Hereandnow wrote: ↑December 31st, 2017, 5:19 pm
...there is something independent 'out there'...
So this is the result of your phenomenological analysis. But for me it is just the starting point. Let us take the sentence "The being of the world is independent of my being", which seems to be true and obvious: the world is "out there", independent of my being. But out of what? Independent of what? My being, of course, and the being of each of us. So these phrases express a relation, and one member of the relation is my being. If we remove that part from the relation, nothing is left. Now we come to the sentence "If I did not exist, there would be nothing", which is the clue for all these considerations. These are much more than word games, they reveal something essential in our reality.
So now we have proved the sentence "If I did not exist..." formally, using a kind of dialectic, but in fact it can be seen
a priori and very clearly, in a phenomenological intuition, if you think of it thoroughly and not just in an everyday manner. I have seen from your posts that you are quite familiar with phenomenological thinking, so I was a bit surprised to find that you did not see what I mean by these meditations, but you are not the only one, in spite of the fact that the key idea of these thoughts is so obvious and simple when the insight comes.
Now we all know that when others die, the world does not end, nor does it end when I die. So we must conclude that dying does not mean nothingness, not even my nothingness. Therefore we must conclude that the subject is something deeper than my individual subject, it is transcendental. And what is important, the transcendental subject is transpersonal: it only manifests itself as individual subjects. Only in this way the world remains when I die. The subject-object relation is fundamental. Wherever there is being, there is a subject for which that being is.
Let us consider the monads of Leibniz. They are "soul-like", he says. Let us assume that they are individual subjects. A monad expresses all other monads. If one monad is removed, the world continues its being as before, but it is always there from a point of view of some monad.
So can you really imagine a universe without subjects?