Money Of The Cultural Philosophy And Its Present-day Significance--A Review About The Philosophy Of Money Of Georg Simmel

In the sphere of the cultural philosophy, money, which has symbolic significance, is not merely merchant currency, but also magic power. So it is able to control both of material world and spiritual world. Obviously money that acts as dual roles supports two different directions of individual's development simultaneously. Firstly, money objectifies relations of individuals and separates the existence of individual from specific material possession and increases the distance between individual and individual. As a result that money makes the subject of interest, the medium of connection and the way of understanding, which are far, close. And it keeps individual's soul peaceful by expanding the self and the spatiality of freedom. Secondly, in people's eyes money becomes a dictator or God or a common denominator of all value unavoidably with interaction between money, money economy and the division of labor. The worst is that individual who is fully alienated finally easily loses real self and integrated self, living a modern life which is equaland quantitative and depends on money's specific property-abstraction, objectivity,unity, fungibility and universal validity. All in all, Georg Simmel revealed a widespread predicament of the modern society with the purely metaphysical mode of expressing which belongs to money, including mutually conflicting between money and individual's ideal existence, between life and form and between subjective culture and objective culture. In the trend of money economy, human can't resist money. But human enables to prevent himself from being accessory of money by developing himself allroudly and understanding and confining money like Kant did that to reason.