Book Description:“In order to build socialism, first and foremost, we need to have socialist people who understand socialist ideology and have socialist...
It’s available for free (officially) at the link. We can have a weekly discussion for a section/chapter/part etc.
When I said chapter 2 is fairly easy to understand, I spoke way, way, way too fucking soon because section 3 was kicking my ass lmao
Section 3 was long with multiple 4+ pages of annotations, and unlike the previous sections and chapters, it's material that I've never seen before. In summary, it outlined categories used in materialist dialectics.
The first pair is private and common. This one is the one that I had the trouble with the most. So out of a section of chapter 2, it's this section of a section that I had trouble with. The pair is supposed to be used within the context of a set of things, with private being each individual member and common being the set itself. My first confusion was that it discussed about categories, but it also discussed attributes, but unlike the category, there are three attributes: private, common, and unique. So, the question I had was why talk about private and common instead of unique and common? My eventual understanding is that private as a category encapsulates all three attributes. So, within a given set of things, each member has attributes that is completely unique and attributes that it shares with at least one other member. The attributes, both those completely unique and those that it shares with other things, form its own private attributes. Unique and common wouldn't work because they're basically polar opposites while private and common would work because the privates of each individual member cannot exist without a common which binds the members of the set together and the common exists as a partial aggregate of some attributes of the privates. I think understanding this section of a section has great ramifications in understanding how different social movements relate to one another and what commonality could be extracted from them.
Reason and result is pretty easy to understand. It's just cause and effect except with a greater focus on how humans cause things.
Obviousness and randomness is just about how some things are straightforward and deterministic while other things are basically random and how some things that are random could be set up to be more deterministic in your favor.
Content and form is another big one. Content is about the sum of the constituent parts of a given thing while form is the relationship those constituent parts have with each other. The easiest way to visualize this is to imagine a ball-and-stick model with the content being the sum total of atoms/balls and the form being sum total of the bonds/sticks. This extends to ideas as well. Art itself has an idealist content but a physical form. This is very interesting to consider. You could view art as having a physical content and form, which is where you get "it's all pixels in a screen" or "it's just paint on canvas," but when viewed as having idealist content and physical form, the physical artform is a means of expressing an aesthetic meaning or artistic intent. This isn't the first time the text includes the study of aesthetics. Perhaps Luna is an artist in real life?
Essence and phenomenon is about the internal aspects of a given thing vs the external manifestation of those internal aspects. I can't help but view essence as just content and form plus some other stuff added in because content and form relates to internal aspects, but I'm not sure if this is correct.
Possibility and reality is pretty straightforward.
The last section is just discussing quantity and quality, unification and contradiction, and the negation of the negation. This is familiar ground to me, so it wasn't particularly hard.
When I said chapter 2 is fairly easy to understand, I spoke way, way, way too fucking soon because section 3 was kicking my ass lmao
Section 3 was long with multiple 4+ pages of annotations, and unlike the previous sections and chapters, it's material that I've never seen before. In summary, it outlined categories used in materialist dialectics.
The first pair is private and common. This one is the one that I had the trouble with the most. So out of a section of chapter 2, it's this section of a section that I had trouble with. The pair is supposed to be used within the context of a set of things, with private being each individual member and common being the set itself. My first confusion was that it discussed about categories, but it also discussed attributes, but unlike the category, there are three attributes: private, common, and unique. So, the question I had was why talk about private and common instead of unique and common? My eventual understanding is that private as a category encapsulates all three attributes. So, within a given set of things, each member has attributes that is completely unique and attributes that it shares with at least one other member. The attributes, both those completely unique and those that it shares with other things, form its own private attributes. Unique and common wouldn't work because they're basically polar opposites while private and common would work because the privates of each individual member cannot exist without a common which binds the members of the set together and the common exists as a partial aggregate of some attributes of the privates. I think understanding this section of a section has great ramifications in understanding how different social movements relate to one another and what commonality could be extracted from them.
Reason and result is pretty easy to understand. It's just cause and effect except with a greater focus on how humans cause things.
Obviousness and randomness is just about how some things are straightforward and deterministic while other things are basically random and how some things that are random could be set up to be more deterministic in your favor.
Content and form is another big one. Content is about the sum of the constituent parts of a given thing while form is the relationship those constituent parts have with each other. The easiest way to visualize this is to imagine a ball-and-stick model with the content being the sum total of atoms/balls and the form being sum total of the bonds/sticks. This extends to ideas as well. Art itself has an idealist content but a physical form. This is very interesting to consider. You could view art as having a physical content and form, which is where you get "it's all pixels in a screen" or "it's just paint on canvas," but when viewed as having idealist content and physical form, the physical artform is a means of expressing an aesthetic meaning or artistic intent. This isn't the first time the text includes the study of aesthetics. Perhaps Luna is an artist in real life?
Essence and phenomenon is about the internal aspects of a given thing vs the external manifestation of those internal aspects. I can't help but view essence as just content and form plus some other stuff added in because content and form relates to internal aspects, but I'm not sure if this is correct.
Possibility and reality is pretty straightforward.
The last section is just discussing quantity and quality, unification and contradiction, and the negation of the negation. This is familiar ground to me, so it wasn't particularly hard.