Parentheses

In Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, he describes several different negative effects the growth of the money economy can have upon the individual. The first few are really things which can be found in any sort of economy – no matter how primitive. These include greed and avarice (by avarice he means being miserly), which are caused by thinking of money as the final end; in greed, the individual simply wants more money, whereas in avarice, the individual is not willing to ever part with the money that has been accumulated. The next two effects are those of extravagance and ascetic poverty. Extravagance is easy enough to understand, but ascetic poverty, initially, seems misplaced when discussing negative effects of money. What indites this sort of poverty as a perversion of money is that it still makes money into an absolute importance. Simmel says: “The tremendous and wide-reaching power of the process by which money is elevated from its intermediary position to absolute importance is best illuminated by the fact that the negation off its meaning is elevated to the identical form.” Thus, by making the renunciation of money the highest good, money is still viewed as something more than a mere tool. The final 2 effects are also those which come only in a more fully developed money economy, according to Simmel. Those 2 are cynicism and the blasé attitude. He writes: “cynicism and a blasé attitude – both of which are the results of the reduction of the concrete values of life to the mediating value of money.” The cynic, Simmel writes “his awareness of life is adequately expressed only when he has theoretically and practically exemplified the baseness of the highest values and the illusion of any differences in values.” This only occurs in a well developed money economy because it is there that everything becomes reducible to money. Anything – and everything – is for sale, and as such can be given a “value” that is nothing more than an amount of money. For the cynic, this debases the object to nothing more than its monetary value.

This leaves the blasé attitude, which is what I wanted to talk about all along, but I had to set the stage. In the blasé attitude, the person “has completely lost the feeling for value differences. He experiences all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue, as not worth getting excited about.” This is the individual who has become indifferent towards just about everything. This is caused by the nature of money. Simmel writes, in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life:”

“For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of ‘how much?’ Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.”

Money then changes qualitative differences into quantitative ones, which leads to the emptying of everything. While the cynic responds to this by mocking it, the blasé individual responds by searching for some sort of stimuli that actually retains meaning. Again, Simmel writes: “out of this there emerges the craving today for excitement, for extreme impressions, for the greatest speed in its change.” This search for stimuli, however is ultimately worthless, and even exacerbates the problem. Simmel says:

“The search for mere stimuli in themselves is the consequence of the increasing blasé attitude through which natural excitement disappears. This search for stimuli originates in the money economy with the fading of all specific values into a mere mediating value. We have here one of those interesting cases in which the disease determines its own form of the cure. A money culture signifies such an enslavement of life in its means, that release from its weariness is also evidently sought in a mere means which conceals its final significance – in the fact of ’stimulation’ as such.”

What makes Simmel’s claims even more compelling is that he wrote in the early 1900’s. He saw in his time those currents which have become endemic in our time. It is hard, at least for me, to read his description of the blasé individual and not see myself in it, even if only to an extent. I find the last line of the last quote particularly true, and also increasingly disconcerting. The money culture enslaves to such a point that even those who recognize its negative effects can still only seek release from within it. In nearly every situation, it is impossible to truly escape from the money economy – and it is only becoming more difficult.

N.B. I wish to be careful to express that this is only one aspect of Simmel’s presentation. He is extremely balanced throughout the entire book, and this is merely one aspect of his argument that I have focused upon. In the book, he is constantly showing the positive and negative effects of the changes the money economy brings. So, please don’t read this as Simmel (or myself) condemning the money economy as evil or as something purely bad.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. Ed. Richard Sennett. Meredith Corporation; N.Y., N.Y. 1969: pgs 47-60.

Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. Routledge, NY. 1978