessity and being willing to allocate resources to satisfy it. The same concept applies to safe consumption rooms for substance-dependent individuals. Eliminating these rooms does not address the underlying contradictions that drive the behavior of the dependent. With public toilets, the need and its straightforward solution are apparent. Safe consumption rooms, however, do not garner the same respect from the state, as there is no unified public sentiment recognizing that dependent individuals are dependent for a reason. Planners can only address the individual substance user’s needs—needs that, for the state, are as irrelevant as shelters for the homeless. An optimal government allows its population to satisfy its needs without questioning the rationale behind them. This is the role of psychology; in the case of toilets, it is biology.
Ashtrays illustrate this same relationship. They have a dualistic connection to smokers. On one side, the smoker has a need to dispose of ash and cigarette butts, and the ashtray channels this need within a proper system. On the other side, the ashtray signifies that there are indeed smokers who have a need. Smokers use the ashtray, and in doing so, the ashtray “uses” smokers by fulfilling its reason for existence. A society without ashtrays, which introduces them, can only have an impact if the population understands their purpose and agrees with their legitimacy. Both ashtrays and public toilets strive to fulfill the principle of reducing friction in users’ abilities to navigate their daily lives under the most reasonable conditions possible.
The ashtray meets the smoker’s needs through its own need to be used. If no one used ashtrays, they would have no basis for existence and would thus not be able to fulfill either the needs of smokers or their own. All technological artifacts, therefore, require usage to exist. It is precisely in their use that they reveal their function. All phenomena can be analyzed in this manner. Nothing that exists does so without a basis for existence, and this basis is always quite logical. Each time a casual conversation concludes with “I simply do not understand why X is the case and continues to be so,” it reflects a lack of understanding of the factors that sustain the phenomenon. Just as a fire requires fuel to continue generating heat, an ashtray needs to be used to exist. However, the difference lies in the layer of reality on which their intrinsic contradictions and relationships are situated.
A fire requires wood to burn, and it is very easy to ascertain whether this requirement is met, as the combustion of the wood can be perceived through heat and flame. There is, however, no physical feedback mechanism in an ashtray—only a social mechanism, as anyone can observe an ashtray and assess whether the cigarettes and ash are on the table or within the ashtray.
A fire possesses a simple, physical, self-validating basis for existence at a chemical level (when humans use a fire as their basis for existence, a social and biological layer also emerges). In this way, all objects have the potential to exist at all layers. The ashtray has a social basis for existence (others can be mentioned), while public toilets have, at an even higher level, a biological, political, social, and economic basis for existence.