WEALTH AS THE PURPOSE OF HUMAN LIFE IN MODERN SOCIETIES

Abstract

Abstract: This article aims at reflecting on the centrality of wealth in the modern world, as a dominant fact and as a norm, that is, as what guides and regulates social and individual activities. We will start with the consideration that the creation of material wealth as the goal of human life to involve the whole of society — this economy-centered way of life — is a condition that belongs only to modern societies and their economic form, capitalism, having expanded to every region of this planet. In order to address this theme, we will take Eric Weil’s thought-provoking reflections, developed especially in his Political Phi­losophy, as a starting point and as a reference, although we are not going to adopt them unconditionally. Next, we will examine the relationship between the development of this form of social existence and the emergence of a science of economy, which will figure as a decisive dimension of its symbolic universe. By way of conclusion, we will raise some questions: could this exaltation of wealth be sustained only by coercion? Or is this a form of life that we, to some extent, adopted by identifying with it? But if human life is not just economic reality, and since life’s fundamental questions necessarily go far beyond economics, would it not be an enormous historical misconception to take economic reality as life’s main dimension, making wealth the ultimate purpose of collective acti­vity? And if the promised economic bliss cannot be realized, are we not facing an essential impasse as well? The positive answer to these questions will lead us to conclude that, although we do not yet know how, it is imperative that we restore the economy of wealth as a means and not as end to human life.

Keywords: Wealth. Economy. Human Life. Ethics. Modern Society. Eric Weil.