The value of money

Although money is not generally believed to make people happy, most people strive to maximize their income.

If you were to ask around on the street what topics philosophy is usually about, probably few passers-by would answer "money". As a rule, according to popular opinion, people are more concerned with truth, certainty, meaning, good and evil, i.e. overall with less "material" matters.

Despite this, or precisely because of it, money is a constant topic when one is professionally involved in philosophy. Not so much because it necessarily makes you particularly poor or rich, but rather because many people expect that as a philosopher you must somehow be able or even want to get along well with little money. After all, one is interested in higher things, otherwise one would direct one's academic talents to a more lucrative discipline, such as dentistry or applied mathematics. I remember once, as a young student, sitting at a table with a French family and someone asked me what I would become one day. Before I could answer, someone else interjected, "He doesn't need much, he's an intellectual!"

Even in ancient Greece, the question of why one would devote oneself to philosophy instead of making more money from one's skills must have been commonplace. A famous anecdote reports that the philosopher Thales of Miletus (c. 624-546 B.C.) once made a lot of money with what today might be called agricultural speculation. He predicted already in winter a good olive harvest for the following summer, rented with foresight numerous oil mills favorably and could sublet these then profitably. Thus he wanted to have proved that philosophers could become rich with their abilities - if they wanted to. But other things were more important to them.

In times when there seem to be hardly any news reports that do not somehow have to do with fears about the loss of prosperity, the provocation that lies in explicitly professing to know more important things than money is of course even greater. Almost as much as religion, philosophy also has the reputation, at least in parts, of putting idealistic ideas into people's heads and thus dissuading them from getting what they are entitled to in terms of material goods - whether individually or in the community.

It is always the others who think materially

Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to think from time to time about what might be more important than material prosperity. And perhaps - at the latest at this point it becomes philosophical in any case - also to think about how we actually address this very topic in our society. It's not as if it's a minority opinion that money doesn't make people happy and that there should be more to life than the satisfaction of mundane needs. On the contrary, our living rooms, cafés and postcard stands are full of aphorisms about the importance of a wide variety of ideal values - love, serenity, honesty, authenticity, courage, good humor and all the rest. The people whom we assume are interested in nothing but prosperity end up with the same calendars hanging on their walls as we do, and assume the same of us in return.

Perhaps the ideas of what is really important in life and the actual priorities often enable each other precisely because they do not coincide. By this I don't mean that people "do hypocritical things" or anything like that: I think many are absolutely certain that they are pursuing idealistic goals in life, while at the same time directing their factual actions primarily toward making and spending money. Our concepts of how all this is to be valued may themselves be ideological again. Why is it good if a child has few toys? Why is it better to spend 160 euros on opera tickets instead of admission to an amusement park? Something like that has to be answered first.