In the affirmative sentence ‘I am’, ‘I’ is the subject of the predicate ‘am’. ‘I’ the first singular personal pronoun and ‘am’ the present tense first person singular form of anomalous, finite, auxiliary verb ‘be’, where the verb ‘am’ indicates the action or the state of being or the condition of agency ‘I’.
The questions arise whether ‘I’ is the condition and ‘am’ the conditioned or ‘am’ is the condition and ‘I’ is the conditioned? Is the agency or subject ‘I’ conditioned by the action ‘am’ the condition or Is it the action or predicate ‘am’ conditioned by the agency ‘I’ the condition? Is the subject the condition and the predicate the conditioned or the predicate the condition and the subject the conditioned?
Grammatically it will be incorrect to say the ‘am’ is the condition and the ‘I’ is the conditioned, as no action or activity can condition its agency for the reason one must suppose a subject as cause of any action or activity without which no effect or predicate or action can be produced. It’s a grammatical rule a subject is the condition and a predicate is the conditioned. Grammatically subject is always independent and predicate is always depended to its subject.
However, since the verb ‘be’ here in the affirmation ‘I am’ is used as an intransitive verb where the verb does not take any object, philosophically thinking the opposite way is perhaps true and more rational: the ‘am’ is the condition and ‘I’ is the conditioned, for the reason that the being or the existence of the subject must be prior then its emerging or appearing as the subject or the agency which is none other than ‘am’ or ‘to be’. If it ‘is’ then only it will ‘be’. Hence, the deduction the ‘am’ which is ‘to be’ since is prior than ‘I’, therefore, ‘am’ is the condition and ‘I’ is the conditioned is equally rational and correct.
~Sw. Chidananda Tirtha