Philosophy Thread

Money and 'The Money Fetish' is an interesting topic, and I think that Marx handles it pretty well in his analysis in Kapital. He states (over a number of pages) that money functions as a symbolic universal equivalent exchange-value (exchange-value being an abstraction of use-value, which is a qualitative and quantitative measure of an object to satisfy a human want, need or desire) between different commodities (which are themselves symbolic, "Since as value, it is only the material shell of human labour expended upon it"). He also concludes that "The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish", and that as a result of the money fetish, individuals can no longer make individualistic and conscious decisions with respect to their relationship with production. This bears an interesting resemblance to something you said earlier, @flare3 I don't think that in order to believe in a god one necessarily has to go outside of reality itself, but rather empirical views of reality. Philosophy beyond empiricism is most certainly possible, it's just impossible to test, and so it's never really possible to actually know. Einstein may or may not be a bad example though, as his insistence on 'God does not play dice with the universe' might have put a bit of a dampener on his career towards the end.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for Einstein; he was a very impressive person with many different accomplishments and interests. What I'm saying there is that his rigid notion of what God does and does not do with the universe is what constrained *him*.