Has any philosopher said that the line between subject and object is arbitrary and can equally well be drawn at any of a number of different places?
by 
rodschmidt
ANSWERS: 3
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The subject philosopher must have ignored the conventional syntax of language wherein the difference is that between 'actor' and 'acted upon', or more to the point, between perceiver and that which is perceived. A number of metaphysical constructs deny the difference (see Alan Watts on the popular side) and they can be very counterintuitive and confusing.
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I'm not entirely sure. I know that Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein both worked to discredit the subject/object distinction. But for them it wasn't that the line between subject and object was unfixable, but rather that it didn't make sense to talk of the world in that way. For Heidegger the world consisted of that which we care about. We projected into that which we perceive by looking at it. Merleau-Ponty continued this line of discussion in the phenomenology of perception, saying that we subtend what we look at by looking at it. It becomes what it is by the way we look at it and from which point we look at it from. For Merleau-Ponty the body was what characterised perception, in that the peculiarity of the body is what makes what we perceive possible as it is seen. For Wittgenstein we are our worlds and that is all we are, and whatever is in our world is not an object but a product of a social thing called a language game.
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This is actually a central idea in Buddhism, and challenging the rigid definition of self vs. other is a basic training approach. The list of Buddhist teachers who've spoken on the topic would cover a football field! :) (I'm a Zen student, btw)
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