From ancient times on, philosophy has always concerned itself only with the pure world of ideas and grand ultimate questions, and has prized “useless learning.” Money, by contrast, plainly sat ill with the interests of mainstream philosophers. Even after contemporary philosophers began to turn their gaze toward technology, money as this distinctive artifact still rarely became a topic of central concern.
Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was an exception. From *The Psychology of Money* to *The Philosophy of Money*, money was one of the focal points and pivots of his philosophical system. In particular, the massive *The Philosophy of Money* has had a far-reaching influence; even today, whenever one speaks of “philosophy of money,” it is almost Simmel’s “exclusive domain.”
Yet the significance of *The Philosophy of Money* has to a large extent been overlooked. This is partly due to Simmel’s own awkward position in intellectual history. As a transitional figure from classical philosophy to modern philosophy, Simmel’s reputation ranks at least behind Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and the like; nor can he easily be assigned to any one school such as voluntarism, positivism, pragmatism, the Vienna Circle, or the Frankfurt School. Although he can with some strain be placed within the category of neo-Kantianism, he still stands apart as something singular. Thus in standard accounts of the history of philosophy, it is difficult either to devote a separate chapter to him or to situate him under some school; the result is that Simmel is entirely absent from many philosophical genealogies. As one of the founders of sociology, Simmel also comes after Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and no followers ever carried his scholarly paradigm to prominence. In short, although people may concede that Simmel’s thought is not to be underestimated, his academic standing seems dispensable.
The design of *The Philosophy of Money* itself also makes it hard to understand fully. It seems to discuss questions of sociology, psychology, or economics, yet it proceeds from the purest philosophical problems. Sociologists find it hard to grasp Simmel’s intention, while philosophers are not much concerned with such “vulgar trifles” as money. And if one starts only from the standpoint of cultural sociology, it is difficult to give *The Philosophy of Money* an appropriate evaluation.
To understand *The Philosophy of Money* properly, one must first make clear that the book’s intention is not to analyze money as such, but rather to use money as an entry point for discussing the deepest and most ultimate philosophical questions. As Frischeisen-Kohler puts it, *The Philosophy of Money* is indeed concerned with the psychological and sociological dimensions of the formation and development of the money economy: “but its ultimate aim is much higher; as Simmel himself says, its ultimate aim is to use external economic events as material in order to inquire into the ultimate value of human nature and its meaning.”[1] Karl Joel thought that “for Simmel, money is by no means merely money, but a symbol of the world”[2]. Bryan Turner believed that Simmel “set out to develop a phenomenology of ‘money’ as a mediator of experience in human social reality… *The Philosophy of Money* is a classic study of the roots of modernity and modern consciousness.”[3]
In short, in *The Philosophy of Money*, “money” is not the end but the means; through money, Simmel seeks to reveal human nature and the structure of the world, to reveal “how value is possible” and the ins and outs of modernity.
Subject——Object
We might as well regard *The Philosophy of Money* as an exploration in transcendental philosophy. Transcendental philosophy, that is, asks after the conditions under which knowledge is possible. Since Kant, transcendental philosophy has held that knowledge is neither derived simply from the subject nor from the object, but from the forms of cognition that stand between subject and object. Stiegler points out, however, that such forms of cognition as transcendental conditions are not eternal things floating in the air; they are rooted in the technical world as “tertiary retention”[4].
Money is also a kind of externalized memory; it solidifies people’s cognition of value. Although Simmel came long before Stiegler, his *The Philosophy of Money* may as well be regarded as an application of *Technics and Time*: money as the transcendental condition of value.
From the very beginning, Simmel introduces Kantian transcendental philosophy. He first correlates “value” with “being”4[61] [5]. What Kant was concerned with was how cognition of being is possible, investigating our experience of being; Simmel, by contrast, wants to concern himself here with “how value is possible,” asking after our need for value. He believes that the two questions have the same structure:
“Just as Kant has already said: the possibility of experience is the possibility of the object of experience—because to have experience means that our consciousness creates objects out of sense impressions. In the same way, the possibility of a need is the possibility of the object of the need. The object is thus constituted, its character is conferred through its separation from the subject, which simultaneously posits it and seeks to conquer it through its desire; for us, this is value. Value can be recovered only as a counter-image, only as an object separated from the subject. … So value does not arise from the indissoluble unity of the moment of pleasure, but from the separation of the subject as the content of pleasure from the object, which stands over against the subject as something desired and can be obtained only through overcoming distance, obstacles, and difficulties.”10[67]
Kant held that the condition of experience is the form in which the object of experience is given (which, in Kant’s view, is time and space), whereas for Simmel the form in which the object is given is nothing other than the form of how subject and object are set apart from one another.
Simmel points out that at the source of mental life, subject and object are in a state of undifferentiated confusion7[64]. Their division is the condition for the object becoming an object of cognition, and this “distancing” is possible only thanks to the various resistances of the real world. As Kant says, air is at once the resistance that birds feel in flight and the precondition that makes flight possible. In the “world of ideas,” where wishes come true at a snap of the fingers, there can scarcely be any cognition. It is precisely human finitude and the deficiencies of the real world that open up the distance between subject and object. “Reality submits to a deformation produced by our consciousness; this deformation is indeed the barrier between our direct existence and reality, but it is simultaneously the prerequisite for knowing and representing reality.” 385[474]
In Heidegger’s words, “distancing” is “de-severance”: making something near by “making it distant”; in the language of media ontology[6], media are precisely what insert “distance” between subject and object so that the object may be presented through it. And for Simmel, when one comes down to the issue of “value,” it is precisely “exchange” or “economic activity” that produces “distancing.” He says:
“Economic activity, as distancing (through labor, renunciation, sacrifice), at the same time overcomes distance. The purpose of establishing distance is to overcome it; the desire, effort, and sacrifice that separate us from the object also move us toward it. Distancing and approach are in practice two complementary concepts, each presupposing the other; they are the two sides of our relation to objects, which we subjectively call our needs and objectively their value. In order to desire it once more, we must make the object farther away from us.”17[76]
For Simmel, value “can neither be derived from the subject nor from the object… it lies between us and the object.” 11[69] On the one hand, it of course depends on the subject’s needs; on the other hand, it also depends on the nature of the object. But in fact, the subject’s needs and the object’s nature here are not primordial: “subject and object both emerge from the same act,” and in the course of this act, “as distance is produced between the self and its object, each of them becomes an independent and separate entity.”8[66]
The presentation of the object is from the outset marked by the framework of the subject, while the subject from the outset is also presented as object: “that is, we can observe, know, and judge ourselves just as we do any other ‘object’.”8[65] Hence the focus of philosophy is neither subject nor object, but “distance.”
To take an example, air is physically vital to human beings, but because it is everywhere, close at hand, its “value” is often far less than gold’s. Only when there is distance between air and human beings, when drawing in air encounters resistance, do people feel that air has value. And in economic activity, if all goods were inexhaustible, there would likewise be no talk of higher or lower value; because goods are limited, people always experience shortage and lack, and thus exchange becomes possible. Exchange is the activity that establishes and overcomes distance between human beings and what they need, and value arises from this.
Notice that the value thus generated between subject and object is both subjective and objective. On the one hand, it always depends on each person’s subjective will as well as the technical and cultural environment in which he finds himself. The existence of subjective differences makes exchange possible, because when Zhang San gives up A in exchange for Li Si’s B, he must think that B is more valuable to him than A; conversely, Li Si thinks A is better.
But the universal existence of exchange behavior also reflects the universality of value: “The fact that an object must be exchanged for another object indicates that it is not only of value to me, but that this value is independent of me, which is to say, it is also of value for someone else. This equation: objectivity = universal validity for the subject, finds its clearest proof in economic value.”23[82]
Money further strengthens the objectification of value. When people buy and sell a commodity at an objective market price, the difference between the subjective needs of the two parties is obscured, and the relation between value and individual context is weakened. The more fully exchange activity in a society develops, the more the value of each thing becomes uniform and objective. “Exchange is the representative of the distance between subject and object, which transforms subjective feeling into objective value.”30[91]
In fact, not only “value,” but “objectivity” in general is transformed from countless subjectivities through communication and contestation among people. Subjective judgments, each voiced in different contexts with different prejudices, through the exchange of information, through mutual comparison, selection, and weighing, eventually form certain consensuses at the social level; and society is nothing other than the sum total of all relations of interaction.
That is to say, it is not as though there first exists an absolute objectivity, while subjectivity arises from deviations and distortions in the cognition of objective things; on the contrary, objectivity is nothing more than a summation of subjectivities. Of course, to go further, each person is situated within a corresponding social environment, and his subjectivity too is rooted in a universal historical situation. In short, so-called objectivity, knowledge, or truth does not originate in some ahistorical absolute thing (such as God), but is nested cyclically within history.
Relative——Absolute
This view of knowledge or value is of course some kind of “relativism,” and Simmel does not deny this at all. He points out:
“Relativity is not a weakened supplementary determination in relation to a concept of truth that otherwise stands independently; rather, it is a basic characteristic of truth itself. Relativity is the mode in which representation becomes truth, just as it is the mode in which the object of a need becomes value. Relativity does not mean that truth is discounted; on the contrary, it is a positive fulfillment of the concept of truth and makes it effective. It is not despite relativity, but precisely because of relativity, that truth is valid.53[117]”
A more fitting translation of relativism may perhaps be “relationism.” It by no means denies the solidity and reliability of truth; but the key point is that what is called solidity and reliability comes precisely from the interactive relations among things. The denser and more universal this web of relations, the more objective and secure truth becomes. Conversely, to try to ground truth in an abstract point that is most remote from relations with the real world, standing aloof from all things or transcending history, is a great naivety indeed. Simmel says:
“The relativistic view is often regarded as a debasement of the value, reliability, and meaning of things, entirely disregarding the fact that only the naively childish insistence on an absolute standpoint places relativism in such a position. But in fact the reverse is true: only by dissolving all those hard, self-sufficient existences into mutual interaction can we attain the unity of function of all elements in the universe, where the meaning of any one element affects every other element.”55[119]
This forgetting of relativity is also gradually intensified along with the deepening of communicative activity and the development of intermediary technologies. For example, length originally “can be established only through a process of comparison”; length is always a relative relation between two things. Yet as more and more acts of comparison unfold, certain specific things are often taken as the standard of comparison, such as the ruler: “definite standards have developed out of countless comparisons of lengths, and they determine the basis of the length of tangible objects. These standards have become objectified, … they no longer appear relative, because everything is measured by them while they themselves are not measured. This error is of the same kind as the error of someone who believes that a falling apple is attracted by the earth while the earth is not attracted by the falling apple.”27[87]
Just as “from particular relative lengths we abstract the universal concept of length”27[87], so too do we form a universal concept of “value” out of relative values. “The need for a single object still cannot create an economic value, because it does not include the measurement of the need; only the comparison of needs, that is, the exchangeability of their objects, assigns a definite economic value to each of them.”31[93] Money is like a ruler: at first it too was merely a particular commodity in exchange activity, but as its range of application expanded, it gradually became the standard by which value is measured.
This search for absoluteness among relative things is indeed a basic tendency of the human spirit41[103]. But the absoluteness thus found is still nothing but the relativity of the age: it is that thing most closely related to all things within a historical context, not some thing detached from history and least related to the real environment. Truth is nothing more than that which is applicable in the greatest number of different proofs; knowledge among various kinds is mutually conditional, “knowledge proceeds along a line that is infinitely receding, infinitely continuous, boundless, yet at any particular moment it is still finite… every point is both beginning and end, and all parts are mutually conditional upon one another.”52[116] Ultimately, the world of knowledge is a network of mutual connections, and the parts where these relations of interdependence are most concentrated are the foundations of knowledge. Hence truth is not what needs no evidence, but precisely what depends most broadly, what is the “most relative”: “If we do not dogmatically preserve once and for all a single truth that needs no proof, then it is easy to assume that this reciprocal relation of proof is the basic form of knowledge… In this way cognition is a freely floating process, whose components determine their mutual positions, just like the weight and volume of things. Truth, like weight, is a relative concept.”44[107]
To acknowledge the relativity of truth by no means means abandoning the pursuit of truth; on the contrary, the pursuit of truth becomes an eternal historical mission: “Many things formerly regarded as a priori are later recognized as empirical and historical structures. On the one hand, we have the task of seeking in every phenomenon, beyond the content given by sense impressions, the eternal a priori rule by which the content is formed. But on the other hand, the maxim says that we should try to trace every individual a priori back to its roots in experience.”51[115]
And *The Philosophy of Money* is precisely a tracing of the experiential roots of the transcendental conditions of value. Money is of course historical, but it also determines the form by which value can be measured. Through “sublimating the relativity of things”57[122], money achieves the absolutization of value.
And this process is continuously reinforced in economic history: “For value consciousness, the degree to which money is absolutized depends on the important transformation of economic interest from primitive production to industrial enterprise. The difference between modern people and the ancient Greeks in their attitude toward money is mainly due to the fact that money in antiquity was used only for consumption, whereas modern money in essence serves production.”162[233]
Possession——Freedom
Although saying that ancient money was used only for consumption may be somewhat one-sided, what is obvious is that the scope of application of ancient money was indeed much smaller. Many productive relations were hard to measure in monetary terms, such as the possession of land, relations of personal dependency, and so on. In antiquity, land was more often inherited through the family, and even allotted lands were associated with political achievement, making them hard to measure simply by money. The personal relations of laborers were also often fixed dependencies rather than wage relations that could be measured purely in money. As for the possession of resources and markets, this too often contained more factors of an inalienable personal status.
The key point is that in antiquity, what was called “possession” was not neutral. “Possession is action; the possessed object is not an object of unconditional obedience,”229[305] Simmel says. “To possess an object with a special characteristic—it would mean more than any abstract notion of property can convey—is not something that can be directly attached to each and every person (as if from outside); rather, it exists in the interaction between the power or character of the subject and the power or nature of the object.”232[308]
For example, I have a little donkey, but I never ride it. Then either I use it as labor for a mill, or I keep it as meat to be slaughtered at any time; in short, so-called “possession” is always bound up with some specific action or actions. If I neither ride it, nor put it to work, nor eat it, then in what sense can I be said to possess it? Possession of land, slaves, tools, and the like is similar: the act of possession is essentially a way of extending the self into the object, of realizing the self’s will within the object. Simmel says:
“Freedom is clearly formed in the possession of things. Possession is not, as it appears on the surface, a passive receiving of objects, but rather an action performed upon them. Possessing property, no matter how broad and unrestricted it may be, acts upon things only by making the self’s will express itself in them: for to possess something really means that this thing cannot resist my various desires, that my will can prevail over it. … The self is thus surrounded by all its ‘possessions,’ as though by a region or territory, and in those possessions the self’s temperament and character traits obtain an intuitively tangible reality. Possessions form an extension of the self; the self is merely their kernel.” 246[322]
“The individual expresses, reveals, and displays himself in the objects he possesses. Therefore, what is crucial for understanding property is to recognize that drawing a sharp boundary between property and the self, between inner life and outer life, is extremely superficial; if one wants to understand it more deeply, that boundary should be regarded as fluid and shifting. … If the self were not surrounded by external objects, then it would seem to lose its dimension and collapse, shrinking into a point.”247[323]
That is to say, the act of possession is simultaneously an affirmation of the self, because “only in the essence of the already possessed object does freedom discover its own limits.”248[325]
Thus, once this capacity for possession is expanded without limit, human self-consciousness will also swell without limit, while at the same time collapsing without limit as well; this is precisely the condition modern people face. And what makes “possession” expand without limit is not only the development of science and technology, but also, importantly, money.
“Existence does not depend on owning property, and property-ownership does not depend on existence—this, as realized by money, first appears in the grasping for money.”233[308]
For instance, my little donkey, which I never ride: after stripping away every practical scenario of use, I can simply sell it. In other words, I do not need to have any actual ability to control this donkey; I only need to possess it in a purely empty nominal sense, and then I have the right to sell it. I could even have never seen this donkey, or indeed the donkey might not exist at all in substance. In a monetary economy, subject and object, together with what the subject possesses, become infinitely estranged from one another: “Those who collect dividends on shares while never concerning themselves with the management of a company, creditors who have never visited the countries that owe them, large landowners who lease out their land—all these people hand over their property to a purely technical elite, without moving a finger themselves, even though they profit from their property. And only thanks to money has all this become possible.”256[333]
On the one hand, this distancing promotes individual freedom, because “both sides can each follow their own rules to a much greater extent”257[334], and the individual is freed from the constraints of all sorts of practical matters. But on the other hand, it also causes individual freedom to lose itself. For the individual can no longer reveal the individuality of the self in its acts of possession; the self revealed through a wholly neutral and universal mode of possession is likewise wholly neutral and ordinary, a man of the masses with no individuality at all. When the self expands to be everywhere, it also loses its place. Infinite freedom is no freedom: “Only when an object sets a boundary to our freedom does it leave room for freedom.”249[326]
Before money, there is nothing that can refuse us; even stars far away in the sky can become an individual’s property. Money deprives nature of its “inaccessibility” and destroys people’s sense of limitation: “The present age ignores the fundamental limits of property possession, because our capacity for adaptation has been damaged; by seizing freedom and property without any restraint, we have come to make innumerable demands upon things, demands which, according to the nature of things and our own nature, are simply impossible to fulfill.”249[325]
Thus the modern person’s inflation of the self and loss of the self, the modern person’s unrestrained greed and plunder, mutually reinforce one another with the development of the monetary economy.
This absolute neutrality and universality of money distorts people’s understanding of individual needs and relative values. Simmel says:
“It is precisely the profit form of money that distorts people’s conception of its value. Everywhere that profit appears only in the form of so-called ‘use value,’ and everywhere that only the immediate, concrete quantity is taken into account, people’s thoughts about the increase of profit will remain within sober limits; by contrast, if this is not the case, the possibility of monetary value and the expectation of it will expand without limit. This is the basis of the essence of greed and prodigality, because both fundamentally refuse any measurement of value.”179[251]
For example, when I measure a person’s needs in a relative context, no matter whether those needs are noble or base, whether they are appetite, sexual desire, or violence, they are always limited. No matter how gluttonous a person may be, he cannot keep eating twenty-four hours a day; no matter how lustful he may be, he cannot keep making love twenty-four hours a day. These limited “desires” are different from the infinite greed supported by money. People’s greed for money far exceeds the limits of fleshly appetite and breaks the rhythm of nature. People can pursue the increase of money twenty-four hours a day, and the more of this increase the better; there is no end to it.
This “goal that is not restricted by conditions” of money “puts a wheel on modern life that can never stop turning; it turns the machine of life into a kind of ‘perpetual motion machine,’ and from this arises the agitation and frenzy so common in modern life. From the Christian perspective, Schleiermacher emphasizes: Christianity was the first to make piety and longing for God into a continuous spiritual state, whereas earlier forms of faith linked religious feeling to particular times and places. Likewise, the longing for money is such a continuous state in which the spirit presents itself within the current monetary economy.”[7]
Just as all things become uniformly equal before the absolute God, life also becomes flattened before money. “The rhythm of ancient life dissolves in modern life into a continuum that can be arbitrarily divided. The contents of life—as they become ever more expressible in money, which is absolutely continuous and indifferent to any special form—seem to split into many small parts; their integral wholeness is now completely shattered, so that any arbitrary combination and reconstruction of them becomes possible.”205[277] Money breaks the qualitative differences of value in life; the human lifeworld, like the transformation in worldview from a harmonious cosmos to an infinite universe, degenerates from an anisotropic whole into homogeneous fragments that differ only in quantity and have no direction. The characteristic of money and the “calculative character of modernity”358[444] reinforce one another.
Means—Ends
This does not mean that, in Simmel’s view, money is merely a bad invention. In fact, Simmel’s attitude toward modernity or the capitalist world is relatively mild. After all, the monetary economy first and foremost provides enormous powers of liberation, freeing human beings from all kinds of rigid relations of dependence. Money has greatly expanded the possibilities of interpersonal interaction, and the richer interaction and exchange become, the greater the space for the individual to make free choices.
The key point is that money is indeed an excellent “means,” but it should not become the ultimate “end”: “Money is the purest instrument; it is an institution or custom through which the individual can concentrate his activities and possessions in order to attain goals he cannot directly attain.”140[211]
Money is the purest means; that is to say, it possesses no quality worth possessing at all. It is not like a donkey that can turn a mill, or land that can be cultivated. The value of money is realized only in the moment it is given up (spent). Acquiring money is only for the sake of relinquishing it. “There is no symbol more clearly emblematic of the world’s absolute dynamic character than money. The meaning of money lies in being spent; when money stands still, according to its specific value and meaning, it is no longer money.”419[511]
And yet, because people have poured so much spirit into obtaining this means, this absolute means has psychologically become an absolute end, while the real ends that are realized only when money is relinquished instead “disappear from our consciousness.”161[232]
This reversal of means and ends is by no means rare. It is like a boy writing love poems in pursuit of a girl, only for the boy to become a poet and the girl to fall in love with the postman. Someone who uses mathematics to keep accounts may become fascinated by mathematics itself and become a mathematician; someone who uses writing to send messages may become fascinated by writing itself and become a calligrapher. The blockage within means often contains a new space of meaning. People sunk in means often abandon their original ends and discover new ends within the means themselves, but money is the most extreme example of this reversal, because the space embedded in this means is completely empty; it has no qualitative richness whatsoever, only sheer quantity.
Therefore, in sharp contrast to mathematics, calligraphy, and art, the new ends opened up within money do not in the least enrich the lifeworld or provide new spaces of meaning; instead, they flatten all meaning or value.
When money is regarded as some kind of static end, the world also becomes some kind of motionless plane. But money was originally the best symbol of a dynamic world. Simmel’s philosophical reflection on money is not a simple negation of money’s meaning, but rather an attempt to restore its dynamic relativity, and thereby restore the plurality of life and value, by reaffirming its significance as a “historical symbol of the relativity of existence”419[511].
[1]弗雷司庇：“论西美尔的《货币哲学》”，见西美尔：《金钱、性别、现代生活风格》，顾仁明 译，学林出版社2000年。第200页。
[2]弗雷司庇：“论西美尔的《货币哲学》”，见《金钱、性别、现代生活风格》第200页。
[3]《货币哲学》译者导言 第4页
[4]见“媒介史作为先验哲学”
[5]文中上标注明的引文皆引自 西美尔：《货币哲学》，陈戎女 耿开君 文聘元 译，华夏出版社2007年。方括号内为边码。
[6]“媒介存在论论纲”
[7]《金钱、性别、现代生活风格》12
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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