Through recent discussions, I’ve found myself wanting to clarify where my own sympathies lie.
I find myself strongly resonating with the view associated with Merleau-Ponty — the idea that we cannot be certain that an objective world exists as a fully completed structure, entirely independent of observation or engagement.
This is not a denial of the world’s existence. Rather, it is a refusal to take for granted the assumption that the world is given to us as a finished object, already complete before any encounter with it.
We are not beings who apprehend the world from a completely detached, external standpoint. We are embodied, acting, perceiving beings who are always already involved with it — through movement, observation, and interaction.
In that sense, objectivity seems less like something guaranteed prior to experience, and more like something that gradually stabilizes through engagement, sharing, and repetition.
This is not the claim that “everything is subjective.” It is simply the sense that we do not need to presuppose a purely observer-independent, unquestionably objective world in order to think meaningfully about reality at all.
I agree with you that objectivity is not something supported by evidence in itself, and that it often functions more like a belief that is later rationalized.
And yet, from there, my thinking has started to move in a slightly different direction.
I’ve come to think that some form of subjectivity is unavoidable — not as an individual or relative perspective, but as a necessary condition for reality to appear as one coherent whole at all.
Even if we reject objectivity as a presupposition, the fact that reality is intelligible as a unified system still seems to require an account.
This line of thought was triggered by encountering a particular paper that attempts to approach these questions not only philosophically, but through scientific experimentation. Since then, my thinking has been moving in this direction.