--- title: "The Means Without End" sousTitre: "Aristotle classifies wealth among the means—useful for the sake of something else. Marx describes the figure in which the means has become the subject, and acquisition finds no stopping point." description: "Aristotle ranks wealth among the means; Marx depicts capital turned subject. Two perspectives on the moment when acquisition loses its measure." date: 2026-07-03 lang: en tradition: philosophie-occidentale auteurs: ["Aristotle", "Karl Marx"] --- # The Means Without End Nothing tells money when to stop. A knife carries its measure in its use: it cuts, then is set down. A remedy heals, then is put away. The tool ordinarily bears its end within what it serves; to reach it is to cease needing it. Money is the tool that has lost this end. In the swelling number, nothing marks the point where one might say: there, that is enough. Aristotle had placed it without hesitation among the means. > As for the life devoted solely to moneymaking, it is a kind of violence and unending struggle; but clearly, wealth is not the good we seek. Wealth is merely something useful, pursued for the sake of other things. > > — **Aristotle**, *Morale à Nicomaque*, livre I, ch. II, § 15. éd. after the French translation by Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Wikisource. The entire first book of the *Nicomachean Ethics* sorts ends by a single question: are they sought for their own sake, or for something else? The [highest good](https://viasophia.org/lexique/souverain-bien/) is what we desire for itself alone, beyond which nothing remains to be desired; it is the only point where the movement of desire can come to rest, for it has arrived. Wealth never attains this: it is useful, and thus suspended from an end it is not. To make it an end is not to aim too high—it is to mistake its rank, placing a means where only an end can stand. Hence "the violence and unending struggle": not a temperamental flaw, but the precise consequence of a means elevated to an end. A means carries no "enough" within itself; it receives its limit only from the end it serves. Remove the end, and nothing bounds acquisition—not from excess of greed, but from absence of term. Aristotle thus locates disorder in the soul that mistakes its end, and he shows the way back: to rediscover, above the means, what is sought for its own sake. Twenty-two centuries later, another gaze describes not the error of a soul, but a figure in which this inversion has ceased to be an error and become a movement. > Only insofar as the ever-increasing appropriation of abstract wealth is the sole driving motive of his operations does he function as a capitalist—or, if you will, as personified capital, endowed with consciousness and will. The use-value must therefore never be considered the immediate aim of the capitalist, nor isolated gain; rather, it is the ceaseless movement of ever-renewed gain. > > — **Karl Marx**, *Le Capital, Livre I*, ch. IV. éd. after the French translation by Joseph Roy, Maurice Lachâtre, 1872" maison lang="deu. Marx traces a simple form: buying to sell at a higher price, "money that is worth more money, value that is greater than itself." Where ordinary exchange begins with a need and ends in its satisfaction—one sells to buy what is lacking, and the circle closes—this form closes upon its own starting point: money returns, swollen, to where it began, only to set out again. It has no term in its very form. This is why Marx does not depict a miser, a temperament; already, for him, [the commodity stood "on its head"](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-fetichisme-marchandise/), and here it is money itself that comes to life. He describes [personified capital](https://viasophia.org/lexique/capital-personnifie/), a value that has become a subject, of which man is but the "conscious bearer." "Produce for the sake of producing," "Accumulate, accumulate! That is the law and the prophets!": the limitless is not a vice that might be tempered, but the logic of a form. Let us separate the two perspectives before bringing them together. Aristotle places the inversion in a choice: a soul has taken a means for an end, and another choice would correct it; measure is restored by revisiting the end. Marx places it in a social form: it does not depend on the passion of any one man, it would hold even if his greed were extinguished, for it is the movement itself that is without measure, and man is but the place where it becomes self-aware. The first expects the remedy from a better-regulated gaze; the second shows that the gaze alone cannot touch what surpasses it. These two diagnoses cannot be merged: one speaks of the soul, the other of the form, and to confuse them would be to lose what each sees. And yet they point to one and the same thing, each in its own way. Whether the inversion lies in the soul or in the form, it is always this reversal: the means usurps the place of the end, and he who held the tool comes to serve it. To name it—this is where the two voices converge—is, in the same gesture, to recall measure. For what has its end in itself carries a place of rest; what has become endless dispossesses all who serve it. The point where acquisition might stop is not a higher number: it is the return, above it, of an end desired for its own sake. So long as it is lacking, no total will be "enough"; let it reappear, and the means instantly becomes what it was—useful, and bounded by what it serves. ## Why does money have no term? Because it is a means, and a means derives its limit only from the end it serves. A satisfied need halts exchange; but buying to sell at a higher price closes upon its starting point and sets out again. Remove the end desired for itself, and nothing in the growing number marks where to stop. The tool does not know where to stop; that was never its concern. Only he who wields it knows—if he still remembers what he took it up for. --- **À lire aussi** - [La table qui danse](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-fetichisme-marchandise/) - [Seul, ou bien accompagné](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-27-seul-ou-bien-accompagne/) - [Ce qu'on ne peut ravir](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-07-02-ce-qu-on-ne-peut-ravir/) ## Sources - Karl Marx, *Le Capital, Livre I* — Maurice Lachâtre, 1872, trans. Joseph Roy (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Capital/Livre_I) - Aristote, *Morale à Nicomaque* — Wikisource (Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire), trans. Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Morale_%C3%A0_Nicomaque) Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/articles/2026-07-03-le-moyen-sans-fin/