Abstract

The central place which the concept of evidence or self-evidence has in Husserl’s philosophy puts him fully in the rationalist tradition. One of the criticisms which has been leveled against this tradition from several sides is that from the time of Descartes at least, it has conceived of consciousness solely as an observer of the world and not as a participant in it. In one fashion or another this tradition treats truth as founded on evidence for consciousness, and this leads to such problems as Cartesian dualism with its “ghost in the machine,” or solipsism, either mundane or transcendental. Such philosophy, it is charged, fails to acknowledge the interactive component of human experience. According to this view, Husserl’s particular mistake is to make visual perception the only paradigm of evidence, and therefore, of all experience of things as they truly are.