By David Black
Richard Seaford, who died a few months ago, was one of Britain’s most celebrated classicist scholars, specializing in studies of Greek Antiquity. His most important book – one of several – is Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Seaford was not the first Marxist to analyze the relationship between the advent of monetization and Greek philosophy. Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1990) located the objective origin of abstract thought in the social nexus of relations behind the exchange of traded goods. Sohn-Rethel’s co-thinker, George Thomson (1903-87), located this origin in the spread of gold and silver coinage in Greek Antiquity. For the first time in history, the cosmology of pure abstractions (the One, the Many, Being, Becoming, etc.) appears in the pre-Socratic thought of Parmenides (the philosopher of Being, who thought change was an illusion) and Heraclitus (the philosopher of Becoming, for whom change through strife was everything). Sohn-Rethel saw Parmenides as the first exponent of ‘pure thought’ to emerge with ‘a concept fitting the description of the abstract material of money.’
Sohn-Rethel pays almost no attention to Heraclitus. But according to Seaford, the opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides can be seen as expression of the opposition between money as the communal logos of circulation and money as the abstract oneness of value detached from circulation.
If money produces philosophy, what produces money?
Greek metaphysics developed under the influence, not only of money, but also of the social forms and practices which preceded monetized society; therefore, money can be understood as the diremption and subsumption of the ancient communal principle of (re)distribution.
In the Greeks’ religious sanctuaries – which were the ‘soul’ of the state – animals are sacrificed to the gods. In the feast that follows the ritual the roasted meat is distributed equally, according the principle of Moira, the goddess who presides over the allocations of land within the community. Coined money originates with the accumulation in these religious sanctuaries of metal objects associated with animal sacrifice and feasting, such as iron roasting spits, tripod cauldrons, figurines made of precious metals and bars of bullion. As befitting the temple, eventually the metals are graded according to value (as gold, silver, or base metals), then coined and stamped with the figure of the deity. Some of the sanctuaries begin to function as banks.
In the philosophy of Aristotle, money is seen as having no value in itself, except as a convention mediating things that do have value. However, because of this convention, the metal substance is transformed by the state-approved ensignia into something greater than its intrinsic value. This was a factor in a conceptual transformation, based on the new collective trust of the polis,(city state).
What is new in Greek philosophy is the idea of the universe as, in Seaford’s words, ’an intelligible order subject to the uniformity of impersonal power’, and of a single substance underlying the plurality of sensuous experience. For the first time in history an impersonal all-powerful substance enters into the philosopher’s cosmic preconceptions, as when Heraclitus says ‘all things are in exchange for fire and fire for all things like goods for gold and gold for goods.’
Monetisation, in marginalizing reciprocity and actualizing inequality, allows individual autonomy to appear in the figure of the tyrant. But the tyrant’s individual monetary power depends on the general , socially constructed acceptance of the value of the money and its ability to circulate beyond his control.
The reason we see Greeks poetry and philosophy as much less alien to us than the culture of Egypt and Mesopotamia is because of the presence of monetization that we share with the Greeks.
In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Clytemnestra plots to kill her husband in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. When Agamemnon returns from the wars he presents Clytemnestra with some expensive linen, which she urges him to trample on as a measure of his god-like status. Seaford sees the linen as representing the unlimited wealth of the sea trade, which gives Agamemnon the illusion, encouraged by Clytemnestra. that he is a god freed from material needs. Later, wrapped up in his expensive linen, he is murdered by his avenging wife for transgressing ‘family values’.
In Sophocles’ Antigone the tyrant Creon, who regards the polis as his own property, projects the corrupting power of money amongr his enemies. Creon, however, actually himself projects the world of money, with his individualistic self-sufficency and drive to homogenize everything under his rule. Creon perverts the death-ritual of the ‘old’ world, by denying Antigone’s rebel brother Polyneices a decent burial’ and perverts marriage-rite by entombing Antigone in what the chorus calls a ‘bridal chamber’. After Antigone’s death brings about the suicide of Creon’s son Haemon, followed by his Queen, Eurydice, the chorus invokes Dionysus to cleanse the curse from the city. Seaford develops this hypothesis in relating the illusion of autonomous self-sufficiency illusion to the crime of incest. In Oedipus Tyrranus when Teiresius tell Oedipus he has committed patricide and incest, the tyrant accuses the seer of having been ‘bought’: ‘Endogomy in Athens and elsewhere, preserved wealth within the family. In tragedy endogamy is associated with blindness, darkness… ‘.
The new society demands the-circulation of money and females; the endogenous household of the Theban tyrants hoards money and imprisons its female kin below ground. Moreover, Seaford points out, money, like the female, may reproduce. Payment of interest seems to have developed out of the practice of reciprocating a gift with a more valuable one, except that money seems to produce more of itself. Aristotle characterizes usury as incest, because interest transgresses the role of currency as a means for exchange, and is thus the most ’ unnatural’ mode of acquisition.
The unlimited monetized power of the tyrants is condemned by Aristotle, who says that the free man ruling over his oikos is only self-sufficient to the extent that he is part of the self-sufficient polis; for unity to prevail, in the face of the unlimited power of money and greed, the polis must limit itself in terms of its size, population and class inequalities. For Aristotle, acquisition of wealth within the oikos (the slave-owning household) was ‘natural’, whereas commerce had to do with ‘production of goods, not in the full sense but through their exchange’. The wealth derived from this latter form of acquisition he saw as “unnatural” and “without limit.” Its unlimited nature did not suit the order of the polis.
The modern era has so much internalized the ‘metaphysics of money’ as to imagine that money, like the weather is a force of nature rather than a social relation. Nevertheless, according to Seaford, it is hard to shake off ‘a lingering sense of arbitrariness of there being something indefinably unsatisfying… about the individual reification of money and injustice and alienation thereby produced. For those with sense, historical understanding of the relative recent (on the scale of human history) transition from premonetary to monetary society may be of particular interest.’
FURTHER READING
David Black,The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism:Essays on History, Culture and Dialectical Thought(Lexington:2013)
Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge University Press: 2004)
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1976)
George Thomson, The First Philosophers: Studies in Ancient Greek Society (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955)