Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin

There is a good methodological principle stated by a Soviet philosoph Ilyenkov: to understand the nature of a thing build or describe a minimal working model of the thing. So simple that if you remove any single detail it ceases to work. He himself gave an example of radio: to understand what radio is build a minimal radio sender and receiver of three or four details each. Do not start with a household radio unit that comes in a polished box with lights and knobs; it has way too many unrelated details.

This works very well both for concrete things like radio and for more abstract things like math or Marx's notion of private property. This is also the principle employed by religious and mystical parables or the book "A pattern language".