  The Ego alone has direct access to the given, that is, to the raw  materials of the existent which are presented to consciousness with  an immediacy at once inescapable and irreducible. The Ego is singular in that, from its own standpoint, it is unique. But in an act of  self-reflection, through grasping (in Weyl’s words) “what I am  for myself”, the Ego comes to recognize that it has a  function, namely as “conscious-existing carrier of the world of phenomena.” It is then but a short step for the Ego to transcend its singularity through the act of defining an  “ego” to be an entity performing that same function  for itself. That is, an ego is precisely what I am for  myself (in other words, what the Ego is for itself)—again a  “conscious-existing carrier of the world of  phenomena”—and yet other than myself.  “Thou” is the term the Ego uses to address, and so to  identify, an ego in this sense. “Thou” is thus the Ego  generalized, the Ego refracted through itself. The Ego grasps that it exists within a world of Thous, that is, within a world of other Egos similar to itself. While the Ego has, of necessity, no direct access  to any Thou, it can, through analogy and empathy, grasp what it is to be Thou, a conscious being like oneself. By that very fact the Ego  recognizes in the Thou the same luminosity it sees in itself.