Abstract
This essay by the influential post-war German cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg was published originally in German in 1976 in a collection of studies on Simmel’s aesthetics. Renowned as the author of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), Work on Myth (1979), Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) and other major writings, the essay showcases Blumenberg’s unique approach to metaphorical figuration in the languages of philosophy and philosophers. Here Blumenberg considers how money stands as Simmel’s ‘proto-metaphor’ for Life in the latter’s nascent Lebensphilosophie. The very phenomenon that might seem most opposed to Life and to ‘higher’ ‘spiritual’ values is also the phenomenon that most dynamically unlocks life’s plenitude of creative forms – even as it threatens constantly to destroy this plenitude through effects of reification and objectification. As Blumenberg reads Simmel, Life itself turns out to be pure circulation, sociation, and interactivity, an endless cycle of extensions and intensifications of value emerging through processes of social exchange. The essay forms a striking counterpart to the many seminal readings of Simmel in the German critical theory tradition from Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer to Habermas.
Can a less casual use of the term ‘philosophy’ be expected from The Philosophy of Money than from the many other titles which combine the arbitrary object of their reflection with that once august term? In other words: a little more reflection and a few more general thoughts on a topic otherwise left to those who specialize in making it?
I do not know whether Georg Simmel would ever have struck a chord with his Philosophy of Money had he not gone on to invent the philosophy of life. Is that a conversion, a leap, a biographically or exogenously determined happenstance? Even if this should turn out to be the case, it remains to be seen what the philosopher of life might have brought with him from his labours on The Philosophy of Money.
For a start, the title is not only vacuous but also no more witty than any juxtaposition of elements commonly deemed to lie poles apart, such as Leriche’s much later Philosophy of Surgery. Yet if money doesn’t stink, no matter how dirty it may be, this is not least because, as something universal, it is odourless anyway, and thus particularly apt to being made an object of philosophical speculation. The universality of money is dynamic: it continually increases the degree of its own abstraction, casting aside all materiality, ever ready to pass into the pure form of the quoted price or currency rate [Notiz]. The earliest philosophical link to the theme of money was forged by the Nominalists, and it is easy to see why their attention was drawn to an object that represents substance without having to be it, or even to depict it. For all that he deploys a relativistic concept of value in The Philosophy of Money, Simmel distances himself from the Nominalistic prehistory of the philosophical treatment of money by identifying its central achievement, not in its representation of value, but in the category of the disengagement of personal functions.
If teleology was traditionally a characteristic of nature, then the teleology of money is one of the utmost artificiality: money is an institution that can never come to a standstill, since it is both impelled and threatened by its immanent telos or limit-value, its tendency to become second nature. The source of this ambivalence is the close connection between this abstract entity and the human passions. What Simmel discovered is the obverse of this situation, the affinity between the institution of money and the process of human freedom. Here, it may already be noted that Simmel’s later concept of that elementary substance, ‘life’, cannot be understood without its interchangeability with the aggregate states of freedom, to which the elementary antithesis of rigidification and liquidity pertains.
Whenever someone confers the title of ‘philosophy’ upon a treatise dealing with an unconventional topic, the question arises as to whether the philosophical perspective on this topic, and the interest taken in it by the philosopher, can be reduced to any of the classic philosophical themes. Subjectivity and objectivity? Freedom and necessity? Substance and individuality? Being and having?
The reader may initially be taken aback when I say that a philosophical theory is no more worthwhile than the descriptive achievements it makes possible by freeing its object from the limited perspective of its professional compartmentalization. When Heinrich Heine, in his pamphlet on Ludwig Börne, adds the name of Rothschild to those of the great European levellers, Richelieu and Robespierre, on the grounds that he deprived landed property of its supremacy in social relations and ‘endowed money with the prerogatives formerly reserved for land, so to speak’, the paradoxical yield of this metaphor – paradoxical in terms of the imagery – first comes with the descriptive finding: ‘Money is more fluid than water, more ethereal than air …’.
The relationship between the philosophy of money and the philosophy of life might consist in the fact that the expression ‘life’ indicates a further increase in the degree of abstraction, while at the same time also designating an actualization of the structure found in the theme of money. For the reader of The Philosophy of Money, first published (like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams) in 1900, it becomes clear that the work’s ultimate point of reference does not lie in its ostensible theme. Rather, something like a paradigm is developed here; perhaps the unfolding of a metaphor has already been observed. The more universal the topic one is discussing, the less can one proceed in discussing it by trying to keep the topic itself in view. On the contrary, generalities can best be discussed by turning away from them. If one wants to make more or less meaningful statements about such general topics as life and the cosmos, one would be well advised to select an orienting schema, a metaphor. That may entail a certain arbitrariness. It is therefore more convincing to show that, if an assault on the universal is to be ventured, one must already have the metaphor at hand. The metaphor comes first, giving access to the higher levels of abstraction in which it increasingly conceals itself as a point of orientation, and into which it finally disappears. That is why it is so instructive that Simmel wrote The Philosophy of Money and discovered everything in his theme that subsequently allowed him to talk about life. Metaphors are only reputed to have a purely illustrative function because they appear as accessories or add-ons, as dispensable trimmings and trappings. But the secondariness of metaphor is the illusion that the author generates by inverting the genetic relationship in the representation: he talks about life and has already found the metaphor of money.
We should not forget that, for Simmel, the topic of money had itself been a detour, an indirect point of entry to a more abstract theme, that of value. Value can be spoken of only inadequately, or, as I would prefer to say, only secondarily, once a guiding thread has been found. The crass difference between the two key concepts in Simmel’s intellectual development – first value, then life – is mediated by the theme of money, which was meant originally to provide access to the concept of value and ended up forcing a path to the concept of life.
In order not to leave that floating as an abstract claim, I would like now to determine the common characteristics of money and life as seen by Simmel. These are characteristics of stages in a process whose dynamism, in both cases, is immanent: rigidification and liquidity, form and dissolution, hoarding and squandering, institution and freedom, levelling out and individuality.
In 1924, writing in the journal Logos, Erich Brock remarked of Simmel: ‘In the moment when he discovered the philosophical concept of life, he grasped the self-transcendence of life; without departing from it, he arrived at the Objective.’ I would contend that this exemplary process is already prefigured in The Philosophy of Money: the peculiar objectivity of a fiction, a substitution resting entirely on a subjective and reciprocal relationship of valuation.
In 1898, Simmel reports in a letter to Heinrich Rickert on the progress of his work on The Philosophy of Money. He is despondent because he feels he has arrived at a point in his theory of value where he can go neither forwards nor backwards. The concept of value appears to me not only to contain the same regressus in infinitum as causality, but also a circulus vitiosus, since, if one pursues the connections far enough, one always finds that the value of A reposes on that of B, or that of B only on that of A. I would gladly leave it at that and declare it to be a basic form of representation that defies logical analysis – if only, just as certainly, absolute and objective values did not demand to be recognized. The solution to this difficulty that I have found in some cases fails in others, and there is no end in sight to the difficulties; for I insist that I can only stick to my relativism if it proves capable of solving all the problems posed by absolutist theories as well. (Simmel, 1958: 94)
The Philosophy of Money shows that value relativism is not something extrinsic to the problematic of money. The discovery made by Simmel is precisely that, under conditions of exchange, the reciprocity of the will in relation to objects offered up for exchange by the other necessarily implies a relationship of higher subjective value. Objective equivalences may well be postulated and institutionally fixed in the exchange, but these are no more important than the subjective non-equivalence of the objects exchanged, their potential to enrich subjective value-spheres through the transaction. Money has its function only in anticipation of this ‘value-adding’ [Wertsteigerung], which is objectified in it, as it were, by the presumption – one could almost say: the fantasy – of value. Solely this subjective element, however, represents money’s disposition to the disengagement of personal functions, in which material things are given a subjectively higher value to which no objective element corresponds.
Money levels out – provisionally, as it were – this subjectivism of value-adding. That is why Simmel traces its objectivity back to the comparability of the sum total of money with the sum total of commodities, as an ideal limit-conception. To be sure, this objectivity lies beyond the reach of the human observer; something like Laplace’s demon would be needed to apprehend both totalities and to weigh one up against the other. Yet in contrast to the natural-scientific idea of representing the totality of a universe in space and time through differential equations from the standpoint of Laplace’s demon, this is an ideal that the philosophy of money can simultaneously refer to and do without. For the totality of subjective value experiences is by no means constant; it is continuously increased by means of the objectivizing medium of money, as each subject of this sphere subjectively enriches itself upon the path of objective equivalences. One need only consider that, although the tale of Happy Hans 1 is mostly given a Rousseauistic reading and is probably also meant to be understood in this way, it can equally be interpreted as that of an extreme subjectivism of value-adding through exchange. It is only the external aspect of the different phases in the story, as it were, that everyone else profits at Hans’s expense; even if the false pedagogical will of the tale allows him to be happy through modesty, he actually owes his happiness to the arrogant subjectivism of his value-fantasy.
The empirical observer of human actions views the process of exchange under the category of reciprocity. The possibility of money rests on the fact that subjective assessments of value can still be objectively compared with each other, and indeed are objectively compared with each other on the market, even though the external observer cannot perceive the original reflexive moment of comparison. Simmel even postulated the concept of exchange for a ‘so-called solipsistic economy’, an economy, that is, in which the isolated individual is confronted directly by nature rather than by his fellow human beings. In this exchange relationship with nature, goods must be paid for by an equivalent that is both elementary and irreducible: his time. The exploitation of nature at the level of hunters and gatherers already has its price and, with regard to time, a certain measure of objectifiability. Value arises here through expenditure, through the outlay of a resource lying at one’s own disposal. Put differently, intrasubjective relations precede intersubjective relations: the subject at a given point in time trades with the same subject at a different point in time, sacrificing its present freedom of action for its future freedom of action on the basis of a primitive cost–benefit analysis. The identity of each individual life thus already rests on an objectivation of subjective valuations: does the price it must pay if it wants to be able to live and act a certain way in future stand in an appropriate relationship to that ability?
Simmel himself identified the significance of The Philosophy of Money for his thinking in its having allowed him to work through the problem of relativism: It appears to me that the current dissolution of everything substantial, absolute, and eternal into the stream of things, into historical mutability, into purely psychological reality, can only be secured against an unbridled subjectivism and scepticism if, in place of those substantially fixed values, one posits the vital interactivity [Wechselwirksamkeit] of elements, these being in turn subject to the same dissolution into the infinite. The central concepts of truth, value, objectivity, etc. revealed themselves to me as interactive realities [Wechselwirksamkeiten], contents of a relativism that now no longer signified the sceptical melting into air of all that is solid, but precisely the prevention of the same by means of a new concept of solidity (Philosophy of Money). (Simmel, 1958: 9) reduces the tragedy of competition … contributes to the noblest and most ennobling result in the historical process: to build a world that may be acquired without conflict and mutual repression, to possess values whose acquisition and enjoyment by one person does not exclude that of another, but opens the door a thousand times for him to acquire such values as well. (Simmel, 1990: 291)
In its most succinct formulation, the axiom of the increase in the absolute sum of experienced values reads as follows: ‘The objectively stable sum of values changes through a more useful distribution, effected by exchange, into a subjectively larger amount and higher measure of uses experienced’ (Simmel, 1990 [1900]: 292). The stringency of this principle is somewhat compromised by the concession that, ultimately, the reality of the exchange system is a partial one over against the system of nature. Inflow from the latter consequently prevents the immanence of value-adding in the former from appearing in all its purity. The assertion that ‘exchange effects a continuously growing utilization of the values wrested from nature at any given time’, insofar as ‘everybody offers for exchange only what is relatively useless to him, and accepts in exchange what is necessary’, is therefore not entirely unambiguous (Simmel, 1990 [1900]: 292). In order to iron out this ambiguity, Simmel rephrases his axiom under the hypothetical condition that the social interactivity system could do without any further recourse to natural resources: ‘If the world were really “given away” and all activity consisted only in the mere moving back and forth of an objectively unalterable quantity of values, then exchange would nonetheless produce, as it were, an intercellular growth of values’ (1990 [1900]: 292).
I can mention only in passing that in his logic, too – represented by the 1913 treatise, ‘The Individual Law’, and the fully revised version of 1918, View of Life – Simmel retains a crucial schema of The Philosophy of Money, namely the binding of objectivity, whether that of values or of norms, to the idea of totality, whether that of subjective valuations or of individual vital actions, so that he can formulate the ‘individual law’ in the following terms: ‘Obligation is in each case a function of the total life of the individual personality.’
Simmel is not numbered among the ‘hard’ system-builders in philosophy. He pushes his way up from the level of description to a higher level of generality, but this energy flags time and again, in much the same way that the tendency to formal consolidation and rigidification in his concept of ‘life’ is constantly draining away from the resulting sedimentations into the indeterminacy of formless liquidity. Simmel was reluctant to apply the logical rigour of a dialectic to the descriptively won phasic structure of the process represented in money, or to ascertain something like the intentional limit-value of that process. Yet it is not difficult to read Simmel in a way that brings such rigour to bear. One arrives then at formulations which Simmel would never have used, even if they set out conclusively to determine the connection between monetary function and humaneness [Humanität]. I will attempt to do just that in what follows.
The superficial grubbiness of money suggests that humaneness stands to gain when money loses in value, since everything cannot then be had for it. The truth of the matter, however, is that at the very moment when money cannot buy everything, payment must be made in what, as something human, ought to remain inalienable. In this sense, it may be said that money which cannot buy everything is worthless. The incomparable persistence of memories of devaluation clearly has something to do with the fact that money’s functional weakness first permits the standard of human-ness it founds to be experienced.
The pathology of money is linked to the intimate relationship between money and time: the downfall in monetary function means, above all, that the advantage to be drawn from the temporary deferral of satisfaction can no longer be deployed at will, but only under time constraints. The commonest proverb about this relationship – that time is money – ignores the important equivalence in our ways of relating to time and money, evident in the seemingly absurd coupling of earning and squandering. In the case of time, this equivalence appears in the effort needed to save time and the thoughtlessness with which it is spent. ‘Passing time’ [Zeitvertreib] is the predicate for practically everything we enjoy doing; ‘saving time’ [Zeitgewinn] is, directly or indirectly, the root of our most conspicuous exertions. In order to pass the time, we save it. The same is true of money: one wants to amass it in order to spend it – provided one is not a miser, that is. Precisely the time we devote to ‘pastimes’ is not measured time; whoever is passing the time stays away from clocks, since he has the time to banish [vertreiben] all thought of time. Similarly, the wish for money is connected with the limit-value of no longer having to spare it a thought.
At this point, it will be necessary to re-examine the saying that money cannot buy happiness. The law of subjective value-adding entails that this saying must be wrong, even if Simmel never states this in so many words. We are here again forced to stoop to the most odious formulations, such as the following: having money is the only definite form of happiness we can possibly name. The reason for this lies in all that can be declared the result of The Philosophy of Money: since only the pure potentiality of money can satisfy the pure subjectivity of the concept of happiness – which is not a philosophical disappointment, but rather an achievement of critique – it can be said that everyone can buy his happiness with money. And happiness consists solely in its potential to be uniquely my own. That this potential can be courted from outside, massively and blatantly in the form of the advertising campaigns so vilified by cultural criticism, does nothing to alter this. Indeed, happiness’s subjectivity is confirmed precisely by the fact that the expectation of it can be manipulated, and that this manipulability finds expression in money. The hostility and contempt directed at money rest on the supposedly attainable objectivity of the idea of happiness; if happiness really were an objective ideal, money would become superfluous and would be consigned to history, since what is objective can be procured and distributed from outside. That money does not always come to those who objectively deserve happiness is only a minor blemish compared with the fact that this one equivalent for the subjectivity of the concept of happiness exists at all. This equivalence explains why people do not just act in the blind delirium of false needs when their thinking is as pervasively influenced by the concept of money as it really is. Nothing essential can be had for money; but everything essential can be had if everything else can be bought.
For Simmel, it is self-evident that the development of money not only participates in the process of the quantification of all vital relations, above all that of science, but itself drives it forward as its purest expression. He sees this without any cultural-critical prejudice. The subject can only avoid being ground down by exchange processes to the same extent that it succeeds in detaching its qualities and achievements from itself. Analogously, in modern science, ‘substance sheds ever more of its qualities’ and so withdraws from external manipulation (Simmel, 1990 [1900]: 335). In the case of property returns, it is obvious that the monetary form enables the proprietor to stay as far away from his property as he wishes, thereby securing his independence from the norms and obligations imposed by the matter. But the commodity character of labour is also depotentiated through its quantifiability, which deprives the labour relationship of its total character; it transforms the full conscription of the person into a functional relationship that stands increasingly under objective norms with respect to a merely partial service. Simmel sees an element of freedom in the fact that the wage-labourer’s subordination: is no longer of a subjective-personal nature but is now a technical one. It is now clear that any basic liberation that lies in the transition of subordination into an objective form is very closely related to the more complete effectiveness of the money principle. (1990 [1900]: 335; translation modified)
What, under the heading of ‘disengagement’, can be summarized as the central function of money in Simmel’s account, here becomes apparent as the extra-scientific identity of quantification and objectivation. The engagement of the person (and personal identity) to work performance makes way for an exchangeable relationship: money creates a free opening where once a position had been held by birthright. Just as any particular service that the feudal lord requires his vassal to perform in person is ultimately made replaceable by money, so the individual’s specific obligations towards the community are cancelled and transformed into public services. The fundamental issue of ‘disengagement’ is not devalued or made problematic by the fact that, in reality, it is overlaid by heterogeneous factors; thus the labour price may make possible the definition of an exchangeable position, but its aspect of freedom remains latent so long as there is competition among those who need it to keep their heads above water. Simmel describes the connection between money and consciousness that obtains here in the following terms: The growing self-confidence of the modern worker is the result of the fact that he no longer feels subordinate as a person, but rather contributes only an exactly prescribed amount of work – prescribed on the basis of its monetary equivalent – which leaves the person as such all the more free, the more objective, impersonal and technical work and its regulation become. (1990 [1900]: 335)
The question of what is philosophical about this theme should not be brushed aside too quickly. It does not suffice to discover, in the theme of money, the proto-metaphor for that of life, Simmel’s most indeterminate concept. It may sound anachronistic, but I will say it nonetheless: the rank of a philosophical investigation into a special theme is at all times determined by its proximity to the great classical foundational problems of the philosophical tradition. That is why a demonstration of the inner consistency between the early topics of value and money and the late theme of money does not suffice to make clear that Simmel’s work from 1900 is one of the few written after Nietzsche that belongs (or will turn out to belong) in the canon. With Simmel, I contend, we can make the observation that, in the application of the early metaphorics of money to the late concept of ‘life’, profit and loss are to be compared in a manner that is significant for all philosophical processes: the explanatory achievement of the highest degree of abstraction is trivially universal, but for its part no longer comprehensible. In this respect, the concept of life anticipates the more recent conception of a history of Being. Thus, Simmel can speak of a ‘great turning’ in the process of life, in which: the forms of the functions that life has brought forth for its own sake, from out its own dynamic … become independent and definitive in such a way that, conversely, life comes to serve them, to invest its contents in them. The success of this investment may be considered no less final a fulfillment of value and meaning than, previously, the integration of these forms in the economy of life. (Simmel, 1916/17: 104)
Such a ‘great axial shift of life’ represents yet another rationally indispensable attempt to arrive at the all-encompassing One, Life, Being. As such, it betrays the same bafflement that had earlier resulted from the personalization of the ultimate authority under the title of God’s unfathomable wisdom, hiddenness and absolute will. The difference between the philosophy of money and the philosophy of life lies in the fact that the same determinations which, in the case of life, can only be accepted as given, declared the fateful and unpacifiable restlessness of life in each of its realizations, its inclination and its resistance to formal rigidification, can still be descriptively grasped in the case of money. Here, they appear as the juxtaposition of a gain in possibility with a loss in reality, of entitlement with renunciation, as the emancipation of the individual at the cost of the functionalization of its qualities. To that extent, the path from the philosophy of money to the philosophy of life is itself a paradigm of the latter.
Is it permitted, then, to speak of The Philosophy of Money as one of the last forms of secularized theology? Leaving aside the problematic of the category of secularization, one can answer here: no, precisely because this philosophy produced its dissatisfaction with itself in the form of the philosophy of life, which is something like a philosophy of the becoming god. But also because the attribute of omnipotence cannot be represented in the mere value equivalence of the sum total of commodities, and this by virtue of the plurality of competing wishes and ideas, whose utopian arbitration or monistic simplification would immediately make the medium of money null and void. It is certainly no coincidence that the theory of money had its first high-point at the time and in the school of late medieval Nominalism, since the pure thought of abstract power had to arise before the idea of its connection with needs and wishes could be made. It is perfectly obvious that the critique of omnipotence which was contained in Nominalism and followed upon it as well, inaugurating modern rationalism, was perpetuated in the critique of what was seen to be the placeholder of omnipotence, money. Marx introduced the subsequently so successful term ‘secularization’ to account for how money, as ‘the alienated essence of man’s labour and his existence’, rules over him and is worshipped by him: ‘The God of the Jews has been secularized …’ (Marx, 1975 [1843]). Simmel, remaining at the level of description, speaks instead of ‘the similarity in psychological form between the highest economic and the highest cosmic unity’, upon which the hostility of the latter power’s clientele towards the former’s is based (Simmel, 1990 [1900]: 237).
The descriptive ‘Philosophy of Money’, if not the concept of money itself, contains perhaps the conclusive critique of the idea of omnipotence, an idea from which the Modern Age took its departure and which it constantly had to work away at. Even enthusiasts for this idea discover the destructive absurdity that omnipotence, in its consequential realization, could do nothing other than reproduce itself, passing from its monism into its dualism and thereby negating itself in its decisive characteristic, since it can now no longer do everything. Omnipotence, understood as performative, would either have to impose its own limitations upon itself or discover them in what it had brought about. This consideration is intimately connected with the problematic of money. Anthropology, unlike theological metaphysics, can afford to insist on the attraction of pure possibilities and to speak of the disappointment of accomplished reality. Money allows a disappointing reality to be taken back into the indeterminacy of mere possibility. The contempt with which the miser has been treated at all times derives from a lack of understanding of his enjoyment of pure possibility. The interest of the others lies in disproving that they are misers themselves. In a letter to Sigmund Freud from 16 September 1930, Arnold Zweig describes the difficulties that resulted when he had to assume the role of head of household: on the one hand, he felt himself compelled to show that he was not mean; on the other, he could write out a cheque with the greatest ease, ‘since that does not look like money’, whereas he parted with a bank note only with the greatest reluctance, ‘because that is real money’ (Freud and Zweig, 1970: 17). The remark is instructive, but it is also naïve. After all, bank notes had aroused far greater mistrust by greatly increasing the ease with which princes and ministers could put ever more money into circulation, henceforth stimulating the tendency to take refuge in ‘real money’ in the form of coins, even if these were copper pennies or the cheapest alloys.
Money’s relationship to the great themes of metaphysics extends to that of immortality as well. The following two thoughts are to be found written one after the other in Voltaire’s notebook: man is the only organism that knows it must die, and death ensures that the secret fantasy of the miser will be carried out by someone else, his heir (Voltaire, 1952: II 502). What an association for someone so intimately familiar with money, and with potential heirs, to make! Knowledge of one’s own mortality and the capacity to invent money are linked in the achievement of the concept, which allows us to think what is not present as well as what can never be experienced in the first place. Being able to think of myself as no longer existing, to imagine the world as continuing to exist in my absence, is, as a conceptual achievement, no less unique than the monetary achievement of making unattainable and unavailable objects potentially available, without – as in the case of the miser – this ever having to be put to the test. Miserliness is the maximization of this abstraction: reaching beyond his own death, the miser can bequeath to his heirs the absoluteness of the demands he makes on the possible.
The proximity of money to the knowledge of death and immortality consists, as we have seen, only in the mediacy of the concept. The affinity of The Philosophy of Money to the canon of classical philosophical questions culminates in the analogy between conceptual achievement and monetary function. In this analogy, ‘the incomparable significance of money for the evolutionary process of the practical mind can be localized’ (Simmel, 1990 [1900]: 221). Simmel describes it thus: What one might term the tragedy of human concept formation lies in the fact that the higher concept, which through its breadth embraces a growing number of details, must count upon increasing loss of content. Money is the perfect practical counterpart of such a higher category, namely a form of being that endows these qualities with real power, and whose relation to all the contrary qualities of the objects transacted and to their psychological constellations can be equally interpreted as service and as domination. (1990 [1900]: 221)
In this regard, I find it incomparably meaningful that, at the end of his own life, Simmel saw this life, and the fruit of his labours in philosophical teaching, under the metaphor of money: I know that I will die without any intellectual heirs (and that is a good thing). My legacy is like one consisting entirely of cash and distributed among many heirs, each of whom invests his share in a living that accords with his nature: it shows no sign of its provenance in that legacy. (1923: 1)
Translated by Robert Savage
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
This essay was originally published under the title ‘Geld oder Leben: Eine metaphorologische Studie zur Konsistenz der Philosophie Georg Simmels’, in Hannes Böhringer and Karlfried Gründer (eds) Ästhetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, 121–34. It was reprinted in Anselm Haverkamp (ed.) Hans Blumenberg: Ästhetische und Metaphorologische Schriften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001, 177–92.