simmel, paradise and the purposive jam

 

George Simmel’s Philosophy of Money is a hard book to go straight through. I’ve never done so. Simmel has a unique meandering style, which gave rise, I think, to the various early twentieth century philosophical styles: Lukacs and Buber in particular. I can see Simmel through certain of Heidegger’s early works.  Simmel has a way of going on abstractly, and the reader goes hum hum hum, on the verge of sleep or headache, and then suddenly out of nowhere some image will emerge, some passage will coalesce, and it all seems… important and poetic and non-humlike. . Rather like Hegel in the high  styling Phenomenology of Spirit. Talk about that wild mercury sound.

One of those passages occurs In a subsection of the book’s first section on value. It is entitled, in German,   “The economy as distancing (through effort, renunciation, sacrifice) and the simultaneous overcoming of the same)”. You can see why David Frisby, in the standard translation, settles for “Economic activity establishes distances and overcomes them.” Still, leaving out the “gleichzeitige” is a little troubling.

The passage comes after Simmel’s consideration of the aesthetic value of an object, in which the object, as it were, sheds its use value and is appreciated for itself.

“I have chosen the above example because the objectifying effect of what I have called ‘distance’ is particularly clear when it is a question of distance in time. The process is, of course, intensive and qualitative, so that any quantitative designation in terms of distance is more or less symbolic. The same effect can be brought about by a number of other factors, as I have already mentioned: for example, by the scarcity of an object, by the difficulties of acquisition, by the necessity of renunciation. Even though in these economically important instances the signicance of the objects remains a significance for us and so dependent upon our appreciation, the decisive change is that the objects confront us after these developments a independent powers, as a world of substances and forces that determine by their own qualities whether and to what extent they will satisfy our needs and which demand effort and hardship before they will surrender to us. Only if the question of renunciation arises – renunciation of a feeling that really matters – is it necessary to direct attention to the object itself. The situation, which is represented in a stylized form by the concept of Paradise, in which subject and object, desire and satisfaction are not yet divided from each other – a situation that is not restricted to a specific historical epoch, but which appears everywhere in varying degrees – is destined to disintegrate, but also to attain a new reconciliation. The purpose of establishing distance is that is should be overcome.”

There you have it, ladies and germs – the key to all the mythologies!

I jest.

Simmel was impressed with the way our actions tend towards purposes that are define steps that are not reached by any single step, but by a series. Each step has its own subordinate  purposiveness, each step absorbs our energy, and thus each step on the journey is, as it were, a journey in itself, with all the weariness that traversal entails. Elsewhere Simmel writes: “Indeed, it is a common experience for those who finish a long task, say, writing a book or even simply an article, to feel a letdown at the end of the process, as one is simultaneously freed from exerting one’s energy and attention to the matter at hand and at the same time left with a sort of unguided and unstructured moment.” The moment is not a vacation – it is a crowning, a finish, an ending. And yet it doesn’t give one anything to do.

But of course there is more to Simmel’s point than this. Much of the modern life-story is taken up with long-term projects of consumption towards some end. College students, for example, are encouraged from the very beginning to aim at some degree, which is in turn seen as the key to a job. And yet, as the degree is years off, it would be difficult to make a calculation to understand just how much time and energy one should spend on each step. Not that something like this doesn’t happen – a computer science student in an elective English literature class is very often a study in someone who has calculated exactly how little time needs to be spent on a subject that is only a lightly weighted means to his end. Of course, this student intersects with a teacher whose purpose is, in fact, exactly to teach that English literature class. Modern life is full of what we might call purposive jams – like traffic jams, they consist of people who, jostling one another, are going different places but find themselves within the limits of the same narrow situation.

Sometimes purposive jams become more intrusive. They thrust themselves on our attention. I would guess that we are passing through a massive purposive jam right now. Each propelled, for good or evil, by some idea of paradise.