III.4. [Money]

[XLI] If man’s feelings, passions, etc., are not merely anthropological determinations in the [narrower] sense, but truly ontological affirmations of essence (of nature), and if they really affirm themselves only because their object exists sensuously for them, then it is clear (1) that the mode of their affirmation is by no means one and the same, but that the different mode of affirmation rather forms the peculiar character of their existence, of their life; the way the object exists for them is the peculiar mode of their enjoyment; (2) where the sensuous affirmation is the immediate supersession of the object in its independent form (eating, drinking, working up the object, etc.), this is the affirmation of the object; (3) in so far as man is human, and so his feeling, etc., is also human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own enjoyment; (4) only through developed industry, that is, through the mediation of private property, does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of man’s practical activity of himself; (5) the meaning of private property, freed from its estrangement, is the existence of essential objects for man, as objects both of enjoyment and of activity.

Money, since it has the property of buying everything, the property of appropriating all objects, is therefore the object possessed in the eminent sense. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being; it therefore counts as an omnipotent being… Money is the pander between need and object, between man’s life and his means of life. But what mediates my life for me also mediates for me the existence of other men for me. For me it is the other person.

“What the devil! Of course your hands and feet / And head and backside, those are yours! / But all that I enjoy afresh, / Is it for that the less my own? / If I can pay for six stallions, / Are not their powers mine? / I race along and am a proper man, / As if I had twenty-four legs.” Goethe, Faust (Mephistopheles)

Shakespeare in Timon of Athens:

“Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, / I am no idle votarist… / Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, / Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. / … Why, this / Will lug your priests and servants from your sides, / Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads: / This yellow slave / Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed, / Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves / And give them title, knee and approbation / With senators on the bench: this is it / That makes the wappen’d widow wed again; / She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores / Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices / To the April day again. Come, damned earth, / Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds / Among the rout of nations…”

And further on:

“O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce / ’Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler / Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars! / Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer, / Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow / That lies on Dian’s lap! thou visible god, / That solder’st close impossibilities, / And makest them kiss! that speak’st with every tongue, [XLII] / To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts! / Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue / Set them into confounding odds, that beasts / May have the world in empire!”

Shakespeare depicts the essence of money excellently. To understand him, let us begin by interpreting the passage from Goethe.

What exists for me through money, what I can pay for, that is, what money can buy, that I am, I, the owner of the money. As great as the power of money, so great is my power. The properties of money are my properties and essential powers, the properties and powers of its owner. What I am and what I can do is therefore by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful woman. So I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money. I, as an individual, am lame, but money gets me twenty-four feet; so I am not lame. I am a bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, mindless man, but money is honoured, and so is its owner. Money is the highest good, so its owner is good; money besides saves me the trouble of being dishonest, so I am presumed honest. I am mindless, but money is the real mind of all things; how then could its owner be mindless? Besides, he can buy himself clever people, and is not he who has power over the clever cleverer than the clever? Do not I, who through money can do everything the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, then, turn all my incapacities into their opposite?

If money is the bond that binds me to human life, that binds society to me, that binds me to nature and to men, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and tie all bonds? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation? It is the true Scheidemünze, at once small change and the coin that divides, as well as the true binding agent, the [one word illegible] chemical power of society.

Shakespeare brings out two properties of money in particular:

(1) It is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural properties into their opposite, the universal confusion and inversion of things; it fraternises impossibilities.

(2) It is the universal whore, the universal pander of men and peoples.

The inversion and confusion of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities, the divine power of money, lies in its essence as the estranged, alienating and self-alienating species-being of men. It is the alienated capacity of mankind.

What I cannot do as a man, what all my individual essential powers cannot do, I can do by means of money. Money therefore turns each of these essential powers into something it is not in itself, that is, into its opposite.

If I long for a particular dish, or want to take the mail coach because I am not strong enough to make the journey on foot, money gets me the dish and the mail coach; that is, it transforms my wishes from things of the imagination, it translates them from their thought, imagined, willed existence into their sensuous, real existence, from imagination into life, from imagined being into real being. As this mediation, [money] is the truly creative power.

Demand (demande) also exists, to be sure, for the man who has no money, but his demand is a mere thing of the imagination, which has no effect, no existence, for me, for a third party, for the [others], [XLIII] and so remains unreal and objectless even for me myself. The difference between effective demand, based on money, and ineffective demand, based on my need, my passion, my wish, etc., is the difference between being and thinking, between the mere idea existing within me and the idea as it exists for me outside me as a real object.

If I have no money for travel, I have no need to travel, that is, no real and self-realising need. If I have a vocation for study but no money for it, I have no vocation for study, that is, no effective, no true vocation. On the other hand, if I really have no vocation for study but have the will and the money, I have an effective vocation for it. Money, as the external, universal means and capacity (one that does not come from man as man, nor from human society as society) to turn imagination into reality and reality into mere imagination, turns real human and natural essential powers into merely abstract ideas, and so into imperfections, tormenting chimeras, just as on the other hand it turns real imperfections and chimeras, the individual’s essential powers that are really impotent and exist only in his imagination, into real essential powers and capacities. By this determination alone, then, it is already the universal inversion of individualities, which turns them into their opposite and attaches to their properties properties that contradict them.

As this inverting power it then also appears against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., that claim to be essences in their own right. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, intelligence into idiocy.

Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges all things, it is the universal confounding and exchanging of all things, and so the inverted world, the confounding and exchanging of all natural and human qualities.

He who can buy bravery is brave, even if he is a coward. Since money is exchanged not for a particular quality, a particular thing or particular human essential powers, but for the whole objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its owner it exchanges every property for every other, even for the property and object that contradicts it; it is the fraternisation of impossibilities; it forces contradictories to kiss.

Assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust only for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to have influence on other people, you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect on others. Every one of your relations to man, and to nature, must be a particular expression of your real individual life, corresponding to the object of your will. If you love without evoking love in return, that is, if your loving as loving does not produce love in return, if through your expression of life as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent, a misfortune. [XLIII]