Quality and Quantity

Question: What is the difference between a qualitative and a quantitative difference?

Answer: It is a qualitative difference.

That's hardly fair. Maybe it isn't even true. Following Kant, we could call the difference between quality, quantity, relation and modality a categorical difference.

But I'm not so sure we have pure intuitions that reveal the categories of pure reason. These categories are instead a way of describing all things. We can only see our observation because, as (if I understood him correctly) Satre says in Being and Nothingness our awareness is always also the consciousness of being aware.

Therefore quality reveals itself as a quality and quantity reveals itself as a quality. But this means our conceptual understanding of quantity is never correct in essence. Even our understanding of quality reveals itself as either a particular quality or as an abstraction representing quality in general, and never as quality-in-itself.

So what is the difference between quality and quantity? Quality is always the hidden basis of our categories and quantity is always that which is at all times near to us in our sense data but hidden from us in itself.

This is too simple. I makes it sound as though quality and quantity are binary forces acting without interaction to other factors. This is never the case. Logic always abstracts, and in abstracting it takes everything out of the context of the totality, in which is stands a chance of making sense, perhaps. If only for some enlightened future, or for our God computer descendent at the end of time.