Monday, January 22, 2024

Money Wisdom #516

The strange irony of the concept of ecology in Western history is that while "nature" precedes all human activity by billions of years, the ecological concept is invented many millennia after economic thought.  In other words, we perennial moderns have been thinking about the regulation of wealth vis-a-viz oikos (the household) since we first distorted our tongues to form words. But we only expanded this notion to include the earth and the cosmos, in an explicit and self conscious way, in the nineteenth century, with Haeckel's coining of the term. Of course, this is a very Eurocentric narrative. But it is precisely this narrative that both shapes and limits thinking ecologically today, in the corridors of power (as well as the living rooms of the disenfranchised). It is as if "we" invented the term the moment at which nature "itself" threatened to truly disappear from under our feet. We can only think "ecologically" as a consequence, when we let go of profoundly romantic notions of (mother) nature. Which is to say that the belated coining of the term ecology signals the realization that we in the so-called West were very late to think about the material and vital surrounds as anything other than the picturesque background of culturally foregrounded activity. Nevertheless, this very modern concept - describing the deep temporality of our given milieu - allows us to reorientate ourselves to the very same, hopefully with a less hubristic and narcissistic attitude.   

Dominic Pettman Peak Libido (2021) p.15

Money Wisdom #515

..[N]ow, in our time, the problem of money has to be faced as a problem of consciousness, as a problem of the being of man in the universal world. It is more than just a psychological or social problem which one strives to correct in advance of attending to questions of the spirit. It has become the key to understanding the great purpose of human life and what, precisely, prevents us from participating in that great purpose. 

Because money is a problem that enters into the whole of human life, it cannot be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion on the level at which it presents itself - pragmatically, psychologically, or moralistically - anymore than one can escape from prison by visiting the prison psychologist or social worker and improving the conditions inside the prison walls.

Jacob Needleman Money and the Meaning of Life (1991) p.4

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Money Wisdom #514

 "What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit from a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will."


David Graeber & David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything (2021) p.161

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Money Wisdom #513

"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself. 

As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto, 

[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics."

Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative? (2009) p.8

Friday, September 29, 2023

Money Wisdom #512

"Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads."

Mark Fisher Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative? (2009) p.17

Thursday, July 6, 2023

Money Wisdom #511

 "Money has value only when immanent in circulation (payment or exchanges), but on the other hand seems to be a stable, value-embodying substance only as a transcendent entity, by being withheld from circulation, possessed. Circulation is necessarily communal, whereas possession is generally by the individual. Our thinkers (whether Greek or Indian) vary in the extent to which their cosmisation of money is of circulation (i.e. from a communal perspective) or of value (i.e. from an individual perspective). [We can] describe theses cosmisations in the descending order of their prioritisation of circulation by Herakleitos and ending with the extreme prioritisation of value by Parmenides. But each of the two essences of money (exchanged and possessed value) produces when projected onto the world an unacceptably one-sided account (Herakleitos excludes stable identity, Parmenides excludes motion and multiplicity). This presents an intellectual problem. But in practice money must both have value and the power to circulate: the two aspects interpenetrate. And so we shall see that in fact comisations of ciculation cannot exclude value and cosmisations of value cannot exclude circulation." 

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.322

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Money Wisdom #510

 "The single, invisible, homogeneous power that inheres in money is uniquely responsive to my will, and so occupies the boundary between internal and external space, closer to my inner self than are the objects I possess."

 Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.309

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Money Wisdom #509

 "As for psychology and politics, a crucial part in Plato's account is played by the desire for money, which is - beyond even the unruly desires of the body - unlimited. That is, as recognised earlier by Solon, potentially disruptive of the polis. Plato recognises that it is also potentially disruptive of psuchë. The two superior parts of the psuchë - the rational and the spirited - will, he says, always preside over the third, appetitive part, 'which is most of the psuchë in each person and by nature most insatiable for money'. It must be controlled by the rational philosophic part of the psuchë, just as in the polis the money-making class must be controlled by the class of philosophers. But the appetitive and money-loving element may dominate the inner self. Socrates in the Apology contrasts maximising wealth with perfecting the psuchë.

Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.302


Monday, July 3, 2023

Money Wisdom #508

 "The ideal entities having shed matter through the process of abstraction are not in a direct sense part of the empirical world... the ideal entities of the cultural and religious world are made part of the self, or, with other words, they transform the self in accordance with their nature."

Cavallin (2013) p.96 quoted in Richard Seaford
The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.287 

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Money Wisdom #507

 "...the first substance to function simultaneously as a general measure of value, a general means of payment and of exchange and general store of value was the coined money that first became generally used early in sixth-century BCE Ionia, of which the commercial centre was Miletos. And so the revolution in thought marked by presocratic cosmology occurred at exactly the same time and in exactly the same place as the first society in history to be pervasively monetised."

 Richard Seaford The Origins of Philosophy in Ancient Greece and Ancient India (2020) p.253