The Ring of Gyges

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that "the mind of early man was preoccupied to such an extent with price-making . . . that in a certain sense this may be said to have constituted his thinking."' A fundamental change in price-making constitutes a fundamental change in thinking. The development of money was such a change. Although minting was not a great technological innovation, money informed a powerful revolution in economic and verbal media.2 The genealogy of the money form is the study of a new logic that is the money of the mind. In this chapter, we shall study the "constitutional" relationship between the origin of money and the origin of philosophy itself. To the Greeks the exact place and time of the introduction of coinage was uncertain. Their genetic explanations of coinage do not depend, however, on exactitude of chronological and geographic data. They focus instead on hypothetical or mythical periods during which they suppose money to have originated. Wishing to discuss the effects of coinage and the relationship between money and the mind, the ancient Greeks chose many different birth places, times, and event^.^ Their quarrel about the origin of coinage, however, is a de-