Brouwer’s Notion of ‘Egoicity’

Abstract

According to Brouwer’s ‘theory of the exodus of consciousness’, our experience includes ‘egoicity’, a distinct kind of feeling. In this paper, we (i) describe his phenomenology in order to (ii) explore and elaborate on the notion of egoic sensations. In the world of perception formed from sensations, some of them are, Brouwer claims, not completely separated or ‘estranged’ from the subject, which is to say they have a certain degree of egoicity. We claim this phenomenon can be explained in terms of the primordial state of consciousness from where the ‘exodus’ starts. Having undertaken the analysis and interpretation of Brouwer’s descriptions and examples of egoic sensations, we (iii) provide a formal account of egoicity based on Brouwer’s definition of its relation to estrangement, desire and fear. We show that the four terms can be modeled by a classical and a graded logical hexagon, giving the corresponding axiomatizations.