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[XLIII.1.]
and which therefore remains even for me unreal and objectless. The difference
between effective demand based on money and ineffective demand based on
my need, my passion,. my wish, etc., is the difference between being and
thinking, between the idea which merely exists within me and the idea
which exists as a real object outside of me.
If I have no money for travel, I have no need--that is, no real and realisable
need--to travel. If I have the vocation for study but no money for it,
I have no vocation for study--that is, no effective, no true vocation.
On the other hand, if I have really no vocation for study but have the
will and the money for it, I have an effective vocation for it. Money
as the external, universal medium and faculty (not springing from man
as man or from human society as society) for turning an image into reality
and reality into a mere image, transforms the real essential powers of
man and nature into what are merely abstract notions and therefore imperfections
and tormenting chimeras, just as it transforms real imperfections and
chimeras--essential powers which are really impotent, which exist only
in the imagination of the individual--into real essential powers and faculties.
In the light of this characteristic alone, money is thus the general distorting
of individualities which turns them into their opposite and confers contradictory
attributes upon their attributes.
Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual
and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in
themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate
into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master
into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.
[XI.1.]
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[XLIII.2.]
Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and
confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all
things--the world upside-down--the confounding and confusing of all natural
and human qualities.
He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not
exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or
for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective
world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore
serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory,
quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes
contradictions embrace.
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one:
then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you
want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you
want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with
a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your
relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding
to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love
without evoking love in return--that is, if your loving as loving does
not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself
as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love
is impotent--a misfortune.
[XI.2.]
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