Yes, in the meantime I’d realized you probably meant something along these lines. It’s like Husserl telling the young Strauss he should not begin with the roof (physical nature) but with the foundation (phenomena, objects of consciousness). But ironically, this means beginning, not with the scientific understanding of the world, but with our natural, pre-scientific, common-sense understanding… So you and I are back at our disagreement about common-sense. I think your scientific understanding, too, still depends on common sense—common-sense understanding being understanding in terms of “things possessing qualities”. Your “1” would actually be a thing dispossessed of all its qualities. The word for such dispossession is, indeed, “abstraction”.
Now abstraction is actually a form of lightening. When we move from “apple” to “fruit”, for example, the thing must be lightened of its quality of roundishness, for a fruit may also be pear-shaped, for instance. And roundishness is itself also a self-lightening. In fact, every quality is a thing possessing the quality of being a quality. And likewise, a thing can never be dispossessed of the quality of thinghood. Thinghood, however, is nothing else than self-lightening. A self-lightening can never be lightened of the quality of self-lightening, even though everything of which it is lightened has itself the quality of self-lightening.
