Axel BureniusJuly 14, 2017 at 20:202450 views6 comments
Question: what is the 'transition from quantity to quality'? I come across it in various philosophical texts and also poetry and think it has something to do with Marx... WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
284. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain.—Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different.—If anyone says: "That cannot simply come from the fact that a living thing moves about in such-and-such a way and a dead one not", then I want to intimate to him that this is a case of the transition 'from quantity to quality'. (From Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations)
Trotsky and the molecular structure of the revolution...“tobogganing towards catastrophe,”
All social changes, minute at first , accumulates unseen and unknown by most continuing to form until the quantity of this unrest reaches critical level, the tipping point, and they become a new quality, a new structure a social explosion of a revolutionary quality.
Right, thank you both for your answers! I think Cavacava nailed it. The quotation is what that made me wonder, who/what W is citing and how the notion was originally used.
Comments (6)
All social changes, minute at first , accumulates unseen and unknown by most continuing to form until the quantity of this unrest reaches critical level, the tipping point, and they become a new quality, a new structure a social explosion of a revolutionary quality.
Kaboom!