"Life & Life Only" ---or It is not about money....

[Mark Kohut]

George Simmel is one of those second-tier (in fame) German 
sociologists/philosophers
from somewhere around or right after the period of the most seminal such 
thinkers, such as 

Weber, Durkheim, etc. . I once read some of his most-famous, I think--right 
Kai?--book on Money when I had none and don't
remember a cent---except that money is an abstraction. ...A bit later, that 
money was shit---N.O. Brown---
I have never forgotten.
 
Vitalism essays below: from that time when so many who influenced TRPjr were 
struggling to define "life", "the human'--
amidst the spirit-crushingness of industrialism, etc...
 
 (I do remember gnarled prose like Veblen or Kant--progressive knotting-into 
anyone?--
back when I would get all tied up reading)....
 
I am taken with Booksluts summarizing and focus which I've excerpted below. It 
reminds me of a life-swallowing
young 'un, in fact just like my grandson: a perpetual eruption of spirit. he 
must be Zarathustra....
 
http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2011_05_017624.php
 
So, let's get to the meat of the question: what exactly is Simmel's view of 
life? Life, in its fullness, is a great Heraclitan stream of “becoming,” of 
organic begetting and endless reproduction. The obvious, immediate rebuttal is 
that we do not generally experience such raptures. To get by, to work, to 
communicate, to be a normal social person, we set boundaries on this overflowing 

vitality. Not every sentence is a poem; usually, I walk because I have somewhere 

to go; most of my time is “clock-time”; and most of my days are spent completing 

relatively banal routines. If life is a continuous river of becoming, a 
perpetual eruption of spirit, a joyous awareness of the globular 
ever-transforming self, there’s a good chance that I'm not all that alive.
For Simmel, though, these routines and boundaries are not completely deadening. 
True, we stake out boundaries in the “infinite fullness of life,” in order to 
act in the world; but to live in the world is nothing more than to overstep 
these boundaries at every moment. So, while I live in routine for much of my 
life, such routine never saturates my existence; for Simmel, there is always a 
kind of vital excess. This is the paradox of Simmel's theory of life: we are 
enclosed; we leave our enclosure. Or: to know your limits is to transcend them. 
Life, for Simmel, is nothing more than this reaching out, this grasping for what 

one is not.
 
http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2011_05_017624.php