From Valuing to Monetized (From Poets to the Sonnetized)

"... man designated himself as the being who measures values, who values and measures, as the ‘calculating animal as such’."

-- Nietzsche from Genealogy of Morals

If humans can be called the value creating animal, then we limit our humanity when we limit the ways by which we define and assign value. Limiting value to quantification limits our humanity to numbers. When those numbers become more and more often attached to money, we more and more become monetary animals. (Humanity is monetizing.)

It could be said of Heidegger's later philosophy that he sees man as the poetic animal. What happens when values become monetized is like what would happen if we said to a follower of Heidegger's later thought that poetry is limited to sonnet writing. Humans become the sonnet writing animal. (Humanity is sonnetizing.) It is an absurd limit.

Yet, we so often go along with the quantification and monetization of everything around us, and of ourselves, without taking more than a passing notice of it, and rarely ever do we deeply consider what it means or does to us. The less we think over this monetization of everything, the more we shift from being a monetary animal to a monetized animal.