Money and categories of reality
One commonplace way to divide reality is into The Real and The Imaginary
The Real: Exists in the physical world.
The Imaginary: Exists in minds.
Opposed to both of these components of reality is
The Unreal: Doesn't exist at all, even in a mind.
Given these categories, where does money fall? Money, we all know, is a fiction. It is not the paper it is printed on or the computer bytes on which an account balance is stored. You will never see it in a microscope, nor measure it with an instrument, no matter how sensitive, as it is mind stuff.
And yet, money is the difference between eating a steak in a warm house, and starving in the cold. Money, literally, moves mountains. It makes and breaks nations. It is a force in the world. So is this really imaginary?
I think a new category is needed
The Real Imaginary: Exist in the mental world, but is projected into the physical world.
The world is filled with such things: nations, religions, ideologies, institutions, are a few examples. Money is just more stark because of its potency and because it has its own physical avatars, currency.
If there is the Real Imaginary, by symmetry there must be the Imaginary Real. And there is.
The Imaginary Real: Exists in the physical world, but is projected into the imaginary world.
This is just the world we know and experience. The world is real, but as we know it, it is purely imaginary: All the colors, sounds, and smells, exist nowhere outside of our heads. They are real things, projected into our imaginations.
Opposed to the Imaginary Real is
The Unknown Real: The bulk of the physical universe, never experienced at all
In summation, reality is for us usefully split into four categories: The Imaginary Real, The Unknown Real, The Real Imaginary, and The Purely Imaginary. When discussing things in a philosophical way, asking "what is" this or that, a good start would be, "to which category does it belong?"
The Real: Exists in the physical world.
The Imaginary: Exists in minds.
Opposed to both of these components of reality is
The Unreal: Doesn't exist at all, even in a mind.
Given these categories, where does money fall? Money, we all know, is a fiction. It is not the paper it is printed on or the computer bytes on which an account balance is stored. You will never see it in a microscope, nor measure it with an instrument, no matter how sensitive, as it is mind stuff.
And yet, money is the difference between eating a steak in a warm house, and starving in the cold. Money, literally, moves mountains. It makes and breaks nations. It is a force in the world. So is this really imaginary?
I think a new category is needed
The Real Imaginary: Exist in the mental world, but is projected into the physical world.
The world is filled with such things: nations, religions, ideologies, institutions, are a few examples. Money is just more stark because of its potency and because it has its own physical avatars, currency.
If there is the Real Imaginary, by symmetry there must be the Imaginary Real. And there is.
The Imaginary Real: Exists in the physical world, but is projected into the imaginary world.
This is just the world we know and experience. The world is real, but as we know it, it is purely imaginary: All the colors, sounds, and smells, exist nowhere outside of our heads. They are real things, projected into our imaginations.
Opposed to the Imaginary Real is
The Unknown Real: The bulk of the physical universe, never experienced at all
In summation, reality is for us usefully split into four categories: The Imaginary Real, The Unknown Real, The Real Imaginary, and The Purely Imaginary. When discussing things in a philosophical way, asking "what is" this or that, a good start would be, "to which category does it belong?"
Comments (42)
This sounds awfully close to Lacan's conception on the subject. You'd only be missing what he calls "the symbolic", the other two are as stated.
We could call money a useful fiction. Something which is considered valuable solely by our considering pieces of paper to be of worth.
I think that your distinction between real imaginary and imaginary real is not needed. You can use one term to encompass both ideas.
Numbers, qualities, logical principles, scientific laws, and so on, are only discernable to the intellect but are real for all who think. So hate to dissappoint you, but it's not a new category, rather you've discovered or re-discovered the basic idea behind universals.
Also the division you propose between 'the mind' and 'the world' is very hard to sustain. There are plainly some things only in my mind, and some things in 'the world'. But if you consider the experience of the world to comprise sensations and ideas (as idealist philosophy claims) then the division is by no means neat. And if I ask where the division between the mind and the world resides, the only answer can be, 'in the mind', because there is no such division in the world.
I'm not familiar, his division is into the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic?
Quoting Manuel
But since money is a collective fiction, it is resistant to our individual thoughts about them. It has properties of both mental and physical objects.
Quoting Manuel
They are opposites. Mental objects which cast a shadow into the physical world, vs physical objects which cast a shadow into the mental world.
Hate to disappoint you, but you can't give a meaningful reply after randomly half-reading a few sentences. Does money or any of the other examples I cited (and you quoted) sound anything like universals?
Quoting Wayfarer
Again if you had bothered to read you would have seen this is exactly my point.
They sound similar.
I'm not disagreeing with the point you're making. I'm simply saying that the idea that there are abstract reals is not a novel idea.
Either way you see it, my point remains the same. Things live in the world, but cross over into the mental world in the form of sensations, and appraisals, as you point out. In the same way, a category of mental things, money among them, cross over into the physical world. .
Not abstract reals. Imaginary reals. Would numbers, qualities, logical principles, scientific laws, and so on, disappear if we collectively stopped believing in them, or if humanity was annihilated? Probably not. Would money, religions, institutions, ideologies, nations? Absolutely they would.
Is that a novel idea? Probably not. Is this way dividing the world into 4 categories the definitive way to conceptually cleave the world? Probably not, I don't think there is any such way. But it is probably useful.
The Unreal is a bit elusive, isn't it? How do we know something like that exists - as soon as we think about it, it exists in mind, no?
What do you think about this framework?
It's probably the most obvious division but personally I find it more intuitive. Can the categories you describe fit onto that model?
I would've preferred:
1. Physical (stones)
2. Mental (unicorns)
3.. Physical & Mental (stones, but not unicorns)
4. Neither physical nor mental (Nagarjuna's tetralemma)
But does that sort of game set up alter the 'reality' of the exchange of desired things? Is the distinction between "necessary: and "fetish" goods something that hinges upon the imaginary?
Yep. It's extremely dense though and its value is very questionable, but there are lectures and books written about it.
Quoting hypericin
What physical object wouldn't cast a shadow of the mental world?
Money is socially constructed.
This can be seen from the fact that a ten dollar note is a valueless piece of paper unless those involved in the transaction have trust in it's value.
Hence the ontology of money requires one to step outside the ontological categories of real or imaginary or physical or mental, and to recognises that there is a wider social world that transcends these limited categories. Money sets up credit relationships between folks. It has a social ontology.
No, it doesn't.
Quoting SEP
But that does not prevent economists misleading themselves and others by pretending it does.
If a ten dollar note (money) isn't a ten dollar note (money), what is it? Something else, which we merely treat as if it were a ten dollar note (money)? The "ten dollar note in itself"?
That's just what we need: a phenomenology of money... :grimace:
Doubtless it will appear.
Quoting SEP
The exchange of valued objects was still based on agreement about the deal regarding actual objects.
The set up did take on a life of its own. I was suggesting that the "game" like qualities of those developments did not change the fundamental basis of barter.
Money does play a big part in the exchange of commodities now. Agreeing it is not a replacement for fungible goods, as what the OP refers to as "real", does not explain that development. Presumably it is the question of how imaginary our interactions may be rather than the status of money that is being raised.
Obviously. The question is, what is money? And the answer is not that it stands in for commodities in our exchanges.
Money functions in virtue of our collective intention for it to work. Nothing more.
That is an obvious observation of how it functions; Noticing that does not mean there is nothing else to be said. Its role in the building of our technical society requires more than agreeing with your proposition.
Are you going Puritan about this angle or something more Baudrillard?
No ought. I was starting from the commonplace dichotomy of real/imaginary, where what is real exists "in the world", and what is imaginary is "in the head" (note, both are part of reality). And showed that that money, for instance, is neither: while its origin and nature is in the head, it is a force in the world.
Yes, but this is my point. The categories of "real" and "imaginary" are inadequate to describe social realities. I am attempting to amend them by expanding upon them.
Everyone is simultaneously mental and physical subject. Your personal identity is simultaneously mental subject and object, when you reflect on it. Money is simultaneously mental and physical object.
They don't seem to neatly cut across reality.
The fact that a ten dollar note is money is not a property of the physical paper. In 5000 years whatever nation backs it will have long since collapsed, the piece of paper will only have the historical curiosity of once having been money. No matter how well preserved it is.
Right, but why not revise what we understand of the real, rather than create new categories because they do not fit tradition? We made up what we understand by the real. We can make it up differently in response to what we know of the world.
Or maybe I can put it differently: if these distinctions are to be more than nominal, is there something at stake is excluding money from the real?
It will be a historical curiosity, and interesting, not because it is a piece of paper but because it was money. What significance would it have then, or would it have had in the past, as a piece of paper? Imagine the museum exhibit: "Piece of paper."
The agreed upon value of a piece of paper we label as money is a cultural artifact. Taking a step back, are cultures real or imaginary? Most would say “real” though not in the sense of that which is physically real.
I’ll suggest the sometimes derided term of “intersubjectivity”, such that money is an intersubjective reality - else, is intersubjectively real - this just as much as cultures are. In contrast, the printed paper itself is a physical reality: an aspect of the physical reality at large upon which all subjectivities and intersubjectivities to a significant extent depend.
The “collective intentionality” which @Banno addresses would then be an aspect of intersubjectivity.
A caveat, however: When reality is taken to be the sum of all real givens, so classifying would require a stanch rethinking of reality categories. For one example, that which is imaginary and strictly applicable to one subject - such as one’s immediate experience of an REM dream - would then be an intra-subjective reality (as in, “that dream I told you about was real rather than a fictitious fabrication”). Even more cumbersome to classify become intersubjectively held fictions, like unicorns, which are not intersubjective realities in the same sense that moneys and cultures are - yet are still actual/real as culturally present fictions: unicorns then being a real, rather than an untrue, fictional notion within the cultures we partake of (in contrast to not being a real/actual fictional notion within cultures that never entertained the concept, such as that of some Inuit tribe), e.g. “unicorns (as fictional animals) are a real aspect of my culture”.
Even if this were so, the components of this synthesis seem worthy of discussion.
This seems to be your favorite rhetorical gun, too bad you can't seem to hit anything with it.
Quoting StreetlightX
I am not excluding them from the real. I am refining the overbroad category of real: things that are ontologically real, vs. things that are ontologically imaginary but manifest as real. If categories are useful, it is because they pick apart relevant qualitative differences. If we lump these differences under the same term, these differences become obscured, and our thinking becomes muddled as a result, and you get money as simultaneously real and imaginary. In my opinion, there are few things that have muddled philosophy more than the real vs. imaginary divide.
The point is, it was money, but no longer is, despite being physically identical at both times. The money is not the paper.
I would still classify unicorns as imaginary. It is just that they are intersubjectively imaginary. But they are not forces in the world, in the same sense that money nations and religions are. The latter is what interests me: things which are imaginary in their nature, but take on a kind of reality as quasi objective entities.
Also, just because something something is socially constructed doesn’t require it to be metaphysically unreal of certain views like Sally Haslanger and Elizabeth Barnes views.
The capitalist aim is to accumulate as much as possible of the stuff. Which introduces the strange situation that some have billions of coins and others just enough to get a piece of chicken for it.
When there was no money yet you actually had to deliver good or service, and this aspect has disappeared. You deliver a good or service and get money for it. Goods and services offered are owned by people or groups of people. They offer money to you and other people if you produce goods for them or offer services in their name. They ask people to pay for the goods you produce for them and the services you offer in their name. You can produce goods and offer services yourself and get money for it which you can use to swap for goods produced or services offered by others. So there is an indirect swap. I swap my chicken for a tenner and swap the tenner for ten dozen of eggs. Money is the intermediary. You don't have to take your chicken everywhere but take the money instead. You have to swap it for money first though. Instead of looking for eggs with your chicken in a basket, you sell your your chicken to whom wants a chicken and then go look for eggs. The egg seller then looks around for the pig she desires. Money stands for all goods and services and as such makes life easy. "I take them eggs! Here's a tenner. I have chickens only. But with this tenner you can get what you want!"
Then money transforms. It stands for all one desires. A closet full, a safe at the bank, and nowadays zeroes and ones at the bank. We want money. We produce goods and offer services to get it. The employers own the production lines, the employees keep production running. Money becomes an icon, an emblem, a symbol for goods to own and services to get.