Simmel (PM) – valor econômico

The reality of things that confronts the perceiving mind is devoid of values, as we asserted at the beginning of this investigation; it develops in a form indifferent to values, often destroying what is most noble and preserving what is most base, because it does not   proceed in terms of a hierarchy of worth, interests or values. We then subordinate this natural objective existence to a hierarchy of values, constructed in terms of good and bad, noble and mediocre, precious and valueless. This construction does not in any way affect being in its tangible reality, but it is the source of all meaning that reality may have for us; and we experience it – in spite of our awareness of its human origin – as being quite the opposite of mere fancy and subjectivity. The value of things – ethical as well as eudaemonistic, religious as well as aesthetic – hovers, like the Platonic ideas, above the world; a realm that is governed by its own alien and intangible inner norms, but that lends relief and colour to reality. Economic value originates by derivation from these primary, directly experienced values, by weighing the objects in which values are incorporated against each other, so far as they are exchangeable. Within this area, however, economic value, no matter how it has constituted itself, has the same peculiar relation to the individual objects as has value in general. It is a world apart, in which the objects are classified and arranged according to particular norms which are not inherent in the objects. Objects that are ordered and related by their economic value form a cosmos that is entirely different from that formed by their natural and immediate reality. If money were really nothing but the expression of the values of things external to money, it would be related to things just as the idea  , which Plato   conceived also as a substantial, metaphysical entity, is related to empirical reality. The movements of money – balancing, accumulation, outflow – would directly represent the value relationship between things. The world of values, which hovers above the real world apparently unconnected yet without question governing it, would be represented in its ‘pure form’ by money. And just as Plato interprets the real world, from the observation and sublimation of which the ideas have arisen, as a mere reflection of these ideas, so then do the economic relations, stages and fluctuations of concrete things appear as derivatives from their own derivative, namely as representatives and shadows of the significance that their money equivalent possesses. No other species of values is more favourably situated in this respect than are economic values. Religious values are embodied in priests and churches, ethical–social values in administrators and the visible institutions of state-power, the values of knowledge in the norms of logic; but none of these is more detached than are economic values from concrete valuable objects or processes; none is more completely the mere abstract bearer of value; in none of them is the whole world of relevant values so faithfully reflected.

[Excerto de SIMMEL, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Tr. Tom Bottomore & David Frisby. London: Routledge, 2011 (epub)]