BOOK REVIEW : Spiritual Essence of Cold, Hard Cash : MONEY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE, <i> by Jacob Needleman</i> , Doubleday Currency, $20; 317 pages

“Money don’t get everything, it’s true,” goes the old rock ‘n’ roll tune, “what it don’t get, I can’t use . . . “

Now, a true philosopher--rather like a rock ‘n’ roller--ought to cut through the bull and concern himself with what really matters. And that’s what Jacob Needleman sets out to do in “Money and the Meaning of Life,” a book that recognizes filthy lucre for what it is: the primal concern of our epoch.

“Money . . . now plays an unprecedentedly powerful role in our inner and outer lives,” writes Needleman, “and any serious search for self-knowledge and self-development requires that we study the meaning that money actually has for us.”

Needleman is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State, and he comes across as one of those charismatic figures who can be so elevating and electrifying in the eyes of their students. More to the point, he’s a working philosopher, an intellectual who is able to bring the loftiest metaphysical issues down to the here-and-now.

And so Needleman offers us not only the musings of prophets and philosophers on the meaning of money--he gives us a stunning moment in which one of his adoring students bestows upon him a mahogany box filled with half a million dollars in gold!

“The radiance of the gold blazed into my brain and a powerful bolt of electricity snaked down the length of my torso, igniting everything in its path,” he writes, “especially in the region of the solar plexus and genitals.”

For a work of philosophy, “Money and the Meaning of Life” is a particularly talky book. Needleman thinks out loud, frets and worries, reminisces about his own childhood, recites legends and fairy tales, engages in lunchtime conversations that turn into dialogues worthy of Socrates and Plato, and--above all--quotes himself at length.

All of the talk might grow tedious if Needleman weren’t quite so earnest and intimate about his own struggle with money--and not just the idea of money, but the impact of money in the real world.

“In the household where I grew up, the most intense and violent emotions centered around money--the lack of it, the need for it, the desperate difficulty of having enough of it, and the fear of what would become of us without it,” he writes. “The gods of money had no compassion. . . . They broke my father’s spirit again and again, and, through his violent despair and anxiety, they continuously broke my own spirit.”

Needleman’s contemplations bring him to the revelation that money was invented to link the material world to “God within and above.” Indeed, the essential argument of his book is that we have lost touch with the original spiritual component of money; our task, he says, is to get back in touch with it.

“Money was created--by the keepers of the sacred teachings underlying all human societies--to maintain a relationship between man’s spiritual needs and his material needs,” he argues. “Money is intrinsically a principle of reconciliation, of the harmonization of disparate elements.”

“Writing philosophy,” Alan Watts once said, “is as easy as falling off a log”--but reading philosophy is quite another task. Perhaps the only way to write about philosophy accessibly is to talk it out, to bring it down to Earth, which is exactly what Needleman has managed to do in “Money and the Meaning of Life.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Trollope: A Biography” by John Hall (Oxford).