Money And Man—A Study On Simmer's Monetary Philosophy

Georg Simmel is a philosopher who has made a great contribution in the field of the philosophy of money after Marx.He treated money,a unique social existence,as the starting point,analyzed the profound changes of the modern social life,and reflected on the effect of money economy on human value of existence and life style.But different from Marx's criticism of modernity focusing on economic structure,Simmel eventually confirmed individual inner spiritual experience as the foothold of modernity.Thus,the interpretation of Simmel's money philosophy would show a contemporary echo of Marx's money philosophy from one side.Therefore,when promoting people's understanding of modernity,the comprehension of the contemporary value of Marx's philosophy is deepened.This paper treats Simmel's book—The Philosophy of Money as the main text basis and present a systematic interpretation of Simmel's money philosophy.The first part mainly inspects Simmel's view of money's essence,which is the basis and precursor of Simmel's whole money philosophy.Simmel's analysis of money essence consists of two modules.First,He firstly discovered the premise of the existence and significance of money.In the view of Simmel,society stems from the exchange behaviors between human beings and as a special social being,the significance and status of money also originates from exchange.Second,Simmel analyzed the nature of money in modern society from both external and internal aspects.The so-called external aspect means that the essence of money has been a abstract symbol of value in the field of objective practice,and the so-called internal aspect refers that money has been the ultimate goal pursued by the people on the psychological level.The second part inspects the effect of money on people's intrinsic value revealed by Simmel,which mainly includes two aspects.First,Simmel thought that money economy expanded people's freedom,which made the people free from the fixed labor relation,the mode of possessing physical property and the fixed social network.Meanwhile,money brings freedom to the person while does not bring new orientation to the person's life.It deprives the fixed content and meaning of life,but does not fill any new thing.Thus,this kind of freedom is negative.Second,Simmel pointed out that money economy reduced the value of people and object.Money economy with its no features,objectivity and universal validity becomes the measure of all values.The value of people and object are all characterized by money value.However,in fact,some special values of people and object cannot be expressed by money.The third part discusses Simmel's analysis of modern life style under the influence of money economy.Simmel thought that money economy influenced people's life style from three aspects.The first one is the rational characteristics of modern life leaded by money economy.Namely,the quantitative calculation of money economy brings the thinking of rational supremacy to modern people and emotion has less and less influence on people's life.The second one is modern “cultural tragedy” caused by money economy,namely,the differentiation of subjective and objective cultures.In the view of Simmel,the main reason of the differentiation of subjective and objective cultures is the development of the division of modern social labor and the specialization of production.The third one is the individual internal psychological experiences in modern urbanism,including calculating,cynicism,boring following by joy surfeited,reserved reserve,etc.