Arminius,
I appreciate your efforts. I think I get what you’re saying. It makes sense that to say “I experience,” must mean that I experience something. And that something must be experienced as “not-me”. Otherwise, it isn’t an object to be experienced, but the experiencer (or nothing at all).
But are there not occasions when one experiences the object without a ‘me’? Those who meditate will often report this experience. They say that they can meditate in front of the ocean or in a meadow with trees swaying the wind, and all that exists for them in those moments are the lapping waves in the ocean or the swaying of the trees–no self, no me–like the self just disappeared and all there is is the ocean or the trees.
These are situations with only object, no subject–at least, from a subjectivist point of view (i.e. no experience of self = no self)–yet what remains of the subject is the experience itself–that is, the experiencing of the ocean or the trees. This situation in which only the ocean exists, only the tree exists, not only preserve the experiencing of the ocean and the trees (the seeing, the feeling) but its what grounds and defines the ocean and the trees. Without the experiencing, what is the ocean and the trees (at least from a subjectivist point of view). But as you see, this is a very different situation from that of a brain in a void. ← In that situation, we were contemplating a subject without any object–no experience to be had–but here I am presenting the opposite situation–an object without a subject–and only because an experience is had.
What I’m trying to say is that I more or less think of it in the opposite way from the brain-in-a-void scenario, except that I think the object sans self can still maintain the aspect of being-experienced (or being-felt). ← This is my theory. I say that “being felt” is part and parcel of what it is for an object to exist (whether that’s a concrete object or an abstract object, or anything else). The “feeling” part of the object is its “being”–it is its “what it is to exist”. In this way, I see the subjective aspect of a thing’s existence (it’s being felt) as the most essential part of what the object is. Ultimately, then, it is the object it is experienced to be, but the fact of its being felt is what its existence is based on. ← It is for this reason I say the objective is rooted in the subjective. The “subjective” aspect, in this case, is not a “self” per se–not a subject, at least not a subject as in a separate being standing away from the object–but just that aspect of the object which retains its subjectivity, it’s being felt, and thus serving as an instance of conscious experience.
I think this may be where the schism lies between what you’re trying to say and what I’m trying to say. By ‘subject’ I sense that you assume a ‘self’ or an ‘individual being’–a person that has the experience of the object–but I’m willing to forego the self, the subject, because for me, what subjectivity means is just the experiencing of a thing, which I think can be bootstrapped onto the object, not necessarily the subject. Being felt is just the mode of being for any object if it is to exist at all.
In fact, as far as ‘self’ goes, I think of self as just another object. To me, my ‘self’ is just the person I see when I look in the mirror. ← Kinda looks like an object to me. Yes, in all the variety of experiences I have of the world, one of them happens to be the experience of a self. But to me, that’s no different than the experience of a chair, or a shoe, or my car. It’s just this body here which keeps following me around wherever I go.
^ Does that make any sense?