Think about yourself. You are you, all others are others. When you say something, you start by saying “I...”, like, for example, “I think...”. When you refer to others you say “You...”, or “They...”, or “She/he...”.
Now my question is: what makes possible to you to say “I”? An obvious answer could be “Because I am I, so why shouldn’t I say I?”. I think that the problem with this answer is that it doesn’t find a point of difference. You know that each of those whom you refer to by saying, for example, “He...” can say the same thing. If they are able to say the same thing, how is that you make a difference by saying “I...” instead of “He...” in different situations? What is that thing that produces, causes this difference?

Actually, sometimes we can decide to use a particular language and I can refer to myself as “he”. For example, now I can say that Angelo is writing this post. However, we don’t think that the opposite is possible, which is, saying “I” when I want to refer to somebody else. I can say in this moment “He, Angelo, is writing this post”, but I cannot say “I am reading this post”, referring “I” not to me but to you, readers. So, despite our ability to refer to ourselves by saying “He/She...”, the exclusive meaning of “I” remains untouched. So, again the question is “What gives me the possibility of saying “I” when I refer to myself? What is different in me, so that I use this different pronoun?”. Somebody might answer “Perspective! Because you are talking from your perspective!”. This answer sends us back to the objection I wrote here before: even those whom I refer to as “He/She” have their own perspective. The problem is that for each one of those billions of people I use just the same pronoun “He/She”: each one is the same. I am the only person in the world who, when I am talking, says “I”. I see that other people say “I” as well, but to me they are all they, while instead I do not belong to that group. My experience of saying “I” is completely different from what I understand or imagine when I see that other people say “I”. What makes this experience so unique to me?

I think that there is a deep and deceitful trick in this question. When I ask “What makes possible to you to say I?”, actually I am saying “What object makes possible to you to say I?”. That’s why there are a lot of answers that fall into the problem of not pointing to a real difference that is not shared by those whom I call “they”. In other words, the question asks to objectify subjectivity. Objectifying subjectivity means that the question drives us to imagine ourselves outside ourselves, seeing how we see ourselves from this imagined external perspective, so that, at the end, what I am talking about is me seen as a “he” by myself. This procedure nullifies the point of the question, because, the moment I project myself outside myself, the objectified me becomes just a “he”, so that there isn’t anymore any difference from all other people whom I call “he”.

This means that the question itself makes itself impossible to answer. The question actually says “What object makes you a subject?”: here is the contradiction implied by the question.

This means that each of us will never be able to explain even to themselves what makes each of us feel ourself as an “I”, because this would mean talking about ourselves as imagined just as another “He/She”, not really about “I”.

When we try to understand anything, we objectify it, we need to objectify it. Moreover, we objectify ourselves as well, because, when I try to understand, for example, what a stone is, that moment I project myself outside myself, trying to understand how that stone is perceived by other people as well. Those people who do not objectify themselves are the artists, but an artist doesn’t say what a stone is, they intentionally reject this perspective, trying not to explain anything, but to express themselves instead.

This means that a lot of philosophy that goes on by using an analytical mind, a kind of philosophy that continuously asks “What is this?”, “What is that?”, the kind of philosophy based on understanding, is a philosophy that objectifies us, drives us to consider ourselves, as questioners who want to understand, just objects, exactly the moment we pose those questions. In other words, it is a kind of philosophy that destroys humanity. When you try to understand anything, you are turning not only that thing into an object, but yourself as well into an object.