this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
74 points (98.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
638 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’ve read Utopia & Das Kapital, but admittedly at the time they were for school projects and I was young. Too young to pay attention to the real, major themes.
I love to learn about all of those things, I just don’t feel I’m equipped to do it solo & fully grasp the concepts being laid out. Like I almost need someone to tell me what I need to be looking for and why it’s important in each chapter. I love to read, and I do it a lot (fiction & nonfiction), but classics like that…it’s so weird, like I am incapable of understanding it in an intuitive manner, like other books. It’s almost embarrassing to admit.
I find it all fascinating & enjoy learning about it, but I don’t do so well when I go to the source…if that makes sense.
Do give Russell's History of Western Philosophy a try. It places those books into a much needed context. When I first picked up that book, it was out of a hope to learn more about philosophy, but after finishing it, I only had those three books on my 'definitely must read' list. I know there's a companion book to Das Kapital written by David Harvey, but he's not the easiest to read either. And Marx, omfg, that mofo has a way of dancing around things for pages on end through the most labyrinthine sentences, so I can definitely commiserate! It took me months to get through the whole thing. Luckily I was in the middle of a move, without TV or computer, so that helped a lot :)
Thank you for the detailed response! That clarifies things a lot. I will give it a try!