If you think that all around you - everything except you - merely “exists” because of the fact that you are perceiving and thinking, then you can also say that there is nothing that “exists” except you, so you are either merely a subject without any object or both subject and object (or even: there is no subject and no object - because there is no difference between them).
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once asked:
[list][list][list][list][list][list] “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?”
(“Why is there anything [being] at all rather than nothing[ness]?”)
[size=80](“Seiendes” is derived from “sein” [“to be”] and means an identical mode of “being”.)[/size][list][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u][/list:u]Do you know the answer?
Or think about the Indian culture/civilisation - the so called “Hinduism” (b.t.w.: I think it is more than merely „Hinduism“) - and its concept of “nirvana”. Do you exactly know what is meant by that? Non-Indian and Indian people have a different understanding of “nirvana”. Is it nothingness, nonentity? (That is the way how Western people understand “nirvana”.) What is it?
Are “affectance” and nothingness perhaps the same? And if so: why? Just because we are able to think the nothingness? Or is the reverse true?
If there is nothing, then there is also no “affectance”. If there is no “affectance”, then there is nothing. The former is true! But is the latter also true?
And do you always think that there is “affectance” everywhere and nothing else? Do you really always think that?
What do you think when you are anxious and don’t know the reason - the cause - for that fact? What or who “affects” you then? Is it the nothingness? And if so, then the nothingness also “affects”, but is it then really nothingness?
We can think the nothingness and the difference between subject and object. Is this difference the nothingness? Or is it even the “affectance”? Or both? Are they the same (see above) or at least similar? If so, then we can’t know anything of them because it is the definition - the linguistic convention or the lingusitic laws - of the word “nothing” to be nothing at all, and the noun for that is “nothingness”.
You can’t just brush aside our ability for thinking the nothingness and the subject/object dualism.
So James’ “RM:AO” has an objective character; the terms “rational metaphysics” and “affectance ontology” claim to be objective, and they are objective. But what about James himself? Is he a part of that objective issue? Is he not present when he argues objectively? And what about the nothingness?