2 Types of Abstraction | Etienne Gilson, Unity of Philosophical Experience Ch 3

[@MrMarktrumble]

These videos are making me want to read Gilson again.DO I have immediate awareness of myself, not mediated through an empirical object of sense? If I do revert upon myself in a reflexive way, without the means of perceiving an extrinsic object, would this be intuition? If I have intuition of myself, then I have an intuition of being, as both thinking and existing. One can apply the Ochamian abstraction from social context, sense data to be lead to the self awareness of the individual. If I peel an onion to find the centre, I may seek a smaller and smaller centre, but I lose the very onion I am looking for, finding the empty centre from which all comes. In order to understand the whole onion(as composed of organized parts) I may have to use the Aristotelian abstraction, and focus on the skin, or the general nature of one persistent feature common to the whole. Here I may have general laws of patterns of growth, and who knows whatever general principles appear. The point is, both directions of abstraction are useful, and the reduction to either an absolute individual at the expense of differentiated organs, or the other way around is to cut out something of what is real. This was a good distinction to think about.