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Philosophy Money

Basics/Background

• It’s a sociology of the money form, insofar as it acts as a symbol that mediates social relationships
  • “Simmel thus suggests that the spread of the money form gives individuals a freedom of sorts by permitting them to exercise the kind of individualized control over “impression management” that was not possible in traditional societies. ... ascribed identities have been discarded. Even strangers become familiar and knowable identities insofar as they are willing to use a common but impersonal means of exchange.” (Ashley and Orenstein, p. 326)
  • You can travel more
  • But also you can feel like society is fragmented and you are alienated b/c of this money basis
  • And also power becomes mere quantity of money
• Simmel: �I know that I shall die without intellectual heirs, and that is as it should be. My legacy will be, as it were, in cash, distributed to many heirs, each transforming his part into use conformed to his nature: a use which will reveal no longer its indebtedness to its heritage.�
• Of the three types of sociology (general, philosophical, and formal) he prefers the social: where each group under study can share the same formal characteristics – rules – while the content of these formal characteristics (the substance defined by the principles of of the formal characteristics) is different for each society, which corresponds to his belief that neither the individual nor the society exists w/out the other, via sociation (relation of parts to the whole)
  • as a result, each individual aspect of social life is at the same time a model for the WHOLE of society (same rules, diff content)
• Published 1900, heavily expanded version 1907
• Two parts, three chapters each; so that money is related to virtually all other aspects of society
  • Analytical Part
    • Money isn’t just economic in nature but also social
    • Money has “psychological” and even “metaphysical” meaning
  • Synthetic Part
    • Place of money in culture: money’s relatedness to all of culture

Analytical

• Money is the objectification of subjective values: money is the only place where the two converge
• Value comes from person’s desire to have the object – NOT use value
• Money ties people together: it enters almost every relationship you have
• Money expresses the relationships among objects via establishment of their relative exchangeability, but it can’t express the “individuality” of the object
• Introduction of paper money = money is now just a symbol, not a substance
• Money has infinite possibilities: what will in connect?: because of these possibilities, money begins to look like it has intrinsic value (flexibility is they key). Greed develops and money penetrates more deeply: relationships are commodified.
• 65: “Human enjoyment of an object is a completely undivided act…Phenomena of the basest and highest kind meet here. The crude impulse…wants to release itself towards and object and be satisfied; consciousness is exclusively concerned with satisfaction and pays no attention to its bearer on one side or its object on the other.”
  • He compares it to aesthetic enjoyment b/c “we forget ourselves” and “no longer experience the work of art as something which we are confronted, because our mind is completely submerged in it, has absorbed it by surrendering to it. In this case…our psychological condition is not yet, or is no longer, affected by the contrast between subject and object.” they have “undisturbed unity” “naive-practical unity”
    • why? you have placed your desire outside of yourself
      • desire happens when you want something you don’t have (“they resist our desire”); this is Kantian, he says: experience IS the creation of objects from sense impressions by the consciousness. so that “the possibility of experience is the possibility of objects of experience” 66
    • so desire arrives b/c of separation and this makes its value (THE VALUE OF AN OBJECT IS THE MEANING OF ITS SEPARATION FROM YOU), but enjoyment is that distance, that diff between subject and object, “effaced”
      • he says that’s the reason why you are aware of objects’ value when they are lost or broken and why you desire an object when it is being withheld: b/c value “Does not originate from the unbroekn unity of the moment of enjoyment, but from the separation between the subject as something desired and only to be attained by the conquest of distance, obstacles, and difficulties.”
      • value: when something “resist[s] our desire to possess them” 67 not because they just have value
    • we habitually believe that things are valuable whether or not you “consciously experience” that value (ie natural laws, some people’s moral attributes)...yet what about things that have a price and yet still unsaleable?
      • it shows how modern mind CONCEIVES ideas and then REPRESENTS “those ideas as if they were independent of its own representation” 68: this is our “metaphysical sublimation of value”
• Enjoyment isn’t subjective b/c there is no longer a subject there! 69
  • when you become AWARE of your enjoyment, that’s when subject/object reappears
  • There’s my quote! about subject/object
• “Economic activity establishes distances and overcomes them”
• Exchange “a means of overcoming the purely subjective value significance of an object”
• Object is “objectified” via exchange, so value determined by EXCHANGE
• 102 Relativism
  • we don’t tend to think of “phenomena” as “specific substnaces” but rather of “motions, the bearers of which are increasingly divested of any specific qualities; and it expresses thing in quantitative, ie, relative, terms.”
  • science no longer “absolute stability of the organic” but “ceaseless development”
  • we want to have some basis for ideas but “we shall never know what this absolute knowledge is” b/c no matter what “we shall recognize this one too as being merely relative and conditioned by a superior one” 104
  • but you don’t have to be skeptical: it’s not skepticism to say that “our knowledge may have somewhere an absolute norm, a supreme authority that is self-justifying, but that its content remains in constant flux because knowledge progresses and every content attained suggests another which would be more profound and appropriate for the task”
    • laws are NOT absolute, laws are “historically conditioned” but you have to assume that there is somewhere a perfected knowledge that isn’t conditioned or subjective 104
  • relativism: “every conception is true only in relation to another one” 104 as “the inner elements of cognition authenticate the meaning of true for each other” 106; truth means that “some representation associated with a particular organization and its powers and needs leads to useful results” 107 “truth is not useful because it is true, but vice-versa” there are diff truths for every different organization
    • for example gravity wouldn’t be “True” for people w/diff understanding of space
• “Money as the autonomous manifestation of the exchange relation which transforms desired objects into economic objects, and establishes the substitutability of objects” 119
• “Money as a reification of the general form of existence according to which things derive their significance from their relationship to each other” 128
• 146: “development of the purely symbolic character of money”
  • Money’s material character mattering less and less as substance; it’s more important as value
• “the common relations of buyer and seller to the social unit as the sociological premise of monetary intercourse” 170
• 210 “Money as the purest example of the tool”
  • its usefulness increases as it becomes “colourless” and “neutral” so fit for the most activities
• 212 “The unlimited possibilities for the utilization of money” “greatest possible number of unpredictable uses”
  • money is more valuable before the exchange b/c it can be turned into anything, rather than ALREADY having been exchanged for something that’s already here and thus limited and narrow
  • the owner of money better off than owner of labor or of commodities, less easily exchanged…and you get profit when you have money
• “Money – because of its character as pure means – as peculiarly congruent with personality types that are not closely united with social groups” 221
• 228: “the psychological growth of means into ends”
  • “money as the most extreme example of means becoming an end”
    • b/c having money is a goal, yet it’s only a means: it is in itself valueless and indistinct, which makes it able to represent value…and that’s what makes it MOST valuable of all things
  • what does it do? creates dissatisfaction b/c you “every point arrived at is actually experienced only as a transitional stage to a definitive one”
    • you no longer care about what you’re doing but only in the “end:” money. too teleological.
    • ends become means, means become ends: they reverse
  • me: this is where my Veblen collapse of metaphor thing comes in!! maybe I can say this is my def of commodity fetishism
• Psychological consequences of money becoming an end in itself
  • Like God, money becomes the “Center” through which all things are given meaning, the common denominator of distant things 236; and in God people find where all contradictions come into unity, everything comes up into a whole
  • Greed and avarice
  • Extravagance 247
  • Ascetic poverty
  • Cynicism
  • The blase attitude 256

Synthetic

• Money is THE central figure in modern societies, the basic organizing structure
• Money increases personal liberty
  • �Money has carried to its extreme the separation… between man as a personality and man as the instrument of a special performance or significance�
  • using money only refers to the part of you that enters the market, not your whole self
  • also b/c it connex so many different individuals, it’s not so important to do things for the person next to you
  • freedom: you can create all sorts of interactions via property; the management of property requires formation of relationships
    • “The meditating concept for this correlation between money on the one hand, and the enlargement of circles [of social interaction], as well as the differentiation of individuals on the other, is often private property as such�
    • distance between people is reduced dramatically
• However, can objectify social relations
  • as a worker you care only about wages
  • as a buyer you only care about prices
• Calculability becomes your sole objective: the mind is reified by calculation
  • this happens most in metropolis: �the seat of the money economy, [where] in rational relations man is reckoned with like a number�
  • culture is monetarized…but this kind of neatly results in romantic/emotional feelings
• B/c everything in the world can be bought, the world is in flux
• Individual Freedom
  • “The gradations of this freedom depend on whether the duties are directly personal or apply only to the products of labour” 284
  • 285: “Money payment as the form most congruent with personal freedom”
    • you no longer have a personal obligation to anyone (compare feudal ‘taxes’ of kind w/modern taxes of money)
    • this is why people in power don’t want the lower classes or peasants to have money: they can elude obligations
  • 295: “Cultural development increases the number of persons on whom one is dependent and the simultaneous decrease in ties to persons viewed as individuals”
    • your “persistent relations” w/others changes character: you are dependent on more people, but only in their capacity as a certain functionary, not to that Person As A Whole Person
    • your unique personality is “almost completely destroyed under the conditions of a money economy” b/c people don’t “operate” as individual personalities: they don’t have certain qualities that make you enter into relation w/them…it’s just their relation to the economic whole
      • divison of labor: you are dependent on more people, but those people have lost their personalities 296: that is, your personality is irrelevant, exchanged for “objective expediency” 297
• 297 “Money is responsible for impersonal relations between people, and thus for individual freedom”
  • we have FEELING of “individual self-sufficiency”
  • freedom: it’s freedom to develop your individuality 298, which is actually dependent in a way” individual freedom is not a pure inner condition of an isolated subject, but rather a phenomenon of correlation which loses its meaning when its opposite is absent.” 299
    • freedom is a type of relationship, one of maximum distance (but the relation still there)
• 306: “The mutual dependence of having and being”
• 321: “Freedom as the articulation of the self in the medium of things, that is, freedom as possession”
• 342: “The development of individual’s independence from the group”
• 343: “New forms of association brought about by money; the association planned for a purpose”
• Relations between money economy and individualism, 347
• 357: “The transition from the utilitarian to the objective and absolute valuation of the human being”
  • ie marriage for money
• 400: “the negative meaning of freedom and the extirpation of the personality”
• 411: mental effort unpaid

The Style of Life

• 429: “the preponderance of intellectual over emotional functions brought about by the money economy”
  • intellectualism is the “psychic state” that the money economy creates
    • how does it create these? b/c money is means b/c everything is incorporated as an aspect of OUR OWN WILL
    • the intellectual side of people (being able to judge causality in objective fashion; “the mediator through which volition adjusts itself to an independent being”) has to come into being, like any aspect of human, for a specific purpose, and this purpose is to get money
  • our desire for money makes us think about having more and more means to attain the end (money) and forces us to think long-term, making us intellectual; money is the “All-embracing teleological nexus” 431
  • emotion is seen as “interference” and doesn’t come in to our judgment…you must see the connex, not your particular evaluation of anything; action is only a series of “calculable rational relationships” which means that emotions only show up in “turning points” in life (the ending termini of each small series of goal-oriented action, at the moments of attainment)
    • life is a series of series that are only connex via money b/c “roundabout ways and preparations for moments of satisfactions have become endless” only connex by money
• 432: “lack of character and objectivity of the style of life”
  • emphasis on money and intellect leads to “a certain lack of character” (the intellect itself lacks character, like money)
  • “we resent the money economy offering its central value as a fully compliant instrument for the meanest machinations” esp b/c all actions look meaningless and “fortuitous relationship between the series of monetary operations and the series of our higher value concepts” (mere luck)
  • “leveling of emotional life”
  • 343: money and intellect are both “suprapersonal”
• 441: Money is related to “rationalism of law and logic” b/c of the “calculating character of modern times”
• 448: mind is objectified and subjective, individual culture lags behind
  • the mind can only be developed if you distance yourself from material culture
  • due also from division of labor: “whenever our energies do not produce something whole as a reflection of the total personality, then the proper relationship between subject and object is missing” “inadequacy” develops between his “existential form and his product” due to specialization, “divorce the product from the laborer” b/c its meaning not determined by mind of producer
    • wereas art is the opposite and resists division of labor (ie more than one person working on it); the work of art is autonomous unity 454 “Subjective spiritual unity” 455 requires only one person “but it requires him totally, right down to his inmost core” and “rewards” the person by being his “reflection or expression” b/c maker “commensurable” w/product
• 470: each person has a style of life, depending on your relationship to things
• 481: technology is important
• 508: “constancy and flux as categories for comprehending the world, their synthesis in the relative character of existence”
  • money is the “historical symbol” for this “relative character of existence”
  • Notes that “cosmologically, and often metaphysically interpreted, dual aspect of being” is the eternal/mobility, constancy/flux dyad. But “thoroughgoing empiricism” will show you that “there are certain forms that do persist through time, whereas the real elements of which they are composed are in continuous motion” 509 (even an organic form constantly changes the atoms, materials it’s made of; even in inorganic forms the molecules always in flux)
    • what has happened? reality is “ceaseless flux,” whereas we are not “sharp” enough in sight to notice that, and so results “appearance” of a solid, “enduring object”
    • however, natural laws are timeless…nonetheless “valid only for a definite state of mind” b/c they are a “formulation of the same factual state of affairs”
      • sure everything would be timeless if we really know all the real rules…
  • “change and motion may be conceived of as absolutes, as if a specific measurement of time for them did not exist….Whereas timeless objects are valid in the form of permanency, their opposites are valid in the form of transition, of non-permanency” 510
  • out of this dyad “this pair of opposites is comprehensive enough to develop a view of the world out of them”
    • WE DO NOT HAVE THE POWER “to distinguish between the recurrent but fortuitous combination of phenomena and actual causal relationships”
  • End Point: “In reality itself things do not last for any length of time; through the restlessness with which they offer themselves at any moment to the application of a law, every form becomes immediately dissolved in the very moment when it emerges; it lives, as it were, only being destroyed; every consolidation for form to lasting object – no matter how short they last – is an incomplete interpretation that is unable to follow the motion of reality at its own pace. The unity of the whole of being is completely comprehended in the unity of what simply persists and what simply does not persist.”
  • The world is “completely dynamic,” and it shows through money b/c “the meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away” that is out of “an anticipation of its further motion” “money is nothing but the vehicle for a movement in which everything else that is not in motion is completely extinguished” 511
    • money is in a complete state of self-negation: “continuous self-alienation”
    • however it also is stable b/c it is the vehicle for the exchange of objects, the evaluation of one thing against another; it is stable while those relationships change; it will always be valid
      • hence it’s both constancy/flux, whose “significance is actually a relative one; that is, each finds its logical and psychological possibility for interpreting the world in the other” 511
      • b/c of constant motion, you posit the ideal of motionlessness; b/c there is “lawfulness” (stability) you can “comprehend and grasp that stream of existence that would otherwise disintegrate into total chaos.” (so, “flux” is BETWEEN chaos and order, not the same thing as chaos)
      • so investigating money clued him in to the “general relativity of the world” which is “a definite stage of intellectual development in correlation with the corresponding practical, economic, and emotional conditions of human affairs”
      • what is money a symbol of? the relativism of our world

Style

• Hardly any citations; only Marx’s Capital comes up
• He uses the free style of his other works, yet this is his only book that isn’t just a collection of essays
• Cares about apparently insignificant details and their relation to the larger system
• Lukacs: said this was Simmel’s major work: sensitive yet “drives” his analysis onward mercilessly; and he admits where his ideas meet their “limitations”
  • he owed to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money what he said about “rationalisation, the desire to reduce everything to signs and formulae,” the intellectualism that he sees everywhere, esp b/c Simmel has pointed out that this process alienates people (in the last chapter of this book)
  • and Lukacs said he read Marx sociologically as a result of reading Weber and Simmel
  • Said that Simmel “deepened” hist mat b/c he saw how the clashes of capitalist culture include that between subjective and objective, mind and soul
• This work anticipated or paralleled the themes of Spengler, Burckhardt, and others: disintegration and individualism, anomie, means-ends disjunction
  • Compared often to Gemeinschaft and Geselleschaft as an attempt to create a whole picture of capitalism, esp in relation to its effects on human interaction