From De-ontologization to Desubjectification: Madhyamaka and the Bridge Problem

This paper offers a constructive philosophical argument grounded in selective exegesis. It begins from the thought that Buddhist non-self is not exhausted by the negation of a substantial self, since experience may still be organized as "I suffer," "I know," and "I act." Exegetically, the paper develops a selective reading of early Buddhist and Madhyamaka materials; constructively, it distinguishes minimal first-person livedness, the subjectivating structure, and the objectified subject, and later differentiates ultimate analysis, conventional establishment, and conventional diagnosis. The paper argues that Madhyamaka handles this terrain with such deftness because its critique so thoroughly dislodges the objectifiable subject that the residual problem of subjectivating organization can easily appear already settled, even when it has only been displaced from ontology to convention. On the selective reading pursued here, the move from the ultimate non-establishment of a bearer-subject to the loosening of the subjectivating organization of experience is not yet made fully explicit. Madhyamaka directly revokes the objectified subject, but the conventional work needed to show how experience ceases to be organized as "I undergo / I know / I do" still calls for fuller articulation. We call that task conventional diagnosis. On this basis, the paper isolates a pressure point in Madhyamaka soteriology without claiming thereby to have refuted Madhyamaka, and explains why Yogācāra-style supplementation remains philosophically attractive as a comparative source of candidate mechanisms rather than as a default victory.