| Popis: |
This chapter describes ideas of cosmic debt in the sixth and fifth centuries bce in Greece and (at about the same time) in India. The earliest Greek ideas of impersonal cosmic necessity, in the fragments of the Ionians Anaximander and Herakleitos, are a cosmization (cosmic projection) of the quantified debt that was central to the newly monetized economy of the polis. But whereas the Ionians cosmize debt as the agent of communal circulation, what the wealthy Eleatic Parmenides cosmizes, from the perspective of individual ownership, is the separation of universal abstract value-substance of money from circulation, its debtless self-sufficiency: Abstract Being is all that exists, is “inviolate,” and is said to be (incomprehensibly to modern scholars) not created by debt. The monetization of northern India in the same period also promoted a metaphysical revolution, in which universal abstract value-substance is cosmized as unchanging invisible brahman, the debt-driven circulation of money is cosmized as the misery of reincarnation, and the power of individually accumulated money in (and to escape) debt-driven circulation is cosmized (and ethicized) as karma. Along with fundamental similarities, the differences between the monetized metaphysics of Greece and of India are related to the social and religious differences between the two societies. |
