4.1Economics and chrematistics

The first question is whether what humans lack for living well, the desiderata of existence, are finite or infinite. Do human needs and wants have a limit or are they are limitless? This is a question which concerned both Plato and Aristotle. As already discussed in Chapter 2, both posit the ontogenesis of human society on the satisfaction of an increasingly elaborate, diversified network of needscum-wants-cum-desires proceeding hand in hand with ongoing refinements in the division of labour. In the case of Plato, his Politeia describes how the ever-increasing complex of necessaries and conveniences of life leads ultimately to war among cities over resources for fulfilling the felt needs of their populaces when they “overstep the horizon of what is necessary and strive for limitless possession of goods” (ἐπὶ χρημάτων κτῆσιν ἄπειρον, ὑπερβάντες τὸν τῶν ἀναγκαίων ὅρον; Rep. 373d).

This overstepping of the bounds of what is necessary is echoed also in Aristotle. In his Politics he says with regard to “true wealth” (ἀληθινὸς πλοῦτος) that the “self-sufficiency of such property for good living is not limitless” (ἡ γὰρ τῆς τοιαύτης κτήσεως αὐτάρκεια πρὸς ἀγαθὴν ζωὴν οὐκ ἄπειρος ἐστιν; Pol. I iii 1256b31). Aristotle thus distinguishes between two different ways of acquiring wealth, one which is integrated within the management of a household and has its limits in the needs arising from maintaining the way of life of that household, and another art of acquiring wealth which is a striving to gain wealth for its own sake and is therefore without limit. Aristotle calls the art of household management οἰκονομική or ‘economics’ and the art of gaining wealth and property for its own sake χρηματιστική (1256a12), ‘chrematistics’. Both these ways of acquiring property take place within the social interplay of exchange. A further way of acquiring apart from exchange which crops up in both Plato (Rep. 373d) and Aristotle (Pol. I iii 1256b27) is that of warfare (πόλεμος) which consists in appropriating the wealth of others through brute military force.

Two millennia later, Karl Marx takes up this Aristotelean distinction in his opus magnum when distinguishing between the simple circulation of commodities on the one hand, and the circulation of money as capital, on the other. The simple circulation of commodities has the formula C1-M-C2, or selling a certain commodity in order to buy another for the satisfaction of a felt lack. The circulation of money as capital, on the other hand, has the inverted formula M1-C-M2, where M2 is greater than M1, or buying commodities in order to make more money out of their subsequent sale.53 In the simple circulation of commodities, on the one hand, it is supposedly the usefulness of the respective commodities and the modest acquisition of specific commodities for the fulfilment of needs which are at the focus of attention and the motivating end for the exchange. Money is only a means of exchange, i.e. a means for exchanging one commodity for the other for the sake of satisfying a need through the commodity’s use-value. In the circulation of money as capital, on the other hand, the usefulness of the commodities is only a vehicle for money-making. The commodities are here only a means for the putatively ever-restless, endless end of the augmentation of money. Money is no longer a mere means of exchange but is the universal representation of wealth itself in a quantitative form with the potential and potency (δύναμις) to lay a claim on any goods at will.

There is thus an excessiveness lying at the heart of dealings with money, and this excessiveness is nothing other than human wanting to have more. Such wanting-to-have-more (πλεονεξία 359c) plays a role throughout Plato’s discussion of justice in his Politeia. Such a desire for more goes beyond a more in order to satisfy a want, but is the desire for more as such. The human psyche is not merely finitely needy, as all socialist ideology would have it, but infinitely desirous. Even in the simple circulation of commodities mediated by money there is nothing to hinder modest need turning into blatantly immoderate desire for luxurious things. Nevertheless, with the circulation of money as capital, this desire for more, now abstracted or unhinged from the fulfilment of a specific need or want, is purely quantitative and finds its adequate object in money itself, which is the abstract, quantitative embodiment of wealth (even though the money be ultimately merely digital digits stored in an electronic bank account or block-chain). Desire itself has become abstractly quantitative, abstracted from the specific usefulness of goods, unhinged from the end of living modestly well along with the unhinging of the human psyche itself. This abstraction goes hand in hand with the inversion of the simple circulation of commodities into the circulation of capital, an endlessly self-augmenting principal sum.

The desire to have more is ultimately the desire for mere potential, potency and social power as embodied in money-capital as reified value-in-movement and, once achieved through one circuit of capital, can only repeat itself — over and over again, the pure ἐνέργεια or energy of money at work in self-augmentation. The self-augmentation of money as capital is endless, borne as it is by an endlessly desirous will to have abstractly more: πλεονεξία. Since excessive wealth exceeds what can be used in the usages of life, it is had (ἔχειν) only as a potential and a possibility (δυνάμει), as a power and potency (δύναμις) which gives its possessor influence through being at work (ἐνεργείᾳ) in mere self-augmentation. There is no ἐντελέχεια of money-capital in the sense of a final, perfect presence in which the movement of self-augmentation has attained its end and come to rest and to which nothing further could be added; the movement can never have (ἔχειν) itself in its end (τέλος) in an attained, perfected presence, but rather, money-capital only attains its ἐντελέχεια in the endless movement itself; ἐνέργεια and ἐντελέχεια are one and the same in this case.

Are these references to the satisfaction of need and desire, and the acquisition of wealth in Plato, Aristotle and Marx merely the citation from doxographic sources in the history of ideas, or do they indicate something essential about historico-temporal human being itself? Is human being in its whoness characterized essentially by a limitless striving to have more? Is human being boundless in this regard? Is such a condition of boundlessness an historical, anthropological invariant, or could bounds be set to human acquisitiveness from within human who-being itself? Are there historical societies in which desirous greed was not a feature? For the West at least — and not only the West —, this question can be confidently denied. Aristotle points out that the limitless striving to accumulate wealth arises from “the striving for life, but not for the good life” (τὸ σπουδάζειν περὶ τὸ ζῆν ἀλλὰ μὴ τὸ εὖ ζῆν; 1257b 41). And what is this good life which could of itself set a limit? For Aristotle, the best way of life was the theoretical, philosophical life devoted to contemplating the beingness of beings, and thus a kind of frugal, self-sufficient existence, but this is hardly a proposal for living well in society as a whole. It is the exception.

Another answer is given perhaps by Sophocles’ Antigone in which he provides an essential outline of human being itself. The famous chorus sketches the seemingly limitless scope of human enterprise which finds a way to overcome almost any obstacle. However, “From Hades alone will he not be granted any escape” (Ἄιδα μόνον φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται; 360). Death is the ultimate limit and horizon for mortal human being in its whoness. The good life takes its measure and its stand in keeping death in view. The accumulation of wealth, too, can only find its limit in regarding the bounds of human existence which lie in the inevitability of death and the mortal time span which death stakes out for each individual existence striving to be somewho. But, says Aristotle, “since the longing of the heart for life is limitless, so too do people long in their hearts without limit for what makes for living” (εἰς ἄπειρον οὖν ἐκείνης τῆς ἐπιθυμίας οὔσης, καὶ τῶν ποιητικῶν ἀπείρων ἐπιθυμοῦσιν; 1258a1). This longing and urging of the heart (ἐπιθυμία) for life and to avoid death is expressed also in Sophocles’ lines, but conversely, in formulating the inevitability of death, “From Hades alone will he not be granted any escape, Even having thought out a way to flee untreatable illnesses” (Ἄιδα μόνον φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται· νόσων δ’ ἀμηχάνων φυγὰς ξυμπέφρασται; 361). Human beings willingly postpone the thought of their own dying, and in this postponement and forgetting of their own mortality, they strive endlessly for riches as the means for living, as if they would live forever, perhaps dynastically through their children. They seek all possible means to overcome even apparently incurable illnesses, or they strive for an Ersatz-immortality in their offspring. Modern medicine, too, is driven by the will to stretch the limits of human mortality. The self-moving motivation of life — the striving and stretching and reaching out of appetite (ὄρεξις) and desire (ἐπιθυμία) for the ὀρεκτόν, the thing reached out for and striven for — in itself strives boundlessly, even without the entrance of self-augmenting capital that facilitates this endless striving. Capital per se is not to blame for unfulfillable human desiring.

The potential to gain access to all the possible means of living, whether they be means of enjoyment or means for prolonging life, is crystallized in money as the representation and embodiment of wealth and the universal reified power for acquiring any particular valuable, useful thing. There is thus an inherent ambivalence in money: firstly, as a means for living by providing the necessary access to the means of life and secondly, as an abstract end in itself whose possession provides the abstract potential of concretion in useful, valuable things and whose endless accumulation therefore becomes the motive for furthering the movement of self-augmentation of money as capital. The endless, circular, self-augmenting movement of money as capital would thus seem to be motivated on the side of human beings by an endless striving for immortality, or at least by an endless denial of mortality, as if the circle of human life could partake of the seemingly eternal circular movements of the stars, at least through the natural cycle of propagation of oneself in one’s progeny. But it is not enough just to feel oneself a part of an endless natural cycle of progeneration; one’s Ersatz-immortality can only be realized by passing on one’s family name — that kernel of whoness — to one’s own progeny who will continue to bear it down through the ages. When thought from the ontological dimension of whoness, immortality becomes an immortality of one’s being as who as expressed in one’s proper name that can have a more or less illustrious and long history of which its bearer is proud.

The possibility of Ersatz-immortality aside, what do people do as long as they are alive? They strive to have more, thus turning money from a means into a motivating end in itself, for wealth itself enhances one’s own who-status and self-esteem. Is that necessarily a bad thing, measured against the yardstick of living well? The striving to have more is expressed above all in the gainful activity of wealth-making which Aristotle calls chrematistics (χρηματιστική). The Greek word, τὸ χρῆμα, means ‘thing’ in the broadest sense, including ‘issue’, ‘undertaking’, ‘event’, but also, in the plural, it signifies ‘goods’, ‘money’, ‘wealth’. Chrematistics is contrasted with economics (οἰκονομική; 1257b20), which latter is the art of wealth-making in accordance with nature (κατὰ φύσιν; 1257b20) and has its end (τέλος) in living well or the good life (εὖ ζῆν or ἀγαθὴ ζωή; 1256b32). Aristotle says that this natural art of wealth-making has an end and a limit in which it comes to rest, “just as in the other arts” (ὥσπερ καὶ ταῖς ἄλλαις τέχναις; 1256b34).

The question is, however, whether economics or chrematistics, as arts of “making riches” (ποιητικὴ πλούτου; 1257b8) or arts of (limited or unlimited, respectively) “acquisition” (τέχνη κτητική 1256b38), are arts in the paradigmatic Greek sense as a knowledge for bringing forth a definite, foreseen end, for there is clearly a difference between the know-how involved in making a bedstead or a house and the know-how required to ‘produce’, i.e. gain, wealth or money. The difference resides in the essential double character of goods themselves which are, on the one hand, primarily good for a certain purpose or useful in a definite context of application within a certain customary practice of life and, on the other, are derivatively ‘good’ for gaining money by way of producing and trading. This double-sided or Janus-faced goodness of goods is referred to in political economy as use-value, on the one hand, and exchange-value, on the other (cf. Chapter 5 on the ontology of exchange for more details).

Whereas the use-value of goods can be reliably produced by a technically effective process of production in the proper sense, as a potential inherent in the product itself, whereby the use-value of means of production is employed according to well-defined knowledge of the production process, the exchange-value of goods cannot be produced reliably by a technical production process because exchange-value is only realized or put to work (ἐνεργείᾳ, ‘energized’) in the exchange for other goods or money. This otherness is not within the knowing, controlling reach of the potential of the goods in question to be exchanged. The production of exchange-value cannot be set up simply as a technical production process, since the production or bringing-forth of exchange-value is in truth a turning-out-to-be, i.e. exchange-value turns out to be what it is, both qualitatively (in being saleable at all) and quantitatively (in the amount of money, or price attained by the goods) in exchange on the market.54 This simple, but crucial, insight holds true just as much for Aristotle’s times as it does for our own, in which the capitalist mode of economic life, including both capitalist production and capitalist markets, prevails, despite all the conspicuous and deep differences in the historical constellations constituted by the socioontological elements in different places at different times.

The art of making money is an art sui generis whose knowledge is not reliable, but rather exposed to the contingency of markets. It is the merchant’s art. This means that the art of making money is strictly speaking not a τέχνη (ποιητική) in Plato’s sense, but rather merely an empirical skill (ἐμπειρία). Plato distinguishes between an art (τέχνη) and an empirical skill in that the latter “does not have any defining insight into what it brings to bear, what its nature is, and therefore does not have the cause of each [in its power] to say” (τέχνην δὲ οὔ φημι εἶναι ἀλλ’ ἐμπειρίαν· ὅτι οὐκ ἔκει λόγον οὐδένα ᾧ προσφέρει ἃ προσφέρει ὁποῖ" ἄττα τὴν φύσιν ἐστίν, ὥστε τὴν αἰτίαν ἑκάστου μὴ ἔχειν εἰπεῖν, Gorgias 465a) and is “simply a retained memory of what usually happens” (μνήμην μόνον σῳζομένη τοῦ εἰωθότος γίγνεσθαι, Gorgias 501b). Because exchange-value cannot be produced like use-value, money-making or wealthmaking is not an art based on insight into the causes which bring forth exchange-value, i.e. to which exchange-value is indebted (αἰτία), but is rather, in Plato’s terminology, an empirical skill based on a retained memory of what usually happens, of observed regularities, especially in the market (even when today they may be modelled mathematically as stochastic processes or by learning-algorithms unleashed onto enormous quantities of merely empirical data). One can only say that, based on experience, a produced good is generally worth such-and-such and can be actively marketed at such-and-such a price, but such experiential knowledge of regularity is subject to contingency (κατὰ συμβεβηκός) and variation and is thus not only unreliable, but is essentially lacking genuine, controlling insight (λόγος) and foresight. Because economics in both the ancient and modern sense is essentially concerned inter alia with the exchange-value of goods in the broadest sense, including services, it cannot be a science in the proper (Aristotelean) sense as a knowledge of causes or first principles. Rather, it can only develop empirical methods (including, today, sophisticated mathematical statistical methods using supercomputers to uncover regularities in so-called ‘big data’) which provide pseudo-knowledge that may or may not be reliable for the most part, i.e. as a rule, but which lacks essential insight into any final causes.55

In switching perspective to the capitalist market economies prevalent today, we can say that money-making in the guise of capitalist enterprise is indeed an enterprise subject to the uncertainties of the market-place where exchange-value is realized. Such uncertainty and contingency are essential to exchange-value, for exchange-value depends upon what others are prepared to give for certain goods of a given quality and quantity on the market at a specific point in time. No reliable knowable causes quantitatively determining exchange-value can be specified. All calculations of prices that can be realized on the market and all price functions that express price, say, as a function of demand quantity, have only relative, empirical reliability which may suddenly turn out to be completely off the mark. (This line of thought will be deepened, i.e. simplified, in Chapter 5, in which an ontology of exchange interplay in connection with the ontology of whoness will be presented. There it will be seen more clearly and deeply in what the essential lack of insight consists and how the valuing of whats is related to the valuing of whos.)

Apart from the question as to whether the art of making money can be a science or a genuine τέχνη ποιητική in the sense of a reliable, fore-knowing knowhow, the point here in the first place is that money-making need not have an end in which it comes to rest, “just as in the other arts” (1256b34). To return to the above distinction between economics and chrematistics: Does the endless pursuit of money necessarily imply a denial of one’s own mortality? Is there a measure to money-making residing in living well that dictates that the getting of money for its own sake is necessarily a perversion of human living? Can the endless cycle of making money simply be a form of social movement rather than an activity undertaken for a specific, finite end? Can one live beyond oneself in making money, not only, say, for the sake of one’s children, but for the sake of how money-making lubricates, facilitates an economy as a whole and contributes to the well-being of the economy as a whole, i.e. to the well-being of other social players, by keeping the interplay of earning one’s living going and enhancing the mode of play? Is the role of entrepreneurial capitalist as the mobilizer of money as capital a socially useful and commendable one that can be regarded as a valuable profession along with others, despite or precisely because it is the business of keeping capital augmenting in endless circuits? Can the entrepreneur dedicating his or her life to running a successful enterprise with continually growing profits be congruent with enhancing the well-being of society, or is this incessant preoccupation with growing the enterprise and the accumulation of wealth a perversion of what economic life, both personally and on the social level, could or should be about? We will take up these questions again in later sections, starting with Chapter 4.6.

4.2Weber’s conception of economic activity

The Aristotelean distinction between household management and moneymaking is echoed not only in Karl Marx’s thinking, but also in the modern positivist social sciences of economics and sociology. Thus, for example, we find in Max Weber’s Economy and Society56 the same distinction in social economic action between the orientation of a “household” toward the satisfaction of need (Bedarfsdeckung, WGII § 15 S. 64), on the one hand, and the orientation of an “enterprise” toward gain as such (Erwerb, WGII § 11 S. 48), on the other. Economic action itself is defined as peaceful social action oriented toward catering to the desire for useful benefits (Nutzleistungen, WGII § 1 S. 31). Useful benefits themselves are, “in becoming the object of caring and providing for oneself, what are assessed to be, by one or several economic actors, as the concrete, individual (real or presumed) chances of present or future use” (die von einem oder mehreren Wirtschaftenden als solche geschätzten konkreten einzelnen zum Gegenstand der Fürsorge werdenen (wirklichen oder vermeintlichen) Chancen gegenwärtiger oder künftiger Verwendungsmöglichkeiten, WGII § 2 S. 34) which, as potential means for the ends of the economic actors, become the orientation for the actors’ activities. The final end of the economic actors is what they regard to be the enhancement of their existence, in Aristotelean language, “good living”, or in modern parlance, the maintenance and improvement of their standard of living. Such useful benefits “can be the benefits provided by non-human (objective) things or the services of humans” (können Leistungen nicht menschlicher (sachlicher) Träger oder Leistungen von Menschen sein, WGII:34.).

The orientation of social action toward useful benefits in the context of taking care of one’s own is thus an orientation toward chances (κατὰ συμβεβηκός) in the double sense of a potential (δύναμις) and opportunity, but one that is exposed to uncertainty or risk. The risk resides not only in failing to gain power of disposal, but also in the hoped-for useful benefits not being forthcoming. Similarly, gainful activity is defined as “action oriented toward the chances of (once-only or regularly recurring: continual) gaining new power of disposal over goods” (ein an den Chancen der (einmaligen oder regelmäßig wiederkehrenden: kontinuierlichen) Gewinnung von neuer Verfügungsgewalt über Güter orientiertes Verhalten, WGII § 11 S. 48). The reference to “new” here means that gainful activity is oriented always toward an augmentation of power, toward a more, i.e. more potential for disposing over goods. Such a striving for more is essentially purely quantitative and can therefore be termed purely capitalist. Gainful activity, Weber says, is economic if it is oriented toward peaceful chances of such gain and it is market economic activity if it is oriented toward chances or opportunities provided by market situations (Marktlagen, WGII:48). The market situation of a commodity is said to be “the totality of chances or opportunities of exchange for money by purchase or sale recognizable in a given situation for those interested in exchange in their orientation toward the struggle over prices in competition” (die Gesamtheit der jeweils für Tauschreflektanten bei der Orientierung im Preis- und Konkurrenzkampf erkennbaren Aus- und Eintauschchancen desselben gegen Geld, WGII § 8 S. 43). The emphasis on “recognizable” shows that a market situation is defined by a certain openness and visibility of possibilities.

But what Weber blurs is that his term “economic gain” (wirtschaftliches Erwerben, WGII § 11 S.48) is, strictly speaking, self-contradictory, since gain is not economic, i.e. “provision for a desire for useful benefits”. Or, if it is not self-contradictory, the concept of “useful benefit” (Nutzleistung) is. For, on the one hand, useful benefits are defined as “what are assessed to be, by one or several economic actors, as the concrete, individual... chances of present or future use” ” (WGII § 2 S. 34) and thus as a potential, and, on the other, are exemplified by “the benefits provided by non-human (objective) things or the services of humans”, i.e. by the actualization of a potential in the satisfaction of desire. If it is only a matter of gaining power over a potential, then the economic activity of a household would be essentially the same as an enterprise’s striving to make money as the universal potential. But then, a household’s objective would not be the satisfaction of need (Bedarfsdeckung, WGII § 15 S. 64). Weber, who can here be regarded as a representative of both the social sciences, sociology and economics, glosses over the inversion that takes place when money-making becomes an end in itself, thus subsuming the striving of modest mortals to satisfy their finite, mortal needs under the abstract augmentation of money as capital. We must turn rather to thinkers such as Aristotle and Marx to see the contradictoriness inherent in economic activity itself.

Competition in the market-place is the way in which the struggle over the power of disposal over “useful benefits” is carried out in a market economy. Weber in fact defines economic activity as the peaceful struggle over the power of disposal over useful benefits, which indicates that there is also the possibility of a non-peaceful struggle through war, piracy, plunder, banditry, etc. In any case, there is a struggle among people over the appropriation of useful benefits potentially provided by things and people which are not freely and limitlessly available, i.e. they are scarce. Since having power of disposal over given goods and services is mutually exclusionary among economic agents, there are essentially always conflicts of interests of many and various kinds among people in their desire to possess what is useful for living and therefore valuable. Thus there are not only differences in the views people hold about a situation or a general state of affairs, and thus a dispute about the truth of a matter, but there is also the difference of conflicting interests and opposed social powers based on mutually exclusionary claims to the power of disposal over useful benefits in not unlimited supply. That latter is an ontic insight; as representative of positivist sociology, Weber nowhere digs deeper into the ontology of social ontology, which is only possible with a clear view of ontological difference that sociology keeps adamantly closed off to view.

Differences in views and conflicting interests have to be distinguished conceptually from each other. The former are more fundamental because differences in views arise from the play of truth itself in revealing and concealing what and how the world is, whereas conflicts of interests derive, in addition, from the striving to gain power of disposal over limited useful benefits, i.e. over beings in the world. Such self-interests of course substantially colour the view which a given party holds about a given situation so that how it is revealed and held to be is biased in the direction of furthering the perceived self-interests of the given party. Having self-interests means that the view of a situation is held to be other than how it would reveal itself of itself, without distortion. For this reason, the search for truth has traditionally always been regarded as a matter of disinterested observation and contemplation (which does not mean, however, that truth becomes objective, since there is no truth at all without human being).

Economic activity is carried out on a formally rational basis, in Weber’s terms, if it is calculable in numbers (WGII § 9 S. 44). The “consummate” (vollkommenste) means of economic calculation is money, which Weber describes, in his purportedly ‘value-neutral’, positivistic fashion, as “the formally most rational means of orientation for economic action” (das formal rationalste Mittel der Orientierung wirtschaftlichen Handelns, WGII § 10 S. 45). Such monetary calculability is the basis of capitalist gainful activity. “Capitalist calculation is the estimation and control of opportunities for gain and their success by comparing the estimated monetary amounts” of all the goods used in the gainful economic activity at the beginning and at the end of a period of reckoning (Kapitalrechnung ist die Schätzung und Kontrolle von Erwerbschancen und - erfolgen durch Vergleichung des Geldschätzungsbetrages einerseits der sämtlichen Erwerbsgüter (in Natur oder Geld) bei Beginn und andererseits der (noch vorhandenen und neu beschafften) Erwerbsgüter bei Abschluß des einzelnen Erwerbsunternehmens..., WGII § 11 S. 48). This calculation enables profit and loss and profitability of the enterprise to be quantitatively determined, but always in retrospect. Capitalist calculation is quantitative calculation based on relevant monetary quantities. This calculation presupposes ontologically the sociating medium of reified value (cf. Chapter 9). Profitability is the ultima ratio for the rational calculation of economic success and failure, whereas the success or otherwise of a household in meeting its needs has to be evaluated in a more qualitative way since needs and their satisfaction are not measurable simply in monetary quantities.

The advance calculation associated with economic activity is, in Weberian terms, always a calculation of the chances for gaining power of disposal over useful benefits. The terms ‘chance’, ‘gain’, ‘power’ in this statement all have to be ontologically investigated as ways of being, something which, needless to say, Weber as a sociologist does not undertake, but which presents itself to us as a philosophical task to be tackled in subsequent chapters. To continue for the moment in a preliminary, more ontic mode: Such chances for gain always involve uncertainty and risk, whether it be for a capitalist enterprise or a household. The orientation of economic activity is indeed toward a certain end (in Weberian terms, the end of achieving power of disposition over the embodiments of useful benefits either for consumption or for further augmentation), but the way to this end is not controllable by technical means, since ‘technical’ in its original sense always means having a foresightful knowledge of how to securely attain an end whilst keeping interfering contingent factors at bay. Τέχνη ποιητική in the Greek sense is ἀρχὴ μεταβολῆς and as such, more specifically, a δύναμις μετὰ λόγου i.e. a foreseeing, knowing point of origin governing a change. Such knowing, foreseeing, fore-casting control which governs an outcome in the temporal dimension of the future is lacking in economic activity because it necessarily involves social relations of exchange, i.e. an uncertain interplay. In economic activity there can only be an orientation toward probable, estimated outcomes of activity that is wagered and risked.

The essential sources of uncertainty for the opportunities offered for gainful activity reside in the market-places for purchasing and selling goods and services. As Weber himself says, the prices achieved on the market are always the result of a competitive struggle over price, i.e. of an interplay among social actors with various potentials, abilities. Whereas the use-value of a good or service is its potential to be used in providing a benefit in consumption or in production as a means of production, and this use-value potential can reliably and foreseeably be counted on to be realized when necessary, the exchange-value of a good or service is its potential to be exchanged for money on a market, and the realization of this potential depends upon the momentary market situation or predicament with all its contingencies. When exchange-value is realized on the market, the current market predicament, which is not precontrivable, precontrollable or predictable, defines or predicates how much the exchange-value is quantitatively. The exchange-value of a good or service can even vanish, momentarily or even permanently, into nothing. There may suddenly be no takers for a certain commodity on the market, even though the commodity’s quality has not altered. The exchange-value depends essentially also on the others, not just on the economic actor who is out for gain.

Since uncertainty and risk are associated with all kinds of capitalist, market-oriented, gainful economic activity, the economic actors feel a need to compensate for this uncertainty by making provision for it. Such provision normally involves saving, especially in monetary and near-money form, for a buffer of money and saleable assets can be employed to gain control over useful benefits (in Weberian terminology) should the current income-earning activity (cash flow) be momentarily insufficient to cover needs. Saving itself is a peculiar phenomenon because it is a way of controlling the future by stocking up on money or near-money assets that function as a store of value, i.e. as an abstract, reified medium that gives its possessor the power to procure at will goods for living or for further production at any time now or in the future. Such a store of value is thus a buffer against unfavourable future events. Market-mediated economic activity essentially involves taking risk and thus also hedging against risk in case plans and precalculations go wrong. If, as Weber says, all economic action is oriented toward chances or opportunities, then all economic action is also projected toward the future, a future which is beset more or less with uncertainty. The management of risk and uncertainty in capitalist economic activity also has an economic solution, but at a price that must be deducted from an enterprise’s gross gain. The risk of an unfavourable outcome of entrepreneurial activity can be spread by means of insurance policies, or the risk can be hedged by transferring it to another economic actor (a so-called speculator), say, by means of a futures contract which fixes a purchase or sale price at some definite date in the future.

The option of insurance is open also to households for the eventuality that income earned is insufficient to cover core needs. This spreading or transfer of risk is made possible ontologically by the sociating medium of reified value itself because in its ‘look’ as money, reified value as a quantified, reified social relation allows a price to be put even on something as abstract and intangible and futural as risk. A peculiarity of a capitalist market economy is that even outcomes in the future, because they can be monetarized, can themselves be traded on a futures market. This makes risk calculable for a given economic actor, but it does not make the risk itself precalculable or predictable, because the buyer of the risk, i.e. the insurance company or the futures trader, then bears the risk and then has to itself hedge or spread (reinsurance) the specific risk it has taken on. Risk is intimately related to the uncertainty of (social) movement, a topic to be resumed and deepened in Chapter 5.

4.3The Cartesian cast of economics

Our purpose here, however, is not to discuss the practicalities of risk management. Rather, the insight into the essential uncertainty inherent in marketmediated economic activity has equally essential consequences for the social science of economics (cf. also Chapter 8). At the core of economics is always a theory of exchange and price couched in quantitative terms. Whether it be a labour theory of value, a theory of marginal utility, a theory of economic equilibrium or some other approach, economic theory as we know it is always concerned with writing equations for the exchange relations among goods in the broadest sense that have futural, predictive power. The qualitative phenomena of commodity, exchange, market, price and money necessarily play a part in any economic theory, but the phenomena themselves are not thought through and brought to their ontological concepts.

Instead, the focus is set singlemindedly at the outset upon seeking a ground in quantitative relations enabling precalculability, and the phenomena themselves are reduced to mere variables in equations. Why is it taken for granted from the outset that positivist economics, which arose out of moral philosophy, must be concerned with quantitative relations? It seems to be unquestioningly self-evident that, say, price is a phenomenon interesting only from a quantitative point of view. Therefore no deeper questions are asked by economists about what price is, i.e. its essence, its ‘look’ of whatness.

The orientation of economics toward uncovering quantitative causes or reasons preferably expressed in equations lies in the circumstance that economics willingly models itself on the mathematical natural sciences which served and continue to serve as the paradigm par excellence for scientificity. This means that economics as a social science is cast in the mould of Cartesian science, i.e. scientific knowledge and, above all, scientific method as understood in the modern age aiming at certain knowledge — and in particular, certain foreknowledge — for the conscious subject posited as the fundament of self-certainty in Descartes’ famous dictum, cogito ergo sum. Descartes was the first thinker to expressly formulate the requirement that scientific knowledge must assume a quantitative form. This goes beyond the Aristotelean concept of science, according to which all knowledge must be derivable from ‘first principles’ or ‘first causes’ or ‘grounds’. According to Descartes, certain knowledge is attainable only through intuition (direct looking-at) and deduction (syllogistic reasoning), i.e. through the only reliable actions of understanding for finding the truth (De Regulae Rule 3). Descartes also laid down the “rule” in his Regulae according to which everything to do with beings has to be brought into the form of proportions and equations. And only that can be brought into the form of an equation “except by admitting a more or less, and indeed all this comprehended in terms of magnitude” (Rule 14.4 “nisi quod recipit majus et minus, atque illud omne per magnitudinis vocabulum comprehendi”57). The upshot, according to Descartes, is that “we no longer think of involving ourselves with this or that subject, but only in general with comparing certain quantities among themselves” (Rule 13.1 “non amplius cogitemus nos circa hoc vel illud subjectum versari, sed tantum in genere circa magnitudines quasdam inter se comparandas”). The import and consequences of this casting of the criteria for scientific knowledge in the modern age can scarcely be overestimated. In the case at hand, with regard to economics, it means that this science self-evidently and therefore unthinkingly takes for granted that it must conceive economic phenomena in quantitative terms amenable to mathematical calculation if it is to be a science at all. The very form of economic knowledge is thus already precast, unbeknowns to economists themselves, by an ontological preconception, the casting of the self-certain subject of consciousness that represents the objects to itself in knowing consciousness. The economic phenomena themselves in their being do not call for thinking, or rather, the call of the phenomena themselves to be thought through in their own specific qualitative mode of being is not heard. Instead, it is demanded of economic science that it be useful, and such usefulness is automatically understood as quantitative calculability that provides certain results above all in the form of predictions and forecasts. And precalculability in the economic realm inevitably means ultimately precalculability in terms of money quantities. As we have seen (and will further investigate), however, the calculability of money quantities does not provide any basis for predictability akin to the laws of physics which provide a basis for precalculating future motion in the physical realm on the basis of relations of cause and effect. There are no such well-founded, axiomatic economic laws of motion, but only a posteriori calculations after the event or else projections and extrapolations from previous empirical data which are necessarily subject to revision and, depending on the assumptions made in the mathematized model, result in various ‘scenarios’. There are no grounds or principles governing economic motion since exchange-value itself is inherently, i.e. essentially, contingent on others’ actions and is thus an interplay. Thus no predictive calculations can be made with certainty but only on the basis of empirical regularity and envisaging a range of possible future scenarios. Economists therefore seek to discover patterns of regularity in what has been and to extrapolate these patterns into the future in order to make a forecast. This is a kind a knowledge based on what is the case ‘for the most part’ (Aristotle’s ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ), i.e. on regularity, and highly sophisticated mathematical statistics has been developed in the modern age to squeeze out the regularities from masses of data on what has already been the case. But even these highly sophisticated, computer-assisted, number-crunching techniques employed in constructing models of what is presumed to be economic ‘reality’ cannot overcome the essential, insurmountable problem that economics as a social science lacks a single unifying, controlling principle from which economic outcomes could be derived.

Modern economic science is calculation with monetary quantities, especially predictive precalculation. We have already pointed out that deeper thinkers who concerned themselves with economic phenomena, namely Aristotle and Marx, very clearly discerned a distinction between economics as household management and the art of making or getting money (chrematistics, τέχνη κτητική). Further consideration of the phenomenon of money-making or entrepreneurship reveals that there cannot be an art of money-making in the strict sense as foreknowledge, but only an empirical skill (ἐμπειρία Plato cf. above), an art of gainful interplay.

Furthermore, the quantitative bias and indeed ground-plan and basic cast of modern economics, which unthinkingly skips over and necessarily takes for granted the qualitative, ontological aspects of the phenomena it must deal with (i.e. their very being), means that modern economics concerns itself basically only with chrematistics. Chrematistics, however, is concerned not with the satisfaction of need, but is a striving to have more, where this ‘more’ remains quantitatively indeterminate and therefore limitless. This is the source of tension between modern mathematical economics and political economy, which, having arisen originally out of moral philosophy, is concerned more with the moral predicament of how well and especially how badly people do in economic life. But political economy, too, overlooks the ontological questions that remain unasked in economics and resorts instead to an ultimately impotent moral standpoint merely of what ought to be.

The more modern name for chrematistics is capitalism or capitalist entrepreneurship. Under capitalism, the augmentation of money — or more nebulously, ‘economic growth’ — becomes an end in itself rather than money being the means to the end of living well. So along with the neglect of the phenomena themselves for the sake of quantitative (pseudo-)‘scientific’ understanding and precalculability, as (iron-)cast, by the Cartesian paradigm for what is to be regarded as knowledge at all, there is an inversion of means and ends in which the quantitative monetary moment becomes dominant as if by sleight of hand. The connection between economic growth as measured by growth in gross domestic product or some such macroeconomic indicator and people living well in an economy has to be considered more deeply from a philosophical perspective, and not just by putting hard numbers into relation with some measure or other of ‘quality of life’. This will involve thinking through economic activity as an important mode of caring-for (cf. Chapter 9.3).

4.4Schumpeter’s equilibrium theory

Let us take as a further example besides the sociologist Max Weber, the work of one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, Joseph Schumpeter, who is an adherent of the equilibrium theory which investigates the conditions of reproduction of the macroeconomic process, analogous to conservation laws in physics from which equations spring. An equilibrium theory or theory of the (initially simple) reproduction of an economy proceeds by building a model based first of all on very simple, counterfactual assumptions. A national economy is treated as a household which unchangingly reproduces the conditions of its own existence. These very strong assumptions mean, for example, that the “wages and rents — the only cost elements which exist here — are necessarily equal to the values of the consumer goods which the labour power and natural powers paid for by these wages and rents produce either directly or via the produced means of production or unfinished products”.58 Furthermore, “Here at least there is still no occasion to misuse the word capital which it would be best to expunge from our vocabulary and which for us is merely a monetary and in particular, although not exclusively, an accounting concept.” (p. 116) It should be noted that this desired exclusion of the concept of capital, which applies to the entire chapter, occurs precisely in a chapter entitled “The Capitalist Economic Process”. The model-building starts with assumptions that are so strong that the concepts of value, money and capital are trivialized with the consequence that “The Capitalist Economic Process” as such is not treated. The strategy of this theoretical approach is to start with a very simple model based on very strong, counterfactual assumptions, and then proceed to gradually relax those simplifying assumptions in order to progressively approximate economic reality by allowing a continual increase in complexity.

But underlying this entire approach is the conception that the value of commodities can be determined quantitatively by means of equations more or less complicated, formulating conditions of reproduction of an economy in the sense of a large and complex household (Aristotle’s οἰκονομική cf. Chapter 4.1). “Since the monetary magnitudes and the monetary processes in the economy are given their sense by the magnitudes of goods and processes in the world of goods to which they correspond and therefore an understanding of the monetary processes presupposes an understanding of processes in the world of goods and cannot be determined independently of it, we thus have already with the considerations just made and the conceptual constructions resulting from these an initial point of approach for an analysis of the sphere of credit and money.” (p. 119) The conditions of reproduction of the economy, no matter whether this be thought as simple reproduction or whether it means expanded reproduction (economic growth), provide the basis upon which value equations can be written to determine credit and money volumes. The stepwise incorporation of more and more complicated conditions of reproduction only modifies and complicates, but does not suspend, the initial assumptions that money is only a means mediating the reproduction of an economy conceived as a household — and thus its augmentation is never an end in itself, i.e. money as capital. This initial assumption means that the magnitude of value is determined by something extrinsic, namely, reproduction (i.e. the production once again) of an economy, and thus has a ground which can be used to calculate value magnitudes. Such value magnitudes can be calculated because exchange, whether it be on the micro or a macro level, is conceived in some sense or other as an exchange of equivalents and this equivalence is thought as conditions of reproduction. But such a preconception, no matter in what guise, means that the economy is being thought of as a kind of household-machine and not genuinely as a capitalist economy in which the groundless exchange interplay is at play and the augmentation of exchange-value is the motivating principle (the principle of movement), but with uncertain outcome.

The existence of money, however, implies nothing other than that the value of economic entities in the broadest sense, i.e. what they are ‘good for’ as measured abstractly by the quantitative, reified sociating medium of money, has assumed a form (i.e. ‘look’) of existence independent of the goods, services, natural resources, etc. whose value is validated in money. It is only by virtue of having assumed such an independent, reified form of existence that the augmentation of money itself can become the simple driving force and motive of economic activity. But the augmentation of money as capital in the circulation of capital does not presuppose an exchange of equivalents, where equivalence is determined by the equality of some extrinsic factor. Rather, money itself is its own measure and therefore the augmentation of money as capital can only be measured by itself in a kind of ‘self-reflection’ back onto itself as an incremental difference, i.e. as a differential. The sense of a capitalist economy is to augment money as capital. Capital is thus a dynamic concept, a concept of movement measured by the differential increment of money-capital through its circuitous movement. Schumpeter, by contrast, posits with an appeal to self-evident common-sense that “the objective sense of economic activity [...] is of course the satisfaction of need.” (p. 129) With this appeal to common-sense, he has circumvented all the fundamental questions concerning capitalist economy.

There is, however, an essential disjunction between money-making and the satisfaction of need, between chrematistics and household management, between capitalism and providing for individual and social needs that calls for thinking. And the seed crystal of this essential disjunction lies in the essence of money itself as an independent embodiment of value, as the quantitative reification of a qualitative relation among things themselves. Exchange-value, as Marx very clearly saw, is disjunct from use-value, although Marx also sought to preserve a quantitative, extrinsic substance of value residing in labour content which thus, in his conception, has a double nature as productive of both exchange-value and use-value. Here it has to be seen that exchange-value, with its own peculiar entity, money, is an independent social dimension that essentially corresponds to and ultimately enables, in an interplay of powers, the striving to have more (πλεονεξία) as a possibility of human existence. Once use-value is expressed universally, abstractly, quantitatively in exchange-value in its ‘look’ as money, it has become alienated from itself, i.e. it confronts itself with its other. We must, however, not be too quick to morally condemn this ontological alienation, as we shall investigate later on (Chapter 9.1).

The point here is that Joseph Schumpeter and other economists are far removed from an insight into the true nature of money, value and capital because they are loath to involve themselves with the socio-ontological issues slumbering in the foundations of their social science. Thus, for instance, as a positivist social scientist, Schumpeter writes in a review of the history of thinking about money, which begins with a few remarks on Plato and Aristotle, that “general remarks on the essence of money are of much less interest than believed to be by those who still regard our science as a conglomerate of philosophy and dogmas. For science it is only a matter of what is made out of such starting-points.” (p. 41f) But everything is decided by the starting-point (ἀρχή), for the startingpoint, with its fore-casting pre-conceptions of what knowledge is (a heritage from the Greek conception of ἐπιστήμη), has a hold over and governs all the thoughts and concepts which follow.

For Aristotle, knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) is characterized as knowing the starting-points (ἀρχαί) governing movement in the observed phenomena. This is not a matter of merely fanciful philosophical speculation. Far from it! The truly speculative insight into the simple essence of money as a crystallization of exchange-value serving as medium of social interplay is crucial for all thinking about economic phenomena, a circumstance that economists gladly obscure with their sophisticated, complicated economic models (today running their computations on computers with so-called learning algorithms fed with masses of empirical digital data) that pretend to ‘scientifically’ grasp the ‘real economic world’ and claim not to be beholden to ‘abstract theories’, but to the ‘empirical facts’ embodied in ‘big data’. It is, however, precisely through this hard-headed empiricism that economics as a social science remains unbeknowns beholden to the quantitative Cartesian cast of being (see section 4.3 above). The socioontological understanding of value will concern us at length in following chapters.

4.5Aristotle on money and exchange — Money as a medium practically unifying social usages

Where is the starting-point for thinking about the economy? The historical starting-point for Western thinking about money, woefully neglected as a starting-point also for thinking by economics, lies with Aristotle, in particular in his Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 5, which deals with reciprocity in relation to justice. For both Plato and Aristotle, social life in the polis is based on a division of labour and the exchange of the products of labour for the satisfaction of need and provision of the “conveniencies of life”, that are an essential component of living well, which in turn is the aim of living together in community. Here I do not take the polis to be simply the historical ancient Greek city-state, but read it as ‘polity’, i.e. “an organized society or community” with its “civil organization and civil order” and “form of government” (OED), having a meaning not only in an historical sense but for all forms of Western society. Aristotle points out that “in sociations of exchange, it is such justice which holds them together, reciprocal justice on the basis of proportionality and not on the basis of equality.” (ἐν μὲν ταῖς κοινωνίαις ταῖς ἀλλακτικαῖς συνέχει τὸ τοιοῦτον δίκαιον, τὸ ἀντιπεπονθός, κατ’ ἀναλογίαν καὶ μὴ κατ’ ἰσότητα. 1132b32) He continues that “through proportional reciprocity, namely, the polity remains together” (τῷ ἀντιποιεῖν γὰρ ἀναλογίαν συμμένει ἡ πόλις 1132b34). The reciprocal give and take of exchange is what constitutes society on the basis of everyday sociation, giving rise to men’s “communication” (μετάδοσις 1133a2). Through it, men “remain together” (συμμένουσιν 1133a2) in sociation. The exchange of useful things in civil society can only work as a sociating bond if they are exchanged in just proportions, and without them “there would be no exchange and no sociation” (οὐκ ἔσται ἀλλαγὴ οὐδὲ κοινωνία 1133a24). This link between the practice of exchange and the constitution of social community is reflected also in the Greek word, κοινωνία, rendered here as ‘sociation’, whose semantic field stretches from “dealings” and “sociability” through “association” to “community”.

How is a just give and take between the owners or producers of different products to be achieved? “Nothing, namely, can prevent the product of one of the parties being better than that of the other, and in that case therefore they have to be equalized.” (οὐθὲν γὰρ κωλύει κρεῖττον εἶναι τὸ θατέρου ἔργον ἢ τὸ θατέρου, δεῖ οὖν ταῦτα ἰσασθῆναι 1133a13) The exchange of useful products and services only makes sense if the products are different and are suitable for different uses. Aristotle adduces the example of the exchange of a physician’s services for a farmer’s products which “have to be equalized” (δεῖ ἰσασθῆναι. 1133a18). “Thus everything must be comparable in some way if exchange is to be.” (διὸ πάντα συμβλητὰ δεῖ πως εἶναι, ὦν ἐστιν ἀλλαγή. 1133a19) And how is this comparability achieved? Aristotle continues, “Money has resolved this and is a kind of middle term, for it measures everything and so also too much and too little and how many shoes are equal to a house or food.” (ἐφ’ ὃ τὸ νόμισμ’ ἐλήλυθε, καὶ γίνεταί πως μέσον· πάντα γὰρ μετρεῖ, ὥστε καὶ τὴν ὑπεροχὴν καὶ τὴν ἔλλειψιν, πόσα ἄττα δὴ ὑποδήματ’ ἴσον οἰκίᾳ ἢ τροφῇ. 1133a20)

Money is thus the solution in practical human social life for how qualitatively different things which are suitable for very different uses can be compared and measured in an abstractly quantitative medium, thus forming the basis for a just, proportional exchange of everything in which one value is exchanged for another, equal value. The justness is apparent in the mutual satisfaction of the exchangers themselves who have struck a deal on the proportions to be exchanged. Even though everything differs from each other in their respective uses and thus in their use-values, everything is also identical with each other and therefore comparable as being useful in abstracto. “So it is necessary for everything to be measured by some unity” (δεῖ ἄρα ἑνί τινι πάντα μετρεῖσθαι 1133a26) and this unity is “in truth, use, which holds everything together” (τοῦτο δ’ ἐστὶ τῇ μὲν ἀληθείᾳ ἡ χρεία, ἣ πάντα συνέχει· 1133a28), for exchange is carried on in order to acquire the useful things which one lacks. “Thus as a kind of substitute for use, money has come about by agreement.” (οἷον δ’ ὑπάλλαγμα τῆς χρείας τὸ νόμισμα γέγονε κατὰ συνθήκην 1133a29)

Money is the universal representative for useful things in the broadest sense and is the medium or middle term which mediates their exchange with one another and thus the give and take of daily social intercourse. It arises as a practical solution from the context of the practice of exchange itself, enabling fair and just sociation in dealings with one another. “Thus, like a measure, money makes things measurable and creates an equality, for without exchange no community would be possible and without equality there would be no exchange, and without commensurability there would be no equality. In truth, however, it is impossible that things so different could become commensurable, but with respect to use this is sufficiently possible. Thus there must be a unity and this is so from what has been supposed.” (τὸ δὴ νόμισμα ὥσπερ μέτρον σύμμετρα μοιῆσαν ἰσάζει· οὔτε γὰρ ἂν μὴ οὔσης ἀλλαγῆς κοινωνία ἦν, οὔτ’ ἀλλαγὴ ἰσότητος μὴ οὔσης, οὔτ’ ἰσότης μὴ οὔσης συμμετρίας. τῇ μὲν οὖν ἀληθείᾳ ἀδύνατον τὰ τοσοῦτον διαφέροντα σύμμετρα γενέσθαι, πρὸς δὲ τὴν χρείαν ἐνδέχεται ἱκανῶς. ἓν δή τι δεῖ εἶναι, τοῦτο δ’ ἐξ ὑποθέσεως 1133b17)

The proof that very different things are commensurable is a practical, conventional one, for very different useful things are in practice exchanged on a basis of mutually agreeable agreement, thus equating their uses in some way. In mediating exchange, money proves itself to be the embodiment of universal use, for it can be used to purchase anything useful, but in being exchanged for money, the concrete, particular use of a specific thing is abstracted from or bracketed off. Money is thus the abstract, universal, unified representative of the uses of things, i.e. their value.

Each thing is useful and thus valuable or good-for-something in its own way, but through its potential exchange for money (its price) it becomes abstractly valuable and commensurable in value with everything else that is good for some application or other. Only this abstraction from all concrete, useful qualities to pure quantities allows a just exchange of goods because, according to Aristotle’s treatment of exchange, a kind of proportionate equality has to be achieved in the exchange relation for it to be fair and equitable. Justice therefore entertains an intimate relation with arithmetic, for justice is concerned with fairness, and the Greek word for ‘fair’, ἴσος, is also the word for ‘equal’. The reason for this is that justice in general is a phenomenon concerned with the relations, i.e. sociating movement, between different people and their goods, so that the relations require some sort of common ratio. These relations are the forms of sociation on which society is based and they must be such that fairness prevails and no one gains the better of the other. Where difference prevails, recourse to a kind of quantifiable equality that serves as a common ratio or denominator must be taken. The existence of markets shows that this kind of equalizing of all sorts of marketable goods takes place on a daily practical level. Even very different qualitative, non-commodity goods (including things like esteem, reputation, celebrity status, privacy, etc.) which come into relation with each other in social life (such as when one person slanders another) have to be quantified in some way if fairness and equity are to prevail (such as a penalty imposed on a slanderer to redress by means of monetary compensation the wrong done to the slandered person in depreciating the esteem and reputation in which that person is held). Money can thus serve the cause of justice even in the case of ‘non-marketable’ goods.

In the above citations of Aristotle, one of the pivotal words, ἡ χρεία, has been rendered as ‘use’. In other translations the same word is rendered as ‘demand’ or ‘need’. Depending upon the translation chosen, it is use, need or demand “which holds everything together”, and money is conceived as having come about “as a kind of substitute for” either use, need or demand. Employing the word ‘demand’ in relation to the exchange of products would seem to be the most modern alternative for a translation, and thus an interpretation, because we are familiar today with conceiving exchange on the market as the interplay of supply and demand. However, the Greek word χρεία has nothing to do with economic demand but means lexically in its primary significations either ‘need’ or ‘use’. But is it admissible to orient oneself towards dictionary meanings? Not per se, because it is the phenomena themselves to which Aristotle is pointing our thoughtful gaze which must decide what the most appropriate translation and consequent interpretation are. The Greek verb related to χρεία is χρῆσθαι, which means ‘to use’ or ‘to need’ and comes from the word for ‘hand’, ἡ χείρ. With regard to the goods involved in a reciprocal exchange it is the use to which these goods can be (potentially) put and enjoyed in the usages of daily life which forms the basis upon which they are needed and not the other way round.

A usage is an “habitual use, established custom or practice, customary mode of action, on the part of a number of persons; long-continued use or procedure; custom, habit.” (OED) Only because certain goods are usually used are they needed, and these uses that are embedded in usages of an historical way of life of a people are historical discoveries and inventions based on human ingenuity that is in turn enabled by a given historical cast of mind. Neither do needs fall from the sky nor are they naturally inherent to the human being considered, say, as a species of animal, but are always situated within the historically variable gamut of practices of everyday life. There is a need for holy water, for instance, only in a society that practises certain religious rites, i.e. certain usages honouring a god or gods, and there is a need for oysters only in a society that practises the usage of eating oysters. The use of the goods also involves handling them by hand in such a way that the hand’s handling is appropriate for realizing the usefulness of the thing used. Such a realization of usefulness is the enjoyment of a possibility of human existence disclosed and proffered by the thing used within the context of an historical constellation of usages. The (customary, usual) usages of daily life determine what things are useful and what are not for that usual, historical way of living. The uses of things are embedded in the usages of daily life and only in the context of such habitual usages do needs for things which may be lacking arise.

The widening of the motive and aim of the exchange of goods, in line with the well-considered phenomena themselves, beyond the ‘satisfaction of need’, which suggests some kind of mere subsistence or an ‘objective’, ‘biological’ or ‘physiological’ necessity, fits well with the inauguration of political economy in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith writes that, “Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life”59, himself echoing Cantillon’s definition of riches, “La richesse en elle-même n’est autre chose que la nourriture, les commodités et les agréments de la vie”60. The enjoyment of life, or εὖ ζῆν, and not merely the satisfaction of needs, lies at the base of the exchange of goods, and the enjoyment of life consists for the most part in practising the habitual usages which constitute an agreeable life in a given historical social milieu. Even the formulation, “merely the satisfaction of needs” is misleading because it is not a matter of pointing out an excess or surplus beyond need-fulfilment that would allow “agreeable” living, but of seeing the derivative nature of need compared to usage. Even the so-called ‘basic need’ of human beings to eat and drink is an abstraction because what is eaten and drunk is always highly particularized within given cultural usages. There is no need for pork, for example, in a society in which the usage of eating pork is not cultivated, and the religious usages prohibiting the eating of pork in such a society are therefore a more basic ‘need’ than the abstract ‘basic need’ to eat ‘food’, overriding any consideration of the scientifically established, ‘objective’ nutritional value of pork.

The context for the entire consideration of exchange as a — or indeed, the — paradigmatic form of reciprocal justice in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics is social life in its habitual usages. Such usages for the benefit and sake of living well with each other in society is what Aristotle has in view when discussing χρεία, or use. This can be seen more clearly by considering money as a kind of “substitute” (ὑπάλλαγμα 1133a29) for use. The use of money is to mediate the procurement of what is used habitually in the usages of daily life. Money represents these uses and substitutes for them as a thing, a means, which can be used now or in the future to supply what is needed for use in the practices of daily living (1133b13). Aristotle says that through money being this conventional substitute, it “has the name νόμισμα (money, or usage, custom) because it exists not by nature but by customary usage (νόμῳ) and can be changed and made useless by us”. (τοὔνομα ἔχει νόμισμα, ὅτι οὐ φύσει ἀλλὰ νόμῳ ἐστί, καὶ ἐφ' ἡμῖν μεταβαλεῖν καὶ ποιῆσαι ἄχρηστον. 1133a31) This passage is usually taken to mean blandly that Aristotle is a proponent of a ‘conventional theory of money’. Money is said to exist only by convention. But there is another, deeper perspective on this passage. For how is money being spoken of here?

The entire passage reads: “So it is necessary for everything to be measured by some unity, as was said before. This unity is in truth use, which holds everything together. If namely nothing were needed or not in a similar way, either there would be no exchange or it would not be the same. Thus as a kind of substitute for use, money has come about by agreement.” (δεῖ ἄρα ἑνί τινι πάντα μετρεῖσθαι, ὥσπερ ἐλέχθη πρότερον. τοῦτο δ’ ἐστὶ τῇ μὲν ἀληθείᾳ ἡ χρεία, ἣ πάντα συνέχει· εἰ γὰρ μηθὲν δέοιντο ἢ μὴ ὁμοίως, ἢ οὐκ ἔσται ἀλλαγὴ ἢ οὐχ ἡ αὐτή· οἷον δ’ ὑπάλλαγμα τῆς χρείας τὸ νόμισμα γέγονε κατὰ συνθήκην 1133a26ff) The problem is clearly that of unity, a unity which serves to hold everything together, i.e. to unify the social whole of living-together as sociating movement. The social whole, however, is constituted by a sharing of uses in various diverse usages. In order to be able to share uses, exchange is necessary, but if uses become self-sufficient or they change, then either exchange is obviated or the changing uses make reciprocally just exchange impossible. And if there is no exchange, there is no sociation and hence no society. Aristotle states this two lines before the passage quoted, “For without this [reciprocal proportion], there would be no exchange and no community (κοινωνία)” (1133a25). Money thus arises for the sake of holding society together by sociation and this means, on the level of everyday life, that money enables mediatingly a complex unity of the manifold usages in which things are used. This is the sense in which money has to be understood as customary, i.e. as related to usages, and not merely as a convention agreed upon out of the blue. As related to usages, the use of money is in itself a usage unifying the multifarious uses by enabling and facilitating the exchange of what is needed for these various uses. Since it is incorporated into the usage of exchange, and this is its raison d’être, money itself can be changed or taken out of use. This does not mean, of course, that the necessity for some kind of money as a substitute unifying all the various uses could be done away with. Therefore money is both customary and necessary.

This alternative understanding of Aristotle’s thinking on money and exchange has implications also for how society itself in its sociating movement is to be thought. For can it be said that the basis of society is the satisfaction of need given that there is a division of labour, thus necessitating the exchange of the products of labour? Or is it rather the case that human beings always already share a world and that this essential world-sharing, as a disclosure and enabling of existential possibilities, precipitates a communal sharing of the practised usages from which needs arise which then have to be unified in some manner? How can such a question of priority be decided? Only by proceeding from what is most originary and elementary. And what is most originary and elementary here is human being itself as sharing exposure to the openness to being, not just as a matter of what humans hold to be true, but also practically in their shared and mutually understood, customary practices which themselves are a kind of movement now conceived hermeneutically AS presencing and absencing in the 3D-time-clearing that being itself turns out to be. Such a sharing of the openness to being can never be attained by proceeding merely from a notion of a division of labour and a consequent necessity to exchange the products of labour in order to satisfy need (food, clothing, shelter), for a division of labour is already a sharing of practices based on a shared understanding of the world, at least to the extent that the various uses of things in the various usages are understood as such.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a need for food, clothing and shelter in abstracto because these latter generalities do not exist as such to be needed. Food, for instance, as a genus exists as a need only in its particularizations into flour, sugar, rice, ostrich meat, sweet potato, deer meat, witchetty grubs and so on endlessly, and whether these particular foods are needed depends entirely upon the culinary usages of the specific society in question. For example, there is a need for flour only in a society that practises the custom of eating specific food (e.g. bread) and dishes in which flour is an ingredient. The modern orthodox text-book definition of economics as “the social science that studies the methods by which individuals and societies organize production activities and allocate scarce resources to meet material wants and needs” is therefore thoughtless pseudo-science with pretensions to ‘objectivity’.

Both Plato and Aristotle present their account of the genesis of society on the basis of such considerations of the gradual historical development of exchange between households and communities, and this account has its plausibility as an ontogenetic history. But ontogenesis should never be confused with the order which the phenomena themselves call for to be properly thought through ontologically in their mode of being. And here the issue is the social mode of being of human being itself in its sociating movement. The sociation of society is most fundamentally the sharing of human beings’ ‘mindful’ openness to being, i.e. the shared exposure to the 3D-time-clearing, which first enables a communication with each other, a showing-off to each other as who each individual is in social exchanges and also a life-enhancing sharing of sociating practices in differentiated, particular usages which requires the exchange of all sorts of different goods both tangible and intangible. Exchange interplay mediated by money is a practical solution to the problem of how practical sociation can be constituted from diverse difference, so giving rise to a kind of unified social whole.

4.6Endless money-making?

After having gained a new perspective on commodity exchange through money by considering more reflectively what usage, use and need mean, it is opportune to reconsider the Aristotelean distinction between economic household management and chrematistic money-making. It has already become questionable that society can be thought, even ontically, as based on the satisfaction of need, because what is primary for the constitution of society is not neediness but the sharing of usages, i.e. of shared, habitual practices of living. So it is worthwhile to take a closer look at Aristotelean οἰκονομική (economics). The word itself is composed of οἶκος, meaning house, home, homeland and an ending related to the noun νόμος, meaning what is allotted, customary usage, principle or law. The related verb is νέμειν, meaning firstly, to allot or distribute, secondly, to possess in the sense of control and administer, or build on, use, enjoy and therefore dwell on, or thirdly, to allot as pasture and thus to shepherd and allow to graze. The verb νέμειν is also related to German ‘nehmen’, meaning ‘to take’ (including ‘to take into possession’). Another related verb is νομίζειν, one of whose meanings is to have in customary usage or to be used to. The words clustering around νέμειν stake out a semantic field that signifies a taking into possession, a taking into care and management for the sake of the enjoyment of life. Aristotelean οἰκονομική is therefore not simply household management, but has a far richer meaning as that which is related to dwelling in the usages of one’s home and homeland. Managing a household in the mundane economic sense is only a partial aspect of οἰκονομική. The exchange of goods in connection with the usages of one’s habitual way of dwelling has these usages and the enjoyment of this way of dwelling as its end or τέλος. And in fact, Aristotle relates οἰκονομική explicitly to the usual way of dwelling in usages which he calls “living well” or εὖ ζῆν (1258a1).

The habitual usages of living well form the limits to the means needed for this end, whereas the limitless striving to accumulate more and more goods, i.e. chrematistics, is said to have lost sight of this end and has thus become end-less in a pernicious sense. Chrematistics is the striving to end-lessly acquire χρήματα, which means goods, property, the collectivity of what is useful, or money and assets, i.e. wealth. Aristotle says that chrematistics, which usually takes the form of the striving to accumulate money, is not in conformity with nature (παρὰ φύσιν 1257a29) in that the wealth required for living well has a limit. And yet, he points out, “all those involved in the accumulation of goods strive to augment money without limit” (πάντες γὰρ εἰς ἄπειρον αὔξουσιν οἱ χρηματιζόμενοι τὸ νόμισμα. 1275b34), so that “their entire way of life is a waste of time getting wealth” (πᾶσα ἡ διατριβὴ περὶ τὸν χρηματισμόν ἐστι 1258a5). But time is lifetime. Finite lifetime. With chrematistics an inversion of means and end takes place: one no longer makes money for the sake of living well, but rather lives for the sake of making money.

Is this inversion a perversion? Can money-making itself constitute the, or a, primary ‘end’ of life? Is money-making elevated to the status of an end in itself meaningless or morally reprehensible? Aristotle does not deal with chrematistics in terms of moral categories, but rather according to whether it accords with nature or not, i.e. with what comes to a stand in presence of itself, καθ’ αὑτό. The nature which is of central importance here is human nature, i.e. human being itself, because we and Aristotle are dealing with sociated human living. Is it contrary to human nature to spend one’s life primarily in making money? This question is to be distinguished from a moral condemnation of human nature as being essentially greedy and incessantly wanting to have more.

The endless end of making money has a momentum all its own, for it cannot cease. It is an end that surpasses even the finitude of an entire human life. But can money-making even be a circular end in itself? Even if an individual devotes him- or herself entirely to money-making, doesn’t this activity have social consequences that willy-nilly go beyond the individual intention? If an entrepreneur (or any other participant in competitive market-economic life) has the skill of making money, why should the exercise of this skill not be the entrepreneur’s purpose in life, not merely for the sake of accumulating riches, but because the activity itself of participating in the economic interplay is personally fulfilling, not least of all for the satisfaction it gives in providing income-earning employment to willing employees? Cannot an entrepreneur decide for him- or herself to continue a satisfying entrepreneurial activity, taking account of the finiteness of life and other aims he or she may have in life? Is it not possible for an individual, competing economic actor to take a step back from the endless end of making money and decide what is appropriate for his or her own mortal life? If this is the case, then money-making is no longer an end in itself, but a means for living one’s finite, mortal life for one’s own sake in sociation with others, perhaps many others. The entrepreneur per se could enjoy an enterprising life risking an undertaking for which having to turn a profit in the long run is only a boundary condition and not the end in sight. This is the individual perspective on money-making, which by no means must exclude continued money-making insofar as continuing to be a player in the economic interplay may well be beneficial both for oneself and other players. Entrepreneurial activity can be continued for the sake of keeping an enterprise running in which others work and from which they benefit, along with suppliers and customers.

At first glance it seems that the endless end of making money stands diametrically opposed to the aim of fulfilling one’s needs through economic household management. This assumes that what is needed to live well is finite, so that needs can be satisfied and a modest way of life could or should be sufficient. Can a limit be found in the satisfaction of need (accepting for the moment that human being is needful rather than desiring)? Is there a limit at which one should or could ‘naturally’ cease to be a gainful economic player, say, when one has made ‘enough’ money, in order then to devote oneself to ‘higher’, more ‘social’ ends? Why should a successful economic player — taking the entrepreneur here as the personification of money-making — at some point necessarily want to cease to engage in the social usages surrounding the interplay called ‘business’? As has been shown, need itself is embedded in and arises from the usages that make up a given historical way of social life. In any given time, these usages constitute an habitual way of life and could therefore be considered as providing a limit within which needs could be satisfied. But these usages are continually evolving, and people in a given society are continually inventing or adapting new ways of living in an ongoing interplay with inventions of all sorts that intermesh with new ways of living. There is therefore also an endlessness to discovering enhanced or, at least, different ways of living and hence also in the commodity goods and services that can contribute to living well defined in some fashion or other.

This limitlessness does not have to be regarded as a pernicious kind of infinity, say, as senseless consumerism, but could be considered as an aspect of the beneficial endlessness of human inventiveness and ingenuity in caring for each other in social intercourse. There is no inherent limit to the possibilities of human existing that can be discovered, nor, therefore, an inherent limit to the development of human abilities, nor an inherent limit to what human beings can do for each other in the mutually beneficial exercise of their abilities, i.e. there are no limits to economic growth properly understood, and, as well shall see, it is possible to regard even self-interested economic activity as a kind of reciprocal caring-for each other in a fundamental existential-ontological sense (cf. Chapter 9.2.5).

Herein lies an ontological connection in understanding money-making, for Aristotle’s distinction between economics and chrematistics depends on an understanding of χρήματα, which, as already pointed out, means goods, property, the collectivity of what is useful, or money and assets. Chrematistics is thus understood as accumulating wealth in the form of property, of things which one owns, forming part of one’s estate, with Aristotle pointing out that, beyond a certain limit, it is senseless to heap up possessions. The Greek word for ‘estate’, however, is οὐσία (G.: Anwesen) as the gathering of all that one owns and therefore lies readily available to hand for use. The word, in turn, is the substantive form of the feminine present participle for ‘to be’, εἶναι, namely οὖσα, and could thus sensibly be rendered also as ‘beingness’ in English, its appropriate rendering in the context of ontology. In the philosophical tradition, however, οὐσία has come to be translated as ‘substance’ or ‘essence’ which is synonymous with the Greek understanding of being itself as ‘standing or lying there in presence’, as standing presence or “ständige Anwesenheit” (Heidegger). This means that wealth itself in the Western tradition is tied to the fundamental understanding of being as standing presence, as substance, so that the acquisition of wealth is synonymous with the accumulation of substantial riches, of substance, of essential whatness. A man of wealth, for instance, is thus a man of substance, whose who-status and self as somewho is an identity mirrored back from an accumulation of acquired whats.

A mere heaping-up of whats in the form of wealth indeed provides the man of substance a mirror in which to reflect his self-standing that is a continually ‘standing’ presence, but this is antithetical to movement, change, becoming in which life itself consists, so that static riches hardly measure up to the Aristotelean standard of εὖ ζῆν, i.e.living well. If endless money-making is to justify itself as a possible mode of living well, it must do so as the movement of a way of living, as already outlined above. A man of substance’s self-esteem, for instance, may be bolstered by his looking at the achievement of having accumulated considerable wealth. What is important, however, are not the χρήματα, i.e. mere things, but the χρείαι, i.e. the usages, in which they are used in the movement of life. I will return to the question of endless money-making in the guise of capitalist economy in later chapters (Chapter 9), but turn first to developing explicitly an ontology of exchange that is required to deepen the phenomenology of whoness.