PREPARING FOR SOMETHING THAT NEVER HAPPENS: THE MEANS/ENDS PROBLEM IN MODERN CULTURE
by DAVID R. LOY
Interenat ional Stodies in Philosophy
Volume 26, Number 4
pp.47-67
47
When I think of all the books I have read, wise words heard,
anxieties given to parents,... of hopes I have had, all life
weighed in the balance of my own life seems to me a preparation
for something that never happens. (William Butler Yeats)
Yeats died in 1939. Today in Japan, where I write this, toddlers
take entrance exams to get into the best kindergartens, because the
best kindergartens help you to be accepted into the best primary
schools, which help you get into the best middle schools, which help
you get into the best high schools, which help you get into the best
universities, which help you get hired by the best corporations, where
assuredly your difficulties are far from over.... Some of the obvious
problems with this have been publicized -- e.g., teenage suicides due
to academic pressure, others so traumatized they refuse to attend
school -- but the greater tragedy is whole generations of students so
burnt out preparing for "examination hell" that they are brain-dead by
the ripe age of 19. Since the sole reason for studying is to pass
university entrance exams (your university, not your academic
performance while there, determines your employment prospects), there
is little incentive to study once you are in -- and, of course, any
personal motivation for an education has been eliminated in the
process.
Needless to say, this is only one example of a more widespread
problem with education today. Those of us who teach philosophy soon
realize that our role is not Socratic: among other problems, the
structure of higher education makes that almost impossible. The system
of grading, credits and degrees is a prime example of what I will call
means-ends reversal: inevitably one learns to study in order to pass
exams, get credit, earn degrees, win fellowships, and so forth, rather
than understanding that process as encouraging an e-ducere imperfectly
(if at all) measurable in those terms. We readily acknowledge the
intrinsic value of lifelong learning, yet this inversion is now so
deeply rooted that it is taken for granted and one mentions it at the
risk of being dismissed as naive. Bertrand Russell already noticed the
problem many decades ago: education today has become one of the main
obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
This paper, however, is not another polemic on what is wrong with
our educational systems. I want to reflect more generally on the
duality between means and ends -- not the usual problem of omelette
and eggs, but their divergence in the modern world. I am concerned
about the way contemporary
48
culture has become so preoccupied with means that it loses ends -- or,
more precisely, they become inverted, in that means, because they
never culminate in an ends, in effect have come to constitute our
ends.
Heidegger does not use the same vocabulary but this way of
formulating our problem is consistent with his later thinking about
technology, which for him too is a means that has become more than a
means: Technik is the particular Òw ay of revealing" whereby Being
manifests itself today. "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by,
to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may
be on call for a further ordering." He calls this Bestand "the
standing reserve".(1) Technik discloses all beings as raw material to
be exploited by the human subject; and the subject also becomes raw
material for exploitation, as we too become objectified by our own
objectifications. The point of Bestand is not so much that our
activities require such a "standing- reserve" as that, for reasons we
do not fully understand, we want to have such a standing-reserve
always available. That is, we desire limitless convertible means which
may be directed to any ends, even as -- or all the more because -- we
no longer know what goals to seek, what values to value. In this way
Bestand too loses ends, for Technik, because unable to provide an
answer to our ultimate questions about what is valuable and
meaningful, has itself become our answer. If if it is true that today
"end-less means" have become our common goal, the taken-for-granted
value, how important is that? What are its causes; and insofar as it
is problematic, are there alternatives? We shall begin by considering
what Max Weber (1864-1920) wrote about the rationalization and
disenchantment of the modern world. Weber himself noted that the
"formal rationality" pre-eminent today deals only with means and
cannot answer our ultimate questions about goals and values. This
aspect of his thought is familiar, yet just as important is another,
lesser- known side of his social theory: his analysis of our reactive
flights into subjectivity -- inner-worldly responses to the
rationalization of the world which do not escape the problem but
aggravate it. Weber's study of the origins of capitalism suggests not
only that it had religious roots but that it may still retain a
religious character. Then must any "solution" to the rationalization
and disenchantment of the world also have something of a religious
character?
Part two turns to Weber's colleague Georg Simmel (1858-1918) in
order to contemplate the example par excellence of means-ends
inversion: money as it functions today. Simmel's magnum opus The
Philosophy of Money contains, appropriately, the most profound
reflections on the means-ends split in modern culture. It also
challenges our understanding of their bifurcation by arguing that the
distinction between them, including our quest for the ultimate meaning
of life, is quite a recent cultural development. Our yearning for an
ultimate is a product of our dissatisfaction with the possibilities
contemporary life provides, due to its sacrifice of substantial values
for instrumental rationality. But is there any way out of this "iron
cage"?
49
We conclude with some Buddhist-related reflections on how one
might respond to this problem. For Mahayana Buddhism our contemporary
bifurcation between means and ends is another version of dualistic
(and delusive) thinking which should be related to the more
fundamental duality between subject and object. That will enable us to
appreciate how the Buddhist deconstruction of subject-object duality
points toward a way to resolve the means/ends split.
Weber
Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from
public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or
into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It
is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not
monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the
smallest and most intimate circles, in personal human situations,
in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the
prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great
communities like a firebrand, welding them together.(2)
Today the distinction between public and private has become so
absolute that we have difficulty comprehending how anything could weld
whole civilizations together. What has taken the place of prophetic
pneuma for us? "The fate of our times is characterized by
rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the
'disenchantment of the world.'"(3) Zweckrationalitat is better
translated as a purposive-rational or instrumental-rational
orientation; its complement is Entzauberung, the "de-magic-ing" of the
world. Zweckrationalitat is an excellent example of what Wittgenstein
called family resemblances: no single characteristic is common to all
the types Weber analyzed. Instrumental rationalization is a family of
separable although interrelated processes which have different
historical roots, develop in different ways and occur at different
rates, and tend to promote different interests and groups. Examples
include an increasing emphasis on calculability in various
institutions; rule-determined bureaucratic administration; the
specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge; and, more
generally, more impersonal control over the ways we live and the
decisions we make.(4)
Weber distinguished such formal rationality from what he called
substantive rationality. Our problem today may be described in terms
of the conflict between them: "Formal rationality refers primarily to
the calculability of means and procedures, substantive rationality to
the value (from some explicitly defined standpoint) of ends or
results."(5) From the perspective of a substantive rationality whose
concern is to actualize particular goals and values, instrumental
rationality can be profoundly irrational. This irreducible antagonism
between the rationality of our modern social and economic order and
its irrationality from the value perspectives of equality, fraternity,
love, etc., is for Weber "one of the most important sources of all
'social' problems".(6)Weber explicitly describes capitalism, his most
famous example of rationalization, as involving the "domination of the
end (supply meeting demand) by the means." (7)The purely formal
50
nature of instrumental rationality, its indifference to all
substantive ends and values, defines what is unique about our modern
world and demonstrates what is morally and politically problematic
about it.(8)
What allows instrumental rationality to become so problematic is
the obvious fact that today we do not agree about what goals and
pursuits most deserve be valued; and in this matter -- which is of
course the most important matter -- instrumental rationality, no
matter how sophisticated, cannot help us. Weber knew his Nietzsche:
the fate of our culture, which has "tasted the fruit of the tree of
knowledge", is "to have to know that we cannot read the meaning of the
world in the results of its investigation, no matter how perfect, but
must instead be in a position to create that meaning ourselves". Yet
such creation tends to be frustrated by the increasingly
incomprehensible complexity of the modern world, whose organization
escapes questions about value and morality by objectifying human
activities into more impersonal processes. The "disenchantment of the
world" means not so much the debunking of magic and superstition as
the tendency to devalue all mysterious and incalculable forces in
favor of the knowledge "that one can, in principle, master all things
by calculation." Yet this proven calculability conceals what Lawrence
Scaff calls a Simmelian paradox, for
its extension throughout culture as a possibility to be applied
only "in principle" is accom panied by the individual's
diminishing knowledge and control over all the conditions of life.
We can interpret this to mean that each of us comes to be
surrounded by and dependent on myriad complex "processes, " from
economic transactions to nuclear fission, affecting the immediate
experienced world and the prospects for continuation and
transformation of that world, which we individually cannot
possibly comprehend, much less control.(9)
Consider, for example, that complex of rationalized economic forces
known as the stock market. If we ignore such ineliminable abuses as
insider trading, its functioning is governed by an impersonal
rationality that bypasses all the ethical dimensions to the issues of
how people earn their livelihood. The leveraged-buyouts popular in the
1980's were often justified as beneficial to the economy, but those
decisions were made according to equations that determined how much
debt could be borne, not its effect on people and their communities.
Economics is a moral science because the problem of who gets what is
inevitably a moral issue, yet economists and their clients strive to
quantify economic processes into mathematical formulae that can be
calculated and manipulated as if they were as impersonally valid as
Euclidean geometry. The belief that an "invisible hand" will
beneficently regulate the economy, if only government intervention
were removed, is an almost ideal type of formal-instrumental
rationality swallowing substantive rationality; and the never-ending
controversy this belief generates demonstrates Weber's point about the
irresolvable antagonism between such rationality and the more
substantive rationality for which such a belief is deeply irrational.
The economic example is appropriate because Weber is best known
for his
51
controversial theory which locates the origins of capitalism in the
"this-worldly asceticism" of puritan, especially Calvinist, ethics.
Qualifying rather than rejecting materialistic determinism, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argued that "idealist"
factors sometimes affect the direction of historical development.
Calvinism believed in the predestination of a select number for
heaven, which encouraged what became an irresistible need to determine
whether one was among the chosen; such predestination made sacraments
unnecessary and led to devaluation of the sacred; in its place,
economic success in this world came to be accepted as the
demonstration of God's favor; which created the psychological and
sociological conditions for importing ascetic values from the
monastery, where they had been the prerogative of religious orders,
into one's worldly vocation, as one labored to prove oneself by
reinvesting any surplus rather than consuming it. The crux of Weber's
essay reflects on how, in this complex interweaving of materialist and
idealist factors, the original intention behind an activity may
eventually be transformed into something quite different:
The Puritan wanted to work in a vocation; we must do so. For when
asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into vocational life
and began to dominate inner-worldly morality, it helped to build
the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is
now bound to the technical and economic presuppositions of
mechanical, machinelike production, which today determines with
irresistible force the life-style of all individuals born into
this mechanism, not only those directly engaged in economic
enterprise, and perhaps will determine it until the last ton of
fossil fuel is burned. In Baxter's view the care for external
goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like "a light
cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed
that the cloak should become an iron cage.(10)
We are a long way from Adam Smith's invisible hand. Weber's metaphor
is less sanguine: the original Calvinist vocational ethos now "prowls
about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs",
conquered by a rationalized civilization of large-scale production and
ravenous consumption that today rests on merely mechanical
foundations.(11)
An important implication of this has not been much noticed and
perhaps was not fully understood by Weber himself. His sociology of
religion distinguishes more ritualistic and legalistic religions,
which adapt themselves to the world, from salvation religions more
hostile to it, which obey sacred conviction rather than sacred law.
The latter are often revolutionary due to the prophecy and charisma
that motivate them, missionary because they seek to inject a new
message or promise into everyday life. Their efforts to ensure the
perpetuation of grace in the world ultimately require a reordering of
the economic system. Weber noticed that adherents of this type of
religion usually "do not enjoy inner repose because they are in the
grip of inner tensions."
All this serves just as well to describe the Puritans discussed in
The Protestant Ethic, which leads to the supposition that capitalism
began as, and may still be understood as, a type of salvation
religion: dissatisfied with the world as it is and compelled to inject
a new promise into it, motivated (or justifying
52
itself) by faith in the grace of profit and concerned to perpetuate
that grace, with a missionary zeal to expand and reorder (rationalize)
the economic system.
This supposition challenges our usual distinction between secular
and sacred, between the economic sphere and the religious one -- a
distinction which as many anthropologists have noticed is a late
development, the exception rather than the rule. Weber's argument
suggests that although we think of the modern world as secularized,
its values (e.g., economic rationalization) are not only derived from
religious ones (salvation from injecting a revolutionary new promise
into daily life), they are largely the same values, albeit transformed
by the loss of reference to an other-wordly dimension. Or, more
precisely, these values have been distorted by the fact that our no
longer other-worldly yet still future-oriented motivation has become
unconscious, which implies, according to psychoanalytic theory, that
those values will be objectified and projected. This sheds light on
Weber's enigmatic claim that "Today the routines of 'everyday life'
challenge religion" because heute aber ist es religioser 'Alltag', the
religious has become everyday/ordinary.(12) The routinization of our
lives challenges religion because our new values constitute an
alternative to its older forms. But then the rationalization and
disenchantment of the world is not so much an alternative to religion
as a particularly heretical -- and perhaps demonic -- form of it.
I shall not attempt to evaluate the lengthy scholarly debate that
Weber's thesis has provoked,(13) but if true it is a paradigm case of
means swallowing ends: Puritanism initially bifurcated the means
(capital accumulation) from the goal (assurance of salvation); in its
preoccupation with this means the original goal became attenuated, yet
inner-worldly asceticism did not disappear as God became more distant
and heaven less relevant; in our modern world the original motivation
has evaporated but our preoccupation with capital and profit has not
disappeared with it; on the contrary, it has become our main
obsession. As Weber emphasizes, the ascetic vocational ethos may have
lost its original meaning yet that does not make it any the less
powerful. Our type of salvation still requires a future-orientation.
As Norman Brown puts it, "We no longer give our surplus to God; the
process of producing an ever-expanding surplus is in itself our
God."(14) In contrast to the cyclic time of pre-modern man, which is
maintained by seasonal rituals of atonement, capitalist time is linear
and future-directed, because it reaches for an atonement (originally,
to be one of the elect who will be saved) that can no longer be
achieved because it has disappeared as a conscious motivation. But as
an unconscious motivation it still functions, for we continually reach
for an end that is perpetually postponed -- which in effect makes the
means into our ends. So our collective reaction has become the need
for growth: the never-satisfied desire for an ever-higher "standard of
living" (because those who now understand themselves as consumers can
never have too much) and the gospel of sustained economic
"development" (because corporations and the GNP are never big
enough).(15)
The psychic toll of a perpetual future-orientation, of this means
which never
53
reaches fulfillment in an ends, is not difficult to imagine. So it is
no surprise that modernity is also characterized by compensations for
the increasing rationalization of the world. In reaction to its
objectivity and impersonality, there has developed what Weber called a
"subjectivist culture" which attempts to redeem us by cultivating an
Innerlichkeit inwardness. Traditionally religion has offered whatever
salvation has been necessary, but the loss of belief in a Òh igher Ó
world has removed that avenue of escape without eliminating our
psychological need for a redemption from this world. The nineteenth
century found a temporary alternative in the Hegelian and Spenglerian
creeds of social evolution, yet by Weber's day liberal historicist
belief in progress was being discredited and replaced by "value
spheres" that sought an inner-worldly redemption. A new place of
refuge was discovered or invented: hypertrophied subjectivity. In
various essays Weber focussed on three such spheres whose
"irrationality" (or nonrationality) we seize upon as a relief from the
seemingly inexorable rationalization of the world: an absolute ethics
of "brotherliness" which for many of his contemporaries would be
embodied in socialism; aestheticism; and eroticism.
The problem with brotherliness as an absolutist ethics is that,
unless still rooted in religious, other-worldly imperatives, it is
plagued by a dilemma. One must choose between hoping to end all forms
of domination or accepting the expediencies necessary for effective
political action. "If the former, then one must be prepared to live
with the maddening incongruities between ideal and real. If the
latter, then one must be prepared to live with the diabolic
uncertainties of responsibility for consequences of action."(16)
Concern for results entails the loss of redemptive purity, but purity
can be preserved only by withdrawing into a subjectivity which will
become that much more inner-worldly as it becomes more alienated from
a world increasingly preoccupied with results and efficiency.
Originally the other two value spheres, art and eros, were like
ethics closely associated with religion, but today they too have
become autonomous. The more we self-consciously elevate them into
absolutes, and the more we understand them to preserve "the most
irrational and thereby real kernel of life", the more aesthetic and
erotic pursuits have taken over "the function of a this-worldly
salvation from the routines of everyday life and, above all, from the
increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism."(17)
Weber, like Simmel, had some contact with the aesthetic circle of
Stefan George and he observed with disapproval how George developed
into a "prophet" of aestheticism. Simmel, himself somewhat of an
aestheticist, noticed that one who lives in more direct contact with
nature may enjoy its charms yet "lacks that distance from nature that
is the basis for aesthetic contemplation and the root of that quiet
sorrow, that feeling of yearning estrangement and of a lost paradise
that characterizes the romantic response to nature."(18) This insight
becomes more important when extrapolated: then it asks us to consider
not only whether our valuation of aesthetic experience but whether our
very notion of aesthetic experience might be modernist: that is,
historically-conditioned by the same social forces that have
54
disenchanted the world. The implication is that our aesthetic
sensitivity to music, poetry, painting, etc., has developed in
response to (and reciprocally encouraged) the de-aestheticization of
the routined everyday world. In other words, certain types of
"bracketed" sensory experience have been privileged, and our
responsiveness to them has hypertrophied, as the rest have been
devalued. Kant's famous definition characterizes aesthetic experience
as nonintentional and disinterested, in sharp contrast with the
utilitarian, means-ends preoccupations of daily life; yet perhaps this
is less a definition than our modern construction of "aesthetic
experience." This suggests a similarly disturbing question about
brotherliness: has preoccupation with a purist personal ethics also
developed in reaction to (and in its turn encouraged) the
"de-ethicization" of our more objectified social world -- e.g., the
loss of community that has accompanied modernity?
Our third escape from the disenchanted everyday is eroticism,
which we now experience as closest of all to the real and natural
because we understand it as the ultimate font of life; for
only in the secret, inward sphere of the irrational, far beyond
the banalities of routine existence in the everyday, can one
directly sense life's pulsating forces. To assume its fullest
meaning, "life" in this world, the only world there is, must be
lived "beyond good and evil." Only under such conditions can its
irrational core -- eroticism -- ever be imagined to offer an
avenue of eternal renewal and escape.(19)
Yet to express the dualism this way, by dialectically opposing "life"
to the rational, makes us wonder whether such eroticism too might be
another historically-conditioned conception. Insofar as the parallel
with aestheticism and brotherliness continues to hold, we may also ask
whether eroticism in the modern world has been hyper-eroticized in
reaction to the de-eroticization of the rest of everyday life. The
question is awkward because it is difficult to gain a sense of what
other alternatives there might be to the banalities of the more public
everyday. Does our contemporary preoccupation with sex as that which
frees us from the routinized utilitarian world reflect a commensurate
lack of sensitivity to a larger Òe rotic Ó dimension -- for example,
a playfulness now almost completely lacking in the more Òs erious Ó
economic and political spheres? To try to evaluate this (and our other
two suppositions) is not easy and would take us beyond the bounds of
this paper, yet it may be mentioned that some psychologists have
reached similar conclusions about eros.(20)
With all three value spheres the flight into subjectivity appears
to be a dialectical reaction to the rationalization of the objective
world. Rather than providing an inner-worldly salvation, however, each
seems to aggravate the problem it flees. An absolute ethic of
brotherliness can maintain its purity only by becoming irresponsible
(in the literal sense: unable to respond) and therefore more alienated
from more rationalized social forces. By developing an acute
sensitivity to art, music, literature, etc., we may have acceded to
the de-aestheticization -- part of the disenchantment -- of everyday
life. And by becoming preoccupied with the erotic as the "most real
kernel of life", we may have become desensitized
55
to the routinization of the "less real". If so, what we understand to
be the solution is actually part of the problem. In this way modern
culture has ended up deeply divided against itself, with the
impersonal objectivist tendency towards rationalization at war with
the subjectivist value-spheres that develop in hostility to it -- yet
each dialectically reinforcing the other. The deceptive possibility of
a private escape encourages us to yield to the degradation of the
public realm, which in turn encourages the development of subjectivist
culture.
For Weber "the spheres of the irrational, the only spheres that
intellectualism has not yet touched, are now raised into consciousness
and put under its lense. This modern intellectualist form of romantic
irrationalism... may well bring about the very opposite of its
intended goal."(21) How might that happen? Scaff points to a paradox
that emerges from the dependence of subjectivist culture on its
objectivist enemy: "the blossoming of an inwardness of cultural
redemption was scarcely imaginable without the new technologies of
publication and communication, the cultural hothouse of the modern
city, new possibilities for economically independent urban existence
-- or, in short, the complete intellectualization of even the most
sacred value-sphere of subjectivity."(22)
Yet I think that such a sociological explanation needs to be
supplemented by a more Buddhist perspective, for which the basic
problem may be more simply understood as the unfortunate bifurcation
between an increasing sense of self-consciousness that by definition
feels alienated from an increasingly-objectified rationalized world.
Since for Buddhism such a Cartesian-like subject is a delusion -- an
incorrect understanding of ourselves which is in fact the very source
of our duhkha, "suffering" -- any salvation from modern
Zweckrationalitat which involves a subjectivist withdrawal from it,
thus granting its free reign within the objectified world, will only
increase the anxiety and instability of such a groundless
sense-of-self.
From his Weberian perspective, Scaff agrees that the sense "of an
increasingly radical tension between this world and the
thought-to-be-inviolable self seems to be at the basis of our most
serious and austere responses to a disenchanted fate." He concludes
that "[w]hat we now need is not so much seductive "grand narratives"
and enticing routes of escape, but rather temporally bounded,
self-restrained, and specific inquiries that bring our history back
into view and retrieve the concrete and particular, the locally
expressed, the individually experienced, the detailed."(23) He does
not elaborate on what these might be. Weber was pessimistic about our
escaping the iron cage while finding his own personal solution in an
"ethic of responsibility." That seems to have been his attempt to
integrate substantial rationality with instrumental rationality by
combining a passionate comittment to ultimate values with a
dispassionate analysis of the best ways to pursue them.(24) As a
modernist ethics this is admirable and perhaps necessary, yet it
cannot be a sufficient response to the problem of modernity,insofar as
its dilemma is rooted in our subjectivist alienation from a
disenchanted world. If even capitalism has religious origins, as Weber
argued, and still retains
56
a religious character, as I have suggested, perhaps the solution must
also have a religious character -- religious in the sense that it
addresses directly the fundamental and increasingly radical tension
between an objectified world and the subjectified self.
Simmel
Modern times, particularly the most recent, are permeated by a
feeling of tension, expectation and unreleased intense desires --
as if in anticipation of what is essential, of the definitive
meaning and central point of life and things. This is obviously
connected with the overemphasis that the means often gain over the
ends of life in mature cultures.... the growing significance of
the means goes hand in hand with a corresponding increase in the
rejection and negation of the end.(25)
Simmel's most sustained meditations on the problem of means and ends
are found in what he considered his magnum opus, The Philosophy of
Money. Perhaps only the chapter on "Filthy Lucre" in Brown's Life
Against Death equals its wealth of insight into the role of money in
our lives -- a role which, it hardly needs to be pointed out,
continues to increase in modern life along with instrumental
rationalization and subjectification generally.
Higher concepts in philosophy are able to embrace an increasing
number of details only by a corresponding loss of content. Money for
Simmel is an exact sociological counterpart, "a form of being whose
qualities are generality and lack of content". For Norman Brown too,
money can be the purest symbol of all "because there is nothing in
reality that corresponds to it."(26) Hence its unparalleled usefulness
as a measure of everything else, and the inevitability by which such a
perfect means becomes the end:
Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its quality
as a means, to its convertibility into more definite values, so
thoroughly and unreservedly developed into a psychological value
absolute, into a completely engrossing final purpose governing our
practical consciousness. This ultimate craving for money must
increase to the extent that money takes on the quality of a pure
means.... Money's value as a means increases with its value as a
means right up to the point at which it is valid as an absolute
value and the consciousness of purpose in it comes to an end. (PhM
232)
Money has become most important in those times when other
value-pursuits such as religion, which encourage satisfaction with
more modest circumstances, lose their attraction. Simmel compares our
present situation with the decline of Greece and Rome, when all of
life came to be colored by monetary interests. He calls it an irony of
history that, as the intrinsically satisfying purposes of life become
atrophied, precisely that value which is nothing but a means assumes
their place. (PhM 236) Later Brown would use psychoanalytic theory to
relate money's hypertrophy with unconscious guilt and fear of death.
However, its increasing importance for us is only part of a more
general transformation of all the elements of life into means, as
sequences that had previously terminated in autonomous purposes have
become mutually connected
57
into more complex teleological structures. Today, in place of earlier,
relatively self-satisfying ends Simmel like Weber sees "objectively
and subjectively calculable rational relationships" that
"progressively eliminate the emotional reactions and decisions which
only attach themselves to the turning points of life, to the final
purposes." Among the many examples he discusses is the English landed
gentry, whose transformation into a class based on more portable
wealth has been held responsible for a decline in their communal
social responsibilities. Rural self- governance had been based on the
personal participation of this class, which has now yielded its
paternalistic role to the more impersonal State. (PhM 431, 343)
Yet money has also enabled people to join groups without needing
to sacrifice any personal freedom. This is an exemplary difference
from medieval types of association, which tended not to distinguish
between people as such and people as members of a group. Medieval
associations encompassed all one's interests -- economic, political,
familial and religious alike. This is consistent with Weber's point
about the modern development of subjectivist value-spheres, but
Simmel's response is more positive. Money should be given its due:
Thus money, as an intermediate link between man and thing, enables
man to have, as it were, an abstract existence, a freedom from
direct concern with things and from a direct relationship with
them, without which our inner nature would not have the same
chances of development. If modern man can, under favourable
circumstances, secure an island of subjectivity, a secret,
closed-off sphere of privacy -- not in the social but in a deeper
metaphysical sense -- for his most personal existence, which to
some extent compensates for the religious style of life of former
times, then this is due to the fact that money relieves us to an
ever-increasing extent of direct contact with things, while at the
same time making it infinitely easier for us to dominate them and
select from them what we require. (PhM 469)
Simmel had stronger ties with fin-de-siecle aestheticist culture than
Weber did and was less inclined to dismiss it as the reactive pole of
a dialectical problem. On the other side, however, this quotation
suggests that he was also less sensitive to the intrinsic connection
between the modern "feeling of tension, expectation and unreleased
intense desires" he noticed and our modernist subjectivity alienated
from an increasingly disenchanted objectivity.
Yet their differences are not as important as what they have in
common. Just as Weber traces capitalism back, in part, to a vocational
ethos imported from Puritanism into the economic sphere, Simmel also
reflects on the religious significance of money. He notices that all
Greek money was originally sacred, for it emanated from the
priesthood, along with other standard concepts of measure (weight,
size, time, etc.); money bore the symbol of the common god because the
priesthood at that time represented the unity of the various regions.
Brown's Life Against Death supplements this sociological explanation
with a psychoanalytic one that accounts for why money continues to be
sacred for us: "the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable
from symbolism; and symbolism is not, as Simmel thought, the mark of
rationality but the mark of
the sacred." As Ernest Becker explains it, the first coins were minted
and distributed by temples because they were medallions inscribed with
the god's image and embodying his protective power. Containing such
mana, they were naturally in demand, not because you could buy things
with them but vice-versa: since they were popular you could exchange
them for other things. The consequence was that "now the cosmic powers
could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit
temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace."
This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person "who
based the value of his life -- and so of his immortality -- on a new
cosmology centered on coins."(27)
Simmel is not unaware of the relation of symbolism with the
sacred, for he notices a profound parallel between money and God:
In reality, money in its psychological form, as the absolute means
and thus as a unifying point of innumerable sequences of purposes,
possesses a significant relationship to the notion of God... The
essence of the notion of God is that all diversities and
contradictions in the world achieve a unity in him, that he is the
coincidentia oppositorum. Out of this idea, that in him all
estrangments and all irreconcilables of existence find their unity
and equalization, there arises the peace, the security, the
all-embracing wealth of feeling that reverberate with the notion
of God which we hold.
There is no doubt that, in their realm, the feelings that money
excite possess a psychological similarity with this. In so far as
money becomes the absolutely commensurate expression and
equivalance of all values, it rises to abstract heights way above
the whole broad diversity of objects; it becomes the centre in
which the most opposed, the most estranged and the most distant
things find their common denominator and come into contact with
one another.
So it is no coincidence that money exhibits the same duality in
function as religion: it is one in the series of human concerns, yet
also transcends the others as an integrative force which supports and
infuses all other concerns. (PhM 485)
Then perhaps God and money suffer from similar problems. The
difficulty with God, as usually conceived, is that in order to
encompass all things he becomes so attenuated that his being is
difficult to distinguish from nonbeing -- which has made it easy for
him to disappear altogether for us, or (as Simmel's analogy suggests)
for his role to be assumed by money. We have noticed that money too is
a perfect symbol because it has no content of its own; yet that is
also what allows its means to become the end, what encourages us to
take its no-thing-ness as more real than anything else. Preoccupation
with either type of nonbeing devalues, and encourages a withdrawal
from, the sensory world of more transitory beings. We attain a
sterilized Being apparently immune to its impermanence but, like
Midas, we are unable to appreciate its charms.
The Philosophy of Money concludes by relating the domination of
monetary relationships today with the way that the relativistic
character of existence finds increasing expression in our lives, for
"money is nothing other than a special form of the embodied relativity
of economic goods that signifies their value." (PhM 512) To a Buddhist
this suggests a rather different analogy between money and sunyata,
the concept of "emptiness" in Mahayana Buddhism. Sunyata has
59
often been reified into an Absolute or a Buddha-nature taken to
constitute the essential nature of all things, but for Nagarjuna
(whose Mulamadhyamikakarikas is the most important text of Mahayana
philosophy) sunyata is a heuristic term used to describe the
relativity, and therefore the lack of self-existence (in Derridean
terms, lack of self-presence) of all phenomena. Nagarjuna took pains
to emphasize that there is no such thing as sunyata: "Sunyata is a
guiding, not a cognitive, notion" employed to "exhaust all theories
and views; those for whom sunyata is itself a theory they [Buddhas]
declared to be incurable" (Mulamadhyamikakarika 24:18, 12:8). If we
misunderstand this the cure becomes more dangerous than the disease,
for "the feeble-minded are destroyed by the misunderstood doctrine of
sunyata, as by a snake ineptly seized" by the tail rather than by the
neck (24:12). Money -- also nothing in itself, merely a symbol -- is
equally indispensable because of its relativism, its unique ability to
convert something into anything else. But woe to those who grab this
snake too wrongly: who mis-take the symbol for reality, this means for
the end.
Simmel's concern with means-ends teleology derives from a
fundamental paradox or unresolvable conflict which he believed to
characterize all developing cultures. Life always produces cultural
forms in which it expresses and realizes itself: these include
sciences, technologies and systems of law as well as religions and
works of art. Such forms provide the flow of life with content and
order. Yet, although arising out of the life process, once objectified
such forms no longer participate so directly in life's ceaseless
rhythm of decay and renewal. They become cages (we are reminded of
Weber's iron cage) for the life-force that creates them but then
transcends them; they remain fixated into identities whose own law and
logic inevitably distance them from the creative process that produced
them in the first place.(29)
As a culture evolves more such forms are produced and take on a
life of their own, which entails a developing relationship between
them and the creative impulse that produces them. Teleological series
lengthen and ramify. A rudimentary example is basic tools. A knife is
very useful but it already complicates things. As well as learning how
to use it efficiently and safely we must learn how to make it, which
requires further teleological chains to locate and work the right kind
of bone or stone. So a developing culture constructs increasingly
complex mechanisms of interlocking preconditions that become necessary
to fulfill each step of the means.
Simmel was so impressed by this tendency that he considered it the
tragedy of culture: once cultural forms exist, they become the
unavoidable objects by whose assimilation we become acculturated --
and with whose acculturation we necessarily become preoccupied, at the
cost of a more direct relationship with the creative impulse. For
prehistoric societies the terminus a quo as well as the terminus ad
quem of cultural forms usually remained within the lifetime of their
creator; the invention of writing systems constituted evidently the
greatest quantum leap outside that boundedness. Today we are all
technicians of
60
teleologies whose termini are not only unknown but unimaginable. The
incalculable abundance of modern artifacts and the continual
ramification of modern teleologies means that in order to play
whatever role we may within our own culture, we must subordinate
ourselves more and more to them. Scholars need only reflect on the
changes within their own disciplines during the past generation or
two. The flood of noteworthy books and papers threatens to become a
tidal wave that will submerge those who try to keep up with all the
developments in their fields. A theoretical physicist once told me
that specialists whose researches are interrupted for a year may never
be able to catch up afterwards.
A consequence of this heightened teleological consciousness, and
of our own diminishing role within it, is the peculiar frustration of
a life impelled to seek beyond itself for what it suspects will never
be found and never be fulfilling.
A developing culture not only increases the demands and tasks of
men, but also leads the construction of means for each of these
individual ends even higher, and already often demands merely for
the means a manifold mechanism of interlocking preconditions.
Because of this relationship, the abstract notion of ends and
means develops only at a higher cultural level. Only at that
level, and because of the numerous purposive sequences striving
for some kind of unification, because of the continuous removal of
the specific purpose by a larger and larger chain of means -- only
then does the question of ultimate purpose, that lends reason and
dignity to the whole effort, and the question of why emerge. The
idea of an ultimate purpose in which everything is again
reconciled, but which is dispensable to undifferentiated
conditions and men, stands as peace and salvation in the disunited
and fragmentary character of our culture. (PhM 360, my italics)
This is one of those insights which compels assent and therefore
redefines our problematic. Lengthening teleological chains are what
lead us to ask about the end, the ultimate purpose of life. What is
distinctive about our situation today is not so much means-ends
inversion as our more basic sense that they are divorced. Modernity is
better defined as the aggravated awareness of a split between them.
Then our need for absolute ends and goals reflects our tendency to
make everything into a means to something else. A yearning for meaning
and ultimate purpose is the other side of our inability to be
satisfied with the possibilities our culture offers us, a
dissatisfaction which, ironically, can be traced back to its sacrifice
of substantial values for instrumental rationality.
When the problem is viewed from this perspective, what "solution"
is possible? The answer would seem to be none whatsoever so long as we
understand any alternative as a particular goal to be gained by means
of instrumental rationality. For that approach is itself the problem.
Then no seductive grand narrative or enticing mode of escape, as Scaff
puts it, and no political or metaphysical end of history can be
expected to fulfill us. What other alternative can there be?
Wittgenstein points us in the right direction: if the abstract notion
of ends and means develops only at a higher cultural level, "the
solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the
problem."(30) But now that the problem
61
of life weighs so heavily upon us, modernists and postmodernists
alike, can it ever disappear?
The Nonduality of Means and Ends
The perplexity of utilitarianism is that it gets caught in the
unending chain of means and ends without ever arriving at some
principle which could justify the category of means and end, that
is, of utility itself. The "in order to" has become the content of
the "for the sake of"; in other words, utility established as
meaning generates meaninglessness. (Arendt)(31) It is by no means
an objective truth that nothing is important unless it goes on
forever or eventually leads to something else that persists
forever. Certainly there are ends that are complete unto
themselves without requiring an endless series of justifications
outside themselves.... If no means were complete unto themselves,
if everything had to be justified by something else outside of
itself which must in its turn also be justified, then there is
infinite regress: the chain of justification can never end.
(Yalom)(32) We, at the present day, can hardly understand the
keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft
bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed. (Johann Huizinga, The
Waning of the Middle Ages)(33)
We have seen that Weber's modern world is characterized not only
by instrumental rationality and disenchantment but also by
compensatory emphasis on an inner-worldly salvation for the self.
Increasing objectification correlates with increasing
subjectification; and although one could argue about which preceded
which, the more important point is that each aggravates the other.
Extrapolating a hint of Simmel's, I have suggested that Weber's
subjectivist refuges themselves contribute to the world's
disenchantment. Circumscribing our aesthetic sensibilities within
narrowly- defined limits may help to de-aestheticize the everyday
world; the hypertrophy of sexuality today perhaps contributes to
de-eroticizing the rest of our routinized existence; and preoccupation
with living a morally-pure life within our own circle encourages us to
reject the rest of the world as irredeemably corrupt -- which can
become a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I mentioned that this way of formulating our situation is
especially meaningful for Buddhism, since the sense of dualism between
subjectified self and objectified world is understood as the crucial
delusion that causes us to suffer, as we try to secure a sense-of-self
which because it is illusory can never ground itself. Contrary to the
other-worldly salvations sought by most religions, Nagarjuna makes it
clear that the goal of Buddhist practice is another way of
experiencing this world: "The ontic range of nirvana is the ontic
range of the everyday world; there is not even the subtlest difference
between the two" (Mulamadhyamikakarika 25:20). In Weber Õs terms,
Buddhism may be understood to promote the re-enchantment of our
everyday world -- re-aestheticizing, re-eroticizing and re-ethicizing
the whole of it -- by reducing our dualistic sense of alienation from
it until we realize that we are nothing other than it. In this
62
concluding section we need to see what such a re-enchantment has to do
with teleology and the split between means and ends.
For Simmel, modern culture is characterized by a widening
divergence between means and ends. Lengthening and ramifying
teleological chains lead to means drowning out goals, a process best
exemplified in the role of money today. As money becomes the absolute
value, in which our consciousness of purpose reaches its end, the
other activities of life become demoted into our methods to attain it.
Schopenhauer said that money is human happiness in abstracto, sought
by those no longer capable of human happiness in concreto; our
preoccupation with this "purest" symbol refutes the common belief that
the modern world is materialistic.(34)
Simmel observes that only in more ramified cultures does the
question of ultimate purpose emerge. As teleological chains multiply,
we begin to wonder why? and yearn for some reconciliation that can
unify our fragmented lives. For Buddhism, however, this modern sense
of a growing bifurcation between means and ends is another example of
our more general problem with dualistic thinking. Usually we dualize
(e.g., good vs. evil, success vs. failure) in order to affirm one term
at the price of its opposite. In this case we use the means to get
some ends, yet the same paradox bedevils us: the opposites are so
dependent upon each other that each gains its meaning only by negating
the other. A life self-consciously Òg ood Ó is preoccupied with
avoiding evil, my desire for success is equalled by my fear of
failure, and when ends disappear into the future they reappear the
only place they can. The further our goals and purposes are projected
into an indefinite future, the more inexorably our means take over
their role. Weber characterized modernity as emphasizing instrumental
rationality at the price of more substantive rationality, yet the
better way to express it is that instrumental rationality has become
our substantive rationality: in reaction to our confusion about what
to value, we have come to value Zweckrationalitat itself.
Unfortunately, such instrumental rationality grants us no peace. Being
a means, Zweckrationalitat is always going somewhere, but, being a
means, it can never rest anywhere. Hence the peculiarly modern feeling
of tension, expectation and unreleased desires that Simmel notices:
our perpetual anticipation of something essential yet to occur, Yeats'
sense of a whole lifetime preparing for something that never happens.
No wonder, then, that we cannot understand the keenness with which a
fur coat, a good fire on the hearth and a glass of wine were enjoyed
in medieval times; for today they do not satisfy us.
This inability to be satisfied is a good Buddhist definition of
our duhkha, whose usual translation "suffering" leaves much to be
desired. Duhkha, the first of Sakyamuni Buddha's four noble truths, is
characteristic of life generally, which makes the restlessness of
modern culture an aggravated version of the more general problem with
being human. Buddhism traces this most fundamental duhkha back to the
delusion of self: the sense of a self that is other than the world is
something which, by definition, can never be satisfied. Lacking any
63
being or ground of its own, the self is best characterized as an
ongoing process which seeks perpetually, because in vain, for some way
to feel secure, to make itself real.(35) The intensified psychological
duhkha of modern life corresponds to our intensified individualism.
This enables us to relate Simmel's increasingly ramified and
increasingly frustrating teleological chains with Weber's dualism
between the rationalized objectification of a disenchanted world and
the subjectification necessary for an inner- worldly escape from it.
If the modern, more subjectified ego-self is a delusion that is never
satisfied, it will understand its dissatisfaction as due to not having
attained its goals; and as attaining the more modest goals of the past
(e.g., a glass of wine before the fire) brings no satisfaction, the
need will develop to project more ambitious goals at the end of
lengthening teleological chains...
If so, the only solution is to deconstruct the sense of a
bifurcation between such an alienated self and its objectified,
disenchanted world. In this context, we need to see how Buddhism
relates this deconstruction of self to the deconstruction of
causality, insofar as the problem of means and ends relies upon our
more basic notion of cause and effect.(36) Then what will happen to
the self when the causal relation it elaborates to make itself real
turns out to be problematical? Nietzsche (whom Weber and Simmel read)
traced the fiction of self back to the fiction of intentionality, the
supposed need for an agent to cause the action. His critique of the
self follows from his critique of causality, which led him to conclude
that "everything of which we become conscious is a terminal
phenomenon, an end -- and causes nothing".(37) Mahayana Buddhism
reached similar conclusions by a different route, which offers a more
practical path to overcome our subject-object, means-ends dualities.
For this our point of reference is again Nagarjuna's
Mulamadhyamikakarikas.
The relationship between cause and effect was one of the main
issues of classical Indian philosophy. Nagarjuna's own approach,
however, seems paradoxical. On the one hand, causality is the main
weapon he uses to demonstrate the interdependent relativity of things
and therefore their lack of self-existence. On the other, probably the
most important verse in the Mulamadhyamikakarikas seems to deny
causality and interdependence from what is evidently a Òh igher Ó
point of view: "That which, taken as causal or dependent, is the
process of being born and passing on, is, taken non-causally and
beyond all dependence, declared to be nirvana" (XXV:9). This climactic
chapter of the Mulamadhyamikakarikas argues that, if there is no
self-existence, then the enlightenment of nirvana, the Buddhist goal,
must also be sunya -- that is, even nirvana cannot be said to exist.
Nagarjuna turns traditional Buddhism upside-down by asserting there is
no specifiable difference between samsara (our everyday world of
duhkha, in which is the things are born, change, and pass away) and
nirvana. There is, however, a change in perspective, or a difference
in the way things are "taken" -- a difference which may be important
if we want to avoid always preparing for something that never happens.
64
The irony of Nagarjuna's approach to the interdependent relativity
of things is that his use of causation also denies causation. Having
deconstructed the self-existence of things (including us) into
interdependent conditions, causality itself disappears, because
without anything to cause or be effected, the world will not be
experienced in terms of cause and effect. Once causality has been used
to refute the apparent self-existence of objective things, the lack of
things to relate- together also refutes causality. If things originate
(and change, cease to exist, etc.) there are no self-existing things;
but if there are no such things then there is nothing to originate and
therefore no origination. It is because we see the world as a
collection of discrete things that we need to superimpose causal
relationships, to glue them together.
This transforms the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination
into an account of non- dependent non-origination. It describes not
the interaction of things but the sequence and juxtaposition of
appearances -- or what could be called appearances if there were some
non- appearance to be contrasted with. Without any self or essential
"thing-ness" behind appearances, however, no such contrast is
possible. Origination, duration and cessation become "like an
illusion, a dream, or an imaginary city in the sky"
(Mulamadhyamikakarika VII:34). It is not self-causation, for the
category of causality is eliminated altogether. This is tathata, the
thusness or just this!-ness which describes the way an enlightened
being lives, according to Buddhism.(38)
This, of course, does not eliminate causality experienced "as if"
in everyday life (Nagarjuna ends up with a two-tiered concept of
truth), but it does enable us to experience the everyday world in a
fresh, noncausal way. The crucial difference from our usual
understanding becomes clear if we translate Nagarjuna Õs dialectic
into our problematic: if there are only means, then there are no
means, for every event becomes an end in itself. Ultimately, events
are not to be justified by their reference to some other events, e.g.,
by their effectiveness in producing some other event. To live only in
a causal, means-ends world is constantly to overlook the most obvious
thing about ourselves and this world we are Òi n Ó. The challenge, for
a Buddhist, is to realize this and then to live it -- a task that soon
exposes our inability to dwell in the present, the sense-of-self's
need to flee its own sense-of-lack now by projecting itself into the
future and identifying itself with its goals, which we hope will make
us feel more secure, more real. In this way the deconstruction of the
cause/effect duality also leads to deconstructing the duality between
the objectified world and subjectified self. Here there is not the
space to describe how meditation practices can lead to "forgetting the
self",(39) but the result of that conflation is less sense of an
alienated self which needs to use instrumental rationality to try to
get something from the world. This breaks the vicious circle between
the increasing objectification of the world and the increasing
subjectification of an internalized self. Needless to say, such
practices and experiences are not confined to Buddhism, yet the
65
Buddhist understanding of this process, which emphasizes
deconstructing both causality and subject-object duality, presents our
problem and its solution in a manner easily related to what Weber and
Simmel have noticed about modern culture. In place of end-less means,
this gives us something that might be described as meaning-ful ends or
end-full means; that is, life becomes play.
Something is play when its meaning is self-contained, because
nothing needs to be gained from it. From the broadest perspective,
then, we are always playing; the question is not whether we are
playing but how. Do we suffer our games as if they were life-or-death
struggles, because they are the means by which the self hopes to
ground itself sometime in the future (by qualifying for heaven,
becoming rich, famous, etc.), or do we dance with the light feet that
Nietzsche called the first attribute of divinity? In Derrida's terms,
it is the difference between dreaming of deciphering a truth which
will end play by restoring self-presence, and affirming a play which
no longer seeks to ground itself. For Buddhism the latter is possible
only insofar as the self is not alienated from its world, for the
alienated ego-self is that which, due to its intrinsic instability,
seeks to ground itself, and therefore needs to objectify its world as
its place to do so.
"So the grand destiny of man is... to play?" Does our incredulity
reflect the absurdity of the proposal, or do the negative connotations
of the word reveal less about play than about us: our self-importance,
our need to stand out from the rest of creation (and from the rest of
our fellows) by accomplishing great projects. The loss of such
self-preoccupation makes true play possible:
To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as
though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when
we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the
relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of
consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to
consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable
outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a
specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility
whatever the cost to oneself.(40)
The problem with instrumental rationality is, finally, its
seriousness, which presses for specified conclusions and is not open
to the unpredictable. When everything that happens is of consequence
--not because of its causal consequences, but because we are open to
it--the world becomes re-enchanted. If Buddhism is right, however, the
cost of this is nothing less than one's self.
End and Goal. -- Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is
not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its
end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
(Nietzsche)(41)
66
1.Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" in The
Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, tran. William
Lovitt ( New York: Harper Colophon, 1977),pp. 5.12,17.
2."Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed.
and trans. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1946)p.135.
3.From Max Weber:Essays in Sociology, p.155.
4.See Rogers Burbaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the
Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1991),p.9.
5.The Limits of Rationality, p.36;Brubaker's italics.
6.Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Witich,
2 vol. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),p.111. See
The Limits of Rationality, p.4.
7.Max Weber, "Socialism, " trans. D. Hytch, in Max Weber: The
Interpretation of Social Reality, ed. J. E. T. Eldridge(New York:
Shocken, 1980), p.202.
8.The Limits of Rationality, p.10.
9.Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Gage: Culture, Politics, and
Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989),p.227.
10.Scaff's translation in Fleeing the Iron Cage, p.88.
11.Quoted in Fleeing the Iron Cage, p.89.
12."Science as a Vocation" in From Max Weber, p.149.
13.For an early overview, see The Protestant Ethic and Modernization:
A Comparative View, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt(New York: Basic Books,
1968), especially pp.67-86.
14.Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of
History (New York: Vintage, 1961), p.261.
15.In Brown's psychoanalytic terms, the result is "an economy drive by
a pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption,"
which is "the more uncontrollably driven by the sense of guilt
because the problem of guilt is repressed by denial into the
unconscious. " (Life Against Death, p.272).
16.Fleeing the Iron Cage, pp. 98-9.
17.From Max Weber, 345; cf. The Limits of Rationality, pp. 78-9.
18.Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom
Bottomore and David Frisby from the 2nd ed. of 1907(London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p.478.
19.Fleeing the Iron Cage, p.109.
67
20.This is one of Norman Brown's main points in Life Against Death and
Love's Body.
21.From Max Weber, p.143.
22.Fleeing the Iron Cage, p.112.
23.Fleeing the Iron Cage, pp.241, 240.
24.See The Limits of Rationality, p.108.
25.The Philosophy of Money, p.481, altered. Weber was a friend of
Simmel's and benefited from his writings, including the Philosophy
of Money, yet this influence, although no doubt considerable, is
not well understood. See, e.g., Fleeing the Iron Cage, ch.4, "The
Sociology of Culture and Simmel."
26.The Philosophy of Money, p.221; Life Against Death, p.271.
27.The Philosophy of Money, p.187; Life Against Death, p.246; Ernest
Becker, Escape from Evil( New York: The Free Press, 1975),pp.
76,79.
28.The Philosophy of Money, p.236. Simmel also notices a very
different parallel:"The indifference as to its use, the lack of
attachment to any individual because it is unrelated to any of
them, the objectivity inherent in money as a mere means which
excludes any emotional relationship-all this produces an ominous
analogy between money and prostitution."(77)
29.See Simmel's Confilict in Modern Culture and other essays, trans.
K. Peter Etzkorn (New York Teachers College Press, 1968),p.11.
30.Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.521.
31.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago
Press, 1958), p.154. The same point can be made about pragmatism.
32.Irvin D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy(New York: Basic Books,
1980), p.466; Yalom's italics.
33.Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the MIddle Ages, trans. F. Hopman,
(Penguin, 1987), p.9.
34.In The Hour of our Death (Penguin, 1981)Philippe Aries turns our
usual critique upsidedown. "It is difficult for us today to
understand the intensity of the [late medieval]relationship between
people and things." The modern world is not really materialistic,
for "things have become means of production, or objects to be
constumed or devoured. They no longer constitute a 'treasure'...
Scientists and philosophers may lay chaim to an understanding of
matter, but the ordinary man in his daily life no more believes in
matter than he believes in God. The man of the Middle Ages believed
in matter and in God, in life and in death, in the enjoyment of
things and their renumciation."(pp. 136-7)
35.For more on this, see "The Nonduality of Life and Death: A Buddhist
View of Repression" Philosophy East and West 40 no. 2(April 1990),
and "Trying to Become Real: A Buddhist