The Philsophy of Money, Georg Simmel, page 272, paragraph 2

The material and cultural relation of form and amount

Perhaps we can also express this in the following way. As a purely arithmetical addition of value units, money can be characterized as absolutely formless. Formlessness and a purely quantitative character are one and the same. To the extent that things are considered only in terms of their quantity, their form is disregarded. This is most evident if they are weighed. Therefore, money as such is the most terrible destroyer of form. No matter what the reason is that the specific forms of things a, b and c cost the same price of m, their differentiation – the specific form of each of them – does not affect their fixed value at all but is submerged in the m which equally represents a, b and c. Form is not a determining factor within economic valuation. As soon as our interest is reduced to the money value of objects, their form, – even though it may have brought about their value – becomes irrelevant just as it is irrelevant to their weight. This may also explain the materialism of modern times which, in its theoretical significance, necessarily has a common root in the money economy. Matter as such is simply formless, the counterpart of all form, and if it is accepted as the only principle of reality, reality is submitted to broadly the same process that the reduction money value exercises on the objects of our practical interest. I shall come back to the problem of how money in extraordinarily great quantities – and fundamentally in connection with the threshold importance of money quantities – attains a particular and, at the same time, more individual form, thereby removing it from its empty quantitative nature. The formlessness of money declines relatively and even outwardly the more its quantity increases: the small coins of the earliest Italian copper currency remained shapeless or had only a crude round or cubical form; the biggest pieces, however, were usually cast in a four-sided ingot form and provided with a mark on both sides. But the universal formlessness of money as money is certainly the root of the antagonism between an aesthetic tendency and money interests. Aesthetic interest are so much focused on pure form that, for instance, design was considered to be the primary aesthetic value of all fine arts, because as pure form it can be realized unchanged in any amount of material. This is now known to be an error; indeed, we must go further and admit that the absolute size of a form of art considerably influences its aesthetic significance, and that this significance is readily modified by the very smallest change of dimensions even if the form remains the same. Nevertheless, the aesthetic value of things remains attached to their form, for example to the relations between its elements, although we now know that the character and the effect of the form is essentially co-determined by the amount of its realization. Perhaps it is no coincidence that a great many proverbs, but only a few of the innumerable folk songs, appear to deal with money despite its predominant importance. Thus, when a rebellion broke out owing to a change in coinage, the folk songs generated by the people on this occasion by and large disregarded the coinage problem. The irreconcilable and, for all aesthetic interests, decisive antagonism always remains in th emphasis placed on whether we value things according to their form or ask for the amount of their value. This value is a merely quantitative one which replaces all quality by a mere sum of equal units.


Routledge, 1990, New York, 0-415-04641-6