Phenomenology of direct evidence (self-evidence)

pp. 80-109

in: Herbert Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1975

Abstract

One of the none too numerous tenets shared by all phenomenologists is the principle that intuitive experience (Anschauung) constitutes the ultimate basis for the justification of all our concepts and beliefs. As the editorial preface to the first volume of the phenomenological yearbook put it in 1913: "It is not a system that the editors have in common.… What unites them is rather the common conviction that only by a return to the primal sources of intuitive experiences and to the insights into essential structures ("Wesenseinsich-ten") which can be derived from it shall we be able to utilize the great traditions of philosophy with their concepts and problems, and that only in this way will it be possible to clarify the concepts intuitively, to reformulate the problems on an intuitive basis and thus, ultimately, to solve them, at least in principle." ¹ Thus, as do other forms of intuitionism, phenomenology adopts as its final test of truth the direct evidence or self-evidence of the intuitive data.