Money, Language and Consciousness

Abstract

Money is a form of consciousness, a form of thought. This is the central thesis of the present paper. In order to explain this, the example of human language is used to show to what extent thinking, consciousness and human society refer to a common origin. The socialization via language – in Greek: “logos” - was overlaid by the increasing money flow through a specifically calculating way of thinking – in Latin: “ratio”. This gradually led to a worldview in which only measured facts are recognized as real. By using newer approaches to the theory of consciousness and Buddhist philosophy, the use of money is described as a phenomenon of consciousness, and crises of modernity derived from it are revealed as crises of the idea of identity.