Money as Thought Form Money forms people’s thinking by forcing them in various ways to be steered by money. Yet it also imposes certain ways of unconsciously thinking on people. In the modern age, money influences a lot in this way, no less than the natural sciences and philosophy.
Function and progress
Money requires everyone to think of goods as both the respective thing itself and its monetary value, that is, purely quantitatively. This results in a way of thinking which also induces a new way of calculating. Unlike all earlier forms of mathematics, this new form deals with pure numbers, calculating mathematical function.
Subject / Object
Prompted by the money-mediated society, the notion arises of a world split into subject and object. Des cartes was the first to formulate this
then-new notion at the beginning of the 17th century. It implies the world is split into the determining, money, as subject and that which it determines, the commodity, as object.
Thought reflexes
Just as we can buy anything and everything with money, we also view and judge anything and everything in the form it acquires through money: as a value among values. We think in terms of purely quantitative value even when we’re not involved with money-related things. This way of thinking is effective in many possible applications.
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