Simmel (and pragmatism) about value

This turns out to be our week for Georg Simmel's philosophy of money.

Today: can his views be understood as converging with Jamesian pragmatism?

Let us look again at the passage of Simmel's that I have been particularly discussing this week.

"It is true that every value that we experience is a sentiment but what we mean by this sentiment is a significant content which is realized psychologically through the sentiment yet is neither identical with it nor exhausted by it. Obviously, this category lies beyond the controversies about the subjectivity or objectivity of value, because it denies the relation of a subject that is indispensable for the existence of an 'object'."

That comment may have seemed mysterious at first. I believe that I cleared it up yesterday when I put it into the context of the "objective value versus subjective value" dispute of his day about the foundations of economics.

To the extent the dispute was ever resolved by economists, it was resolved by setting it aside. Economics doesn't really need 'foundations' -- let us get on to studying things like why prices move! And so they did. Th supply and demand graphs drawn on every blackboard in every classroom where economics is taught incorporate this get-on-with-it attitude.

So we have four distinct thoughts before us, and we might well wonder with which of them William James would have affiliated himself with had it been put to him. The four thoughts are: (1) value is objective, (2) value is subjective, (3) value is neither because it is prior to either (as Simmel is saying) or (4) let us set value and foundations aside and talk about pricing instead.

I think you can make the case for any one of the four on Jamesian grounds and invoking Jamesian texts. I won't do that now, though. Instead, I will make the case that he had within him something akin to the fourth of these.

The case takes comfort from his essay on "great men and their environment." James discusses the Carlylean theory of history as a set of the biographies of "great men" in Carlyle's sense. He also discusses something contrary to that. a fatalistic understanding of history as driven by vast impersonal forces.

“If we proceed on that method [fatalistic reasoning], we might say with perfect legitimacy that a friend of ours, who had slipped on the ice on his doorstep and cracked his skull, some months after dining with thirteen at the table died because of that ominous feast.” That is at page 217 of THE WILL TO BELIEVE AND OTHER ESSAYS. James comes back to this point brilliantly at p. 220, “And if, in the case of the unfortunate man, we lose ourselves in contemplation of the thirteen-at-table mystery, and fail to notice the ice on the step and cover it with ashes, some other poor fellow, who never dined out in his life, may slip on it in coming to the door, and fall and break his head too.”

Value, considered as more fundamental than price, is the sort of mystery we ought to learn to abandon and concern ourselves with things like putting ashes (or salt or other friction-imposing stuff) onto the porch in the winter. Perhaps pragmatism takes THAT side, the side that no longer claims to be taking a side, other than taking care of the porch.

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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