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Title: Money and Logos Author: M.D.P. Language: en Topics: economics, history, philosophy Source: Retrieved on Arpril 6th, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/kka/logos.html Notes: Translated from “Il Diavolo in Corpo”
Is there a relationship between the birth of the rational mentality and
the development of commercial economy? In the 7^(th) century B.C.E., a
whole series of tightly connected social changes took place in the
Ionian Greek cities of Asia Minor. It is precisely during this epoch
that the rational mentality arose, at the time when maritime commercial
culture began to experience its first great development.
In a short period of time, things moved from tribal social structures
and ancient monarchy to the political form typical of the Greek
city-states. The kinship and religious ties of the landed aristocracy
gave way to a new kind of social ties in which the individual was valued
above all on the basis of his property: luxury very quickly becomes a
political institution. The same aristocrats who had formerly based their
power on land ownership and warrior virtue began to acquire wealth first
by rigging pirate ships for sea robbery and later by rigging merchant
ships for commerce itself. The aristocrat started to invest his property
on the sea.
A new form of domination arose, a plutocratic aristocracy that began to
concentrate political power and the administration of justice in itself.
The wealth that came from the land allowed it to arm merchant ships
which reached the farthest ports of the Mediterranean. The usurious loan
was developed to a high degree increasingly immiserating the peasant
class. Class struggle developed between the peasants and the
aristocrats. A third class soon intervened as an intermediary, namely,
the merchant class. They were the ancient demiurges, that is to say, the
first master artisans who were accustomed to taking their work from city
to city, who acquired power through commerce. They were the cadets of
the noble class who had been excluded from hereditary rights and
therefore began to acquire wealth on the sea. In short, it was about a
new wealthy class that rose with the development of maritime commerce.
This new class at times sided with the aristocracy and at times with the
people, increasing or moderating the class conflicts in accordance with
it’s own interests.
The dominant regime is thus political particularism, the spirit of
competition taken to the highest degree, the domination of the census
and of wealth. The ruling oligarchy was forced to take an
ever-increasing interest in the political events of the city. It
gradually lost its nobility and superiority of descent as personal
wealth increased; the importance of family and birth diminished in the
face of the individual and of money. Class struggles sharpened to such a
degree, particularly in the commercially wealthiest cities, that at a
certain point a new form of mediation intervened in order to annul it:
legislation. Written law (nomos) to which citizens were subject and to
which they could turn in order to demand their rights became necessary.
The right is separated from politics. This is a fact of enormous
historical importance that was developed to the fullest extent not so
much in the Greek colonies of Asia Minor as in the western colonies of
the Greater Greece. We will see that it was really here that
mathematical thought developed and that the philosophical school that
had Parmenides as its greatest representative arose.
The domination of the dynastic oligarchy became political domination;
the aristocracy of money replaced that of birth; power was not protected
by the traditions of nobility but by written laws that sanctioned the
power of money. Wealth became an essential factor for having political
rights and participating in the public thing. The aristocrats converted
the harvests of their lands into money and assembled slaves for their
mines. They gave up piracy for commerce which was more secure. Piracy
was the response of the warrior aristocracy to the new merchant class.
At first the aristocrats defended their privileges by fighting the sea
traders, but later they found it more useful and profitable to become
merchants themselves. On the other hand, the new wealthy class, who were
at first despised by the nobles in the same way that a pirate chief
despises the captain of a merchant ship, acquired ever greater prestige
and invested their money in land so that soon there was nothing to
distinguish them from the nobles and the warriors. The aristocrats who
became merchants and the merchants who became landowners are the
trustees of a new form of power, the plutocratic oligarchy.
Beneath the rich nobles and the new rich, a middle class formed that
enriched itself through marriage or auspicious speculation or was forced
into agricultural or manual labor through impoverishment. Below this
middle class were the peasants and artisans. The former were subjected
to the usury of the rich and forced to sell the products of their land
at low price in order to buy manufactured objects at a high price. The
latter, the urban population — consisting of artisans, tradesmen, manual
laborers and mercenaries — formed an urban proletariat mainly
concentrated in the markets and ports. It was not strong enough to
impose its will, but was strong enough to form a troublesome element.
From the 7^(th) century B.C.E. on, Greek history — and not just that of
the Ionians of Asia — was characterized by a continuous succession of
class struggles. These were precisely what led to the application of
written and democratic laws which served the new rich class as a
powerful weapon for combating the divine and hereditary rights of the
aristocrats on the one hand and the demands of peasants and artisans on
the other. The aristocrats lost the privilege of creating and
interpreting the rules of social life according to the tradition of
blood. The collective responsibility of the ghenos and of the family
gave way to that of the individual and of the citizen before the
city-state. The power of tradition gave way to the power of law.
Another institution of fundamental importance arose in this period of
major historical transformation. The coining of money with its value
guaranteed by the state was actually invented in the 7^(th) century
B.C.E. in Asia Minor to facilitate trade between the Ionian cities and
the most important cities of Lydia. The latter had already accumulated
considerable wealth in trade with Mesopotamia, so much so that in that
period the Lydians were considered the most capable merchants by way of
land. The Ionians offered the merchants of the interior an opening to
the sea. The Greeks of Asia Minor became the indispensable
intermediaries in the trade with all the people who could not be reached
by land. The naval power of the Ionians would rapidly increase replacing
the older power of the Phoenicians.
Among the many innovations of those times, two factors in particular
distinguished Greek commerce from that of the Phoenicians and were the
source of it s supremacy. The Greeks did not limit themselves to trading
slaves or refined products like spices, jewels, precious cloth and the
like by sea like the Phoenicians, but traded items of primary necessity
and low cost such as oil and wine, ceramic jars, metals, fabrics and
utensils, and they traded these things in great quantities. It is easy
to understand how this type of commerce established completely new
exchange relationships between people. Attention is not paid to the
quality of the material, but to the quantity. Trade not only serves rich
and powerful monarchs and aristocrats of the more “civilized” people,
but the widest range of social classes. Every people whether civilized
or barbarian, every individual whether of the highest or lowest rank, is
a potential buyer or seller of goods according to the Greeks.
There is another substantial difference. The Phoenicians, who could be
considered the most daring navigators of the time due to their
navigation skills and courage, faced the sea with tiny ships and built
commercial trading centers on the coasts where they stopped as bases for
their most distant dealings. The founding of trading centers is a
characteristic aspect of Phoenician commerce. There are only a few
exceptions to this, and the most important of these is the founding of a
city such as Carthage, which quite quickly became economically powerful
by being able to rebel against the Phoenicians and constitute itself as
an independent naval power. Unlike the Phoenicians, the Ionians of Asia
Minor established a sort of sea-based commerce with an essential
characteristic that is completely new: the establishment of colonies.
It is not easy to enumerate all the causes of Greek colonization, but
the most important of these could be considered the scarcity of tillable
topsoil that led to the search for new territories; rising
overpopulation connected to the increase in wealth; class struggle
between rival factions within a single city and between cities that
forced entire groups of citizens to make their exodus by sea. This last
factor in particular must be taken into consideration since it is the
typical expression of the establishment of new forms of social
relationships, of the breakdown of ancient feudal kinship ties following
the rise of a new social class of wealthy merchants, of the political
and social instability that derives from it and of the political
particularism of the polis.
The invention of money had a revolutionary effect on a whole series of
planes, accelerating a social process of which it was itself one of the
basic effects: the development of a maritime commercial sector within
the Greek economy that even extended to products for common consumption,
the creation of a new type of wealth that was radically different from
landed wealth and the development of a new wealthy class whose activity
was decisive in the social and political restructuring of the city. A
new mentality and a new morality were born. The entire traditional
conception of human excellence based on nobility of birth and warrior
virtue were called into question and later destroyed by the power of
money. Money became a social mark of value: it gave prestige and power.
Emerging as a fitting human strategy to guarantee the ease of exchange
between trading people, Money established a common denominator and a
common measure between use values that are qualitatively different. The
goods had to be made comparable to each other in order to be traded;
they had to be made equivalent to one another through a process of
abstraction that ignores the difference in order to find the uniformity,
that abstract and quantitative element that is exchange value. Every
commodity came to be like every other; thus one person valued another
because he possessed the same amount of money. The written law confirmed
the process of quantification established by the circulation of money in
its process of abstraction — all citizens were equal before the law just
as they were before money; all could participate in the public thing and
the government of the city with powers proportional to their wealth and
everyone could acquire wealth through saving, commerce and speculation,
independently of family relations, ancestral religion and the customs of
birth.
The process of abstraction and quantification was manifested not only in
money and law, but in other areas as well: the adoption of alphabetic
writing, the promulgation of a civil calendar responding to the needs of
public administration, the division of the city into zones defined on
the basis of criteria of administrative convenience, the birth of
mathematics and philosophy and, lastly, the concept of the polis itself.
The city was not identified with any particular group, privileged family
or specific activity; it was simply the ensemble of all the citizens
whose social relationships, freed from ancient personal and familial
bonds, were defined abstractly in terms of identity, interchangeability
of roles, equality before the law.
The mathematical, rational, logical mentality arose in the Ionian
colonies of ancient Greece at the same time as sea-based mercantile
economic structures. The quantitative and abstract aspect of mathematics
was joined with the process of abstraction and quantification implicit
in commodity exchange.
The social transformation that marks the transition from the ancient
monarchic and feudal regime to the city-state is connected to the
analogous transformations in the fields of ethical and mythico-religious
thought.
The ancient religious prerogative, through which those of royal and
noble birth secured their power over the masses, lost its privileged
character, expanding and spreading out until it was integrated almost
completely into political institutions. A knowledge formerly prohibited
and reserved for a privileged few became public domain; it was discussed
in the circle of brotherhoods of sages that at this point no longer
imposed any restrictions of rank and origin. The opening of common
discussion on topics of a general order that were previously the subject
of supernatural revelation, such as the origin of the cosmic order and
the explanation of natural phenomena, led to the rise of philosophy.
The philosopher was no longer the ancient priest, trustee of a mystery
at the service of royal power, but an individual belonging to a
brotherhood in which free discussion had opened; later he would argue
his opinion directly in the crowded agora, making them subjects of
public debate in which contradiction, dialectical reasoning and “proof”
would have definitively gained the upper hand over supernatural
revelation. The basic problem of the philosopher and the sage was the
diffusion and publication of his ideas, placing them in dialectical
relationship with his predecessors and successors. He had to take the
potential rebuttals of his adversaries into account and was constrained
to think in relationship to them. His task was to create schools of
thought, teach and transmit ideas and knowledge while perpetually
keeping the possibility of discussion open. Through words and writings
he addressed himself to all citizens and all cities. The philosopher no
longer had a homeland or traditions; rather one could say that he was a
“world citizen”. He traveled from city to city to discuss his ideas, to
learn different things, to counterstrike, to argue. It was much more
difficult to keep track of the city of one’s origin than of the “school”
to which one belonged; in fact, this was one of the small elemental
gestures that characterized him. As Heracleitus asserted, the
philosopher had to take hold of that which is common to every human
being; he had to base himself on logos just as the city is based on law;
the only law the philosopher obeyed was the law of reason. But the
Heracleitean logos, the normative principle of nature, started to
separate from nature; the original unity between being, becoming and
norm was already damaged. The logos was not so much the normative
natural principle as the normative human principle, that which ruled the
behavior of people, their relationships among themselves and with
nature. But nature was subjected to a law that it did not itself create
that was no longer immanent in it, a law that was imitated in the social
order of the city-state that imposed its rules of conduct in all
relationships of a person with himself, with other people and with
nature, just as money, universal exchange value for all goods, imposed
its law on the goods themselves and ruled the relations of people with
each other in the realm of commercial exchange.
The same basic needs were also found in poetry before and during the
time philosophy developed, starting with Homer. The sense of the
transience and inconstancy of life and human destiny, the discomfort and
restlessness of those who experienced a world turned upside-down and in
continual transformation, appeared frequently in the poetry of this
period, expressed in a very lively way. In the midst of such instability
in life, the Ionian felt the urgent need to catch hold of anything firm
and stable, the necessity of conceiving a unitary principle and
permanent law of change. Therefore, he turned to the abstract concepts
of Fate, Necessity, Justice, that served him as an anchor. These ethical
concepts arose in the sphere of social life in response to the harsh
struggles of cities, parties and classes and came to constitute not only
the channel between the social sphere and the individual, but also
between this and the surrounding natural world. And since long and
dangerous sea voyages increased the awareness of the changeability and
instability of all natural things even more, the problem of the search
for stability and permanence acquired cosmic dimension; in other words,
it became a philosophical problem. Speculation on the natural world,
aimed at the search for a unitary law applicable to every
transformation, found a basic point of reference in the earlier ethical
conception and in the abstract concepts of Necessity and Justice. In the
Ionian philosophies of the 7^(th) century B.C.E. and consequently in
Heracleitus, Parmenides, Empedocles and Democritus, the concepts of
Fate, Necessity and Justice established the permanent, unitary principle
of a universal and eternal law in the multiple varieties of phenomena.
The word cosmos itself was derived from the military-political field,
referring to an ordered arrangement. It would give birth to the term
cosmology and reflected the mental sphere of philosophy.
The notion of a universal and stable law that rules human life first
appeared in Greece in the Ionian epic poetry of the Homeric narratives.
This notion was connected with the transition from a more ancient form
of morality exalting the violent passions and warrior courage typical of
the aristocracy to the more recent one in which courage and force were
considered dangerous passions and surrendered their place to prudence
and intelligence. The morality of the merchant replaced that of the
warrior; the violence of reason and language replaced that of physical
force, the calculated risk of the shrewd trader replaced the manifest
risk of the noble warrior. Thus, a completely new mentality and ethic
arose.
Though always understood as the supreme regulator of all natural and
human events, Fate was interpreted in two substantially different ways
within the sphere of Ionian thinking. Sometimes it appeared as a dark
mysterious force that blindly distributed the good and the bad among
people. At other times, it appeared as a normative law, a rational and
ethical principle of conduct that a person had to follow so as not to
provoke punitive sanctions through the violation of a prescribed order.
The first conception recalls the blind natural forces to which the
seafarer was subjected and the uncontrolled, destructive forces
liberated in the first bloody class struggles that marked the advent of
a new society. In the lyric and tragic poetry of the more ancient era,
the clear awareness of the misery of the human being who was subjected
to a power that was greater than her and that he was utterly unable to
control appeared continually. Thus, the original moral precepts of
moderation arose. These did not so much draw attention to a need for
measure and proportion as is frequently claimed, as to the awareness of
the limited and dependent conditions of the human being of the time. But
later, when the first written laws arose with the aim of annulling
social differences and affirming the abstract power of money, the
ancient decrees of Fate were definitively transformed into norms of
moral conduct, a need for order and justice the violation of which
inevitably led to sanctions aimed at restoring its validity. From this
time on, it was no longer the blind violence of nature, but rather the
human passions, the human passions that were considered the original
source of the violation of the law of order and justice. Rebellion
against the law of Fate could be considered reckless and still rouse a
sense of secret admiration; rebellion against the norms of justice was
simply considered pride and foolish arrogance and was punished as such.
Only at this point did the transition to the new ethical perspective of
mercantile society in which control of the passions, prudence, the use
of reason and the insidious hidden violence of laws and norms of social
conduct gain the upper hand over the open expression of desires, over
violent emotion, over the force of arms and over recklessness seem fully
evident. At this point, the power of the abstract value of exchange over
ancient ties and social relationships was clearly manifested.
In the same way, the principle of Necessity, which corresponded to the
primitive social situation in which the individual was completely at the
mercy of great political upheavals and natural forces that the seafaring
merchant was forced to face on the sea in extremely precarious
conditions (leading to nostalgia for a more stable world and, thus, to
reaction in the face of new historical events), gradually gave way to
the principle of Justice. This occurred when a new social order began to
be built, when instability and uncertainty began to give way to
stability and permanence, in other words, when a balance based on the
common denominator of exchange value was established between the old and
new social classes in struggle, a balance which accepted the power of
money as law and established individual worth on the basis of wealth.
But the new social stability was achieved abstractly through the
promulgation of written law and the quantification and rationalization
of all civic life. Even though social organization in general was
subject to an abundance of stable laws, perpetual unending becoming, the
game of changing fortunes and circumstances in which nothing is truly
fixed or stable, ruled in the realm of concrete daily life. Only in the
realm of the administration of justice and power did the abstract
principle of permanence and immutability appear, that principle
according to which the social world seems to be ruled by a single,
inflexible law, the law of profit. This social situation found its
correspondence in philosophy. From the 8^(th) through the 6^(th) century
B.C.E., attention began to focus on permanence and on the laws of
necessity, measurement and justice; the need to bring the multiple back
to the unitary, becoming to being, became increasingly urgent. But no
longer in the form of an inclusive, organic conception of nature
according to which being is devoid of reality unless it is the principle
of becoming and becoming is not acceptable if it cannot be traced back
to being, but rather at first in the realm of a dialectical conception
that relates being to becoming in the endeavor of a reciprocal
justification and tries to bring the multiple back to the unitary, and
later in the realm of being itself that, after denying the reality of
all becoming, can only relate to itself. This evolution of philosophical
though can be easily followed, because it retraced the paths of the
evolution of commercial capital.
The merchant exchanged goods in order to make money. In doing so, he
gave up the violence of arms to make use of a more subtle and refined
method, the violence of language. The merchant gave up the spoils of
war, easy to acquire but short-lived, for a more lasting profit even
though it was more difficult to conquer. He gave up the Dionysian
activities of pillage and war for the Apollonian activity of commerce.
While warrior people got the upper hand through the immediate violence
of their strength, merchant people were too weak and cowardly and had to
have recourse to cunning in order to survive. So they renounced the risk
of adventure, put off their greed for a time, shunned open violence in
order to take advantage of the hidden violence of cunning.
Cunning is the art of deceptive persuasion, and the art of deceptive
persuasion is diplomacy. A superiority of language is needed; one has to
be coherent in order to persuade with reasoning; one needs to explain,
that is to say, to make it plain, through language, that things cannot
possibly be different from what one wants them to be. Explanation is the
act of convincing violently with language; it is persuasion through
which one can convince oneself of the truth of an argument; it is the
facility for convincing oneself. To explain is thus to persuade the
opposing party that the behavior one is trying to secure is advantageous
to them. The merchant must persuade in order to sell his goods at a
profit, and in order to accomplish this he must play on the desire of
the eventual buyers. He must swindle through persuasion. The art of
persuasive deception is typical of the merchant.
The powers of thought and language over reality are guaranteed only by
the separation between language and reality; but power over reality can
only mean taking possession of it. There is a paradox in the fact that
this power, which is only guaranteed by separation, must at the same
time be a possession. This leads to an endless process in which language
and thought continually try to take possession of reality, while
continually reestablishing their distance from it. This is appropriate
for the activity of expressing themselves as the thought and language of
alienated power. The absurdity is the will to take possession of reality
in the moment and in the very act in which separation from it is
established.
In order to better understand the relationship between the development
of Greek philosophy and the parallel development of the commercial
economy, it is useful to compare the conception of nature held by the
earlier Ionian philosophers with the philosophical speculations of
Parmenides in order to understand the substantial difference between
them.
When the Ionian philosophers spoke of natural reality, they used the
word ta onta, which means the things that exist, because they perceived
reality in its concrete multiplicity. However it may have been
interpreted, the essence of the world showed itself to them under the
visible form of a plurality of things, rich in all their qualities.
Being appeared as singular for the first time in Parmenides and was
designated by the term ta on which meant that which is. The essence of
the world was no longer a variegated plurality of qualities, but rather
one single abstract and general quality. The change of language revealed
the advent of a new conception of reality. It was no longer made up of
the multiple things gathered from sensory experience or speculative
reflection, but was the intelligible object of rational reflection (the
logos) that was expressed through a language that, critically reflecting
on itself, found its basic requirement in the principle of
non-contradiction.
The Being of Parmenides is One, identical to itself; it cannot be other
than itself, but can only grow into itself. The Being of Parmenides is
intelligible, the object of logos, that is to say of reason. It is the
object of rational language. Or rather, it is formed in the sphere of
this rational language that is common to all human beings, the general
abstract element of their reciprocal relations of communication.
However, the Being of Parmenides is not immediately visible in reality.
It must be acquired through a difficult conquest: the investigation of
the philosopher. The essence of reality must be “earned”.
The connection between the Being of Parmenides and exchange value in the
form of money, a pure abstraction that is identical to itself, should be
evident. Money is accumulated in order to buy goods in one place and
resell them in another with the aim of getting money. But the exchange
of money with money seems absurd, since exchanging things which are
identical to each other makes no sense. The sense in this process
actually comes from the fact that money is not exchanged for an equal
amount of money, but for a greater amount, thus increasing its value.
This happens because the goods are bought at a low price so that they
can be sold at a higher price. Thus money can be exchanged with itself;
it can represent the unchangeable being that has reason to exist only in
itself. At this point, reality becomes One in the qualitative sense. Its
only quality is “exchangeability”, exchange value.
“The doctrine of Parmenides marks the moment in which the contradiction
between the becoming of the sensory world, this Ionian world of the
physis and the genesis, and the logical requirements of thought are
proclaimed,” Vernant states. In other words, it marks the moment in
which the contradiction between the differing qualities of goods and the
single quality of money is set forth. This single quality is known as
exchange value, interchangeability, that which all things have in
common, that which is the essence of all thins, that which makes all
things comparable, that which places them in relation, that which
constitutes their ratio, their rational, intelligible, logical aspect.
Vernant goes on: “After Parmenides the task of philosophy would be that
of restoring the link between the rational universe of discourse and the
sensory world of nature through more subtly shaded definitions of the
principle of non-contradiction.” In Parmenides this link — that is to
say, the link between the exchange value of things and the things
themselves — is destroyed. The exchange value of things replaces them,
representing them in the same way as the rational world of discourse
represents the sensory world of nature.
Greek reason is commercial reason. Commerce can take place only in terms
of linguistic fraud, and this language is built on deception. This
language must persuade, must offer evidence for persuasion, must
explain. This language, like the Being of Parmenides, must find its own
verification in itself.