Those familiar with Plato’s doctrine of truth will recognize the degree to which his philosophy, too, moves through an abstract space. Yet, Plato seeks to demarcate the space of philosophy from that of money, banishing it from the domain of truth. Particularly in his most developed text, The Republic, philosophy is so explicitly counterposed to money that the pair can be taken to form “two competing architectonic principles.”36
Plato sets up this counter-positioning in the first sentence of The Republic, when he has Socrates inform his readers, “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon.”37 The Piraeus was the Athenian harbor, the site of an incessant movement of goods and money, as cargo-bearing ships came and went, and as purchases, sales, and business investments were endlessly conducted. It has been suggested that the (private and accumulative) activities characteristic of the harbor were at fundamental cross-purposes with the public duties of citizens to the state.38 Certainly, Plato’s intent in selecting this setting seems designed to contrast these conflicting principles, as he immediately moves to a debate over the relationship of money to justice. The debate occurs with Cephalus, a wealthy citizen whose home the philosopher and his companion are visiting. Socrates quickly inquires as to whether their host inherited his fortune or acquired it through his own pursuits. Cephalus proudly declares that he has largely inherited his wealth, and Socrates intones that he suspected as much. After all, he remarks, unlike those who inherit their wealth (and therefore do not have to engage in acquisition), those who have made their own fortunes “have a second love of money as a creation of their own,” and this is a source of corruption. In contrast to the “natural love of money,” which everyone has because of its usefulness as a means to satisfy wants, these “makers of fortunes” have an unnatural and obsessive worship of money: “they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth” (330). Already, Plato is intimating that money has a natural role as a means to an end, but that it can also stimulate a perverse and corrupting passion—an unnatural love—when it becomes an end in itself. Yet, Cephalus is not entirely convinced that money ought to be radically demarcated from justice. In fact, he proposes that the man with money can afford to be honest (he has no need to defraud others) and to honor his debts to gods and men. But Socrates is unyielding. “To speak the truth and pay your debts” are not equivalent to justice, he proclaims (331). Indeed, justice cannot be conceived in the terms of a utilitarian calculus. Unlike money, urges Socrates, justice is an end in itself, not a means to an end. And this, as I have suggested, gives a critical-utopian charge to Plato’s search for a form of good life beyond monetary calculation. That which is good has no price; it is no means to an end. The good and the true are ends in themselves, requiring no external measure or validation.
Cephalus, however, resists this conclusion. Deploying one example after another, he tries to demonstrate that justice is useful—that it is a means to distinct ends, such as payment of debts, assistance of friends, and the establishment of fair contracts. Each time, Socrates debunks the argument. Indeed, the philosopher goes so far as to insist that the usefulness of justice is that it is not instrumental to any external purpose. Justice exists in and for itself, as its own end. “Justice is useful,” he urges, only when all other things, including money, “are useless” (333). Justice begins, therefore, where things with specific purposes can go no further, where they have arrived at a limit point. Justice becomes an end in itself naturally, whereas money does so only unnaturally. In this unnatural state, money asserts its nonidentity with all other things; it insists on its primacy over everything else. Coats or boats or enslaved people can be desired for particular purposes; but money as end in itself transcends all particularity—it presents itself as universal, though its generality can only be false. Against this tendency of money toward pseudo-universalization (the essence of the unnatural “second love of money”), Plato seeks to restrict money to a simple means of exchange, something desired only as a means to particulars, rather than for its own sake. Only then, he intimates, can justice flourish as the one true universal end in itself, free of interference by money’s false universality. This argument is later rehearsed by Aristotle in his Politics, where he contrasts the natural use of money, as a means to finite ends, with its perverse use as an end in itself (which, as I discuss below, he refers to as chrematistics). In Marx’s terms, Plato and Aristotle describe the circuit C–M–C as natural (where a commodity C is sold for money M, which is then used for the purchase of other commodities). Here, money is used to acquire a use value, a specific good. But the circuit M–C–M’—where money is used simply to buy commodities to be resold for more money (M’ > M)—is unnatural and irrational, as money has become a demonic end in itself. “There is no limit to the end which this kind of acquisition has in view,” writes Aristotle. This mode of acquisition never arrives at a natural and rational end; it tends “not for the good life,” but away from it.39 Plato and Aristotle consider money (represented by silver or gold) as a particular thing that is pathologically misapprehended as universal, like justice or truth. But this false universality is a perversion that induces irrational passions and pursuits. For this reason, Plato seeks to limit money to the particular roles of means of exchange and means of payment. Yet, in trying to get beyond monetary calculation, he proceeds to model justice and truth on the very abstracting and generalizing powers that he discerns in money’s unnatural capacities. Thus, while philosophy and money are “competing architectonic principles” in the text, they are also symmetrical. Philosophy takes on the abstracting and universalizing powers of money, the better to vanquish it. Its mimicry of money is on full display when we turn to the crucial books VI and VII of The Republic.
Plato’s innovation here is not simply the idea of a unifying substance that underlies all things. As Richard Seaford has shown, this counterintuitive idea, which seems at odds with the plurality of things that affect our senses, is widely characteristic of early Greek cosmology, and particularly prominent in the texts of Heraclitus and Parmenides.40 Plato, however, gives this cosmological notion a heightened idealist inflexion. Early in book VI, he urges that only philosophers “are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable,” unlike “those who wander in the realm of the many and variable” (484). Here we have a clear juxtaposition of the One and the Many, with truth posited as unitary and unchanging in opposition to ordinary experience, which apprehends the world as plural (“the many”) and changing (“variable”). Whoever contemplates the “being” of things, according to Plato, must turn away from their becoming and their “multiplicity.” The latter features typify everyday, empirical existence, which flounders among the appearances of things, rather than their timeless essences (490). We perceive many things as beautiful and good, he continues, but we fail to attain knowledge unless we grasp the “absolute beauty” and the “absolute good” that transcend any specific iterations of beauty or goodness. These qualities must be “brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of each” (507). Here we have an explicit dualism of essence and appearance, and of the One and the Many, in which truth lies with the former and error with the latter. As in Plato’s doctrine of Forms, truth or the absolute does not reside in things as they appear in everyday experience. Truth participates in an eternal, unchanging, and nonsensuous sphere. This is a realm that can be accessed only in thought, through the logic of ideas, rather than via the medium of sensation.
Having laid