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And boy howdy does my head hurt.

I'm almost through the preface, and i have NO clue what he's talking about.

So far, the only thing I've gotten is something about how a result is determined by the path that lead to it, and that a negation is not a destruction of something but just a further step forward.

But I have no fucking clue about his other concepts like Notion, Subjective/Objective, what he means by Science or how to piece it all together.

It really feels like walking in, mid conversation, in a foreign language.

Is the rest of the book easier to read, or should I just call it quits here?

I just wanted to better understand dialectics lmao

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[-] iridaniotter@hexbear.net 4 points 22 hours ago

The Phenomenology? Yeah that preface is a piece of work. There's a lecture series on Youtube that might help but it's almost 200 hours long. If you're reading it only because you're trying to understand dialectics/dialectical materialism then I think you're better off saving it for later. Find a writer who engages with the dialectical (materialist) method that you can mostly keep up with and enjoy reading and start from there instead. So that might be, say, The Dialectical Biologist, or Capital, or Thought and Language. Ilyenkov has written some pretty good introductory and history essays on dialectics, too...

this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]

"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes


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