Reviews for Psychology of Nonviolence

The average rating for Psychology of Nonviolence based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-05-07 00:00:00 Ilia Ilia This book comes in two parts: an analytical and a synthetic half – so, a pulling apart of the idea of money, followed by a putting it back together again. The preface and introduction make the point that Simmel didn’t really do footnotes, or even tell you in the text where he might have gotten ideas from. However, they also say that about the only people mentioned as a source of ideas here is Marx, I think 3 times, and Nietzsche twice – the book is over 500 pages long, like I said, who needs references... Now, this is awfully interesting, since Marx’s Capital discusses money and value (and the sources of both) extensively, but does not come to even slightly similar conclusion as Simmel does. In fact, Marx’s labour theory of value is rejected here as too limited an explanation of how value is created or embodied in objects. There’s a part of me that feels that Simmel is trying to out Hegel Marx in this book – the result is a mixture of both the profoundly observant followed by much that I found beyond my abilities to understand, although all of it was written in clear, and often rather beautiful, prose. This is, then, my understanding of a text that is very long, contains a wealth of ideas, and probably deserves more than one reading. I’m saying all this in case someone does a TS Eliot on me and says, “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all” – to which the answer will be, very possibly. The movement here is from desire to will to purposive action to attainment and then ultimately to dissatisfaction – this is presented as the human condition. Religion plays an interesting role here too – since religion has always played the role of pacifying us when we contemplate the disjuncture between our desire and the ability of our will to realise it. For Simmel, money distorts this role for religion in interesting ways. God has to be without desire or will. This is interesting because desire and will are here considered to be the most important attributes that make us human. God needs to be without either because having been able to create the entire universe purely by articulation (in the beginning was the word) whatever he ‘wills’ would be immediately realised. We cannot desire what we already have, that is, what comes to us unmediated by some action. Simmel makes it clear that this is a problem for many marriages and potentially the reason why so many marriages end up without love – he twice quotes Plato as saying that love is the intermediate state between possession and deprivation. To have kills love, just as certainty of deprivation would also kill it. To desire something requires us to will that we should obtain it, but the act of willing also implies thinking about the means that would be necessary to lead to the end of having it. Desire creates a purpose and that purpose is articulated and given life by the means we create toward the end of obtaining it. The problem is that what we desire changes as society develops – and it also changes in the sense that what is desired cannot be obtained by our own efforts alone, but must include the efforts of other people. It is in this sense that he says that ‘exchange’ is the basis of human social systems – first in the sense of barter between individuals of the various things they have produced – so that if I make coats and you make bread we work out an exchange rate between these products such that the exchange is always on the basis that I want your bread more than I want my coats and vice versa. Exchange, then, is fundamentally about satisfaction of our desires, with us desiring what we do not have more than we do that which we already have – otherwise we wouldn’t make the exchange. But this is by far the simplest form of exchange. Other forms are much more complex and they also have a history. Feudal exchange is significantly different to capitalist exchange – and money is an important part of this difference. The key aspect here is how much more abstract and universal money is when compared to other forms of exchange. For example, a peasant might be required to pay the lord a certain amount of wheat and honey as their rent. As such, this means the peasant is required to produce wheat and honey or they will not be able to pay their rent, and so they are restricted in what they can produce on the land they use. Here innovation is made much more difficult, since the exchange (I get to use the land in exchange for a certain quantity of wheat and honey) is so concrete. For the peasant to change crops they would still need to somehow gain access to the honey and wheat they also need to pay their rent. It is in this sense that money – as something that is both something without fixed qualities other than those required for it to be money (that it persists, is recognised as a store of value, is freely exchanged, and so on) also helps to liberate those who can use it in exchange. Simmel sees this as the relation between the shift to money and the growth of freedom – both as a movement towards more abstract forms of exchange between people. Money is interesting since it has so few actual qualities (paper money or, even more clearly, the strings of ones and zeros on a computer system being an expression of this increasingly abstract nature of money). The more abstract money becomes (the more it can be used to exchange for virtually anything) the more it becomes ‘value’ – that is, basically quantity beyond quality – essentially formless. Things have qualities, but money stands abstracted from real things and as a relation between things – as their exchange value. Money is abstract in this sense, but in its abstraction it allows the person who possesses it access to all things. That is, money is a kind of potential, a potential for satisfying desires. As abstract relation, though, money only makes sense in its movement – it is only in its ‘liquidity’ that money is real money. Money as the means to satisfy desire is true both in the sense that you can use money to purchase whatever it is you would like to purchase – as Marx says somewhere, the ugly man can purchase a beautiful wife, the fool can purchase smart men and so on – but also money allows you to purchase the means to achieve your desires, to create, to turn what you desire into what you possess. The abstract nature of money is important here since it provides access to ways to self-creation that are not available with more concrete forms of exchange (the wheat and honey example mentioned above, for instance). This form of exchange, the most abstract form, allows people the possibility to fully develop their own individuality. Here the notion that money is infinite potential is a central idea and seen as one of the main ways that money is linked to freedom. In part, Simmel’s problem with Marx’s labour theory of value is that he understands it to stress physical over mental labour as the chief creator of value. And this would run counter to many of Simmel’s other ideas expressed here – not least that progress in freedom is achieved by a movement away from the concrete (physical labour is always upon something and so therefore concrete in that sense) toward the more abstract, with mental labour being the most obvious example. He points out that the development of the productive forces under a money economy (capitalism) intensifies the division of labour so much that for most people their labour becomes entirely alienated from them – much as the early Marx had already said, but this is, apparently, something Simmel would not have known when writing this. Here value is not so much created by the labourer in its fullest sense – since the labourer is likely not to understand the whole production process they are involved in or even understand the full implications of the single role they are playing in that process – but is more likely composed and given value by the more abstract labour of the inventors of the machines and the production process – although, even here it is likely (as with computerisation) that in fact no one fully understands the whole thing and must rely on ‘trust’ that things will work as advertised – I’ve no idea how the computer chip allows me to type this, but it does and I’ll trust that, rather than bother myself with finding out how. I don’t think Marx was nearly as ‘concrete’ on labour as Simmel suggests, but he has encouraged me to read the second and third volumes of Capital now. One book always leads to so many others – why is that? This book is surprisingly interesting about things we might not think would end up in a book on the philosophy of money - things as disparate as dowries and women’s liberation, the segmentation of time, the creation of works of art or the role of religion in a society where the new abstract universal that seeks to be the equivalence of all things is no longer god but gold. Like I said at the start of this, bits of this are hard going (he’s a German writing about philosophy, a large part of his national and self-esteem are tied up with being occasionally incomprehensible), but this is a treasure trove of ideas and like other really good books, makes you wonder how you didn’t notice some things before. I don’t think I agree with all of this – but that shouldn’t be the criterion for reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-25 00:00:00 Kenneth Maliga Acknowledgements Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition: Money? Really! Preface to the Third Edition & Notes Introduction to the Translation & Notes --The Philosophy of Money Afterword: The Constitution of the Text & Notes Name Index