Evidence

Use in the book

The poetic self-evidence fragment asks whether its language should reflect its poetic character. The separate following image makes a descent from rays of light more than mortal. Both formulations value how truth appears as well as what is asserted. In the moral passage, self-evidence belongs to touch rather than sight, and its opening qualification allows only as much evidence as that kind of thing permits. This prevents a simple demand for the same visual certainty in every domain. A later sequence associates orientation toward the true with a sound mind, and tendency toward the beautiful and evident with eminent minds; its needle image remains a fragment, not a completed theory of an intellectual compass.

Places to read

1. I, p. 470, entry 7, ¶1Self-evidence has something poetic and raises a question of language.
2. II, p. 688, entry 2, ¶1Moral self-evidence is figured as touch rather than sight.
3. II, p. 908, entry 1, ¶3Direction toward the true and evident is expressed through unfinished directional imagery.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses self-evidence to prevent the English evidentiary sense from dominating. Touch retains the physical comparison in tact; it is not reduced to social tact. The latter passage’s [Habitual] is a qualified rendering of damaged habituell[…].

Invidence

French: invidence.

Joubert tentatively proposes invidence for inward, intimate self-evidence: clarity without brilliance, constituted by ease of belief. The final “if that word may be used” qualifies the coinage itself. The English translation keeps the unusual word and the surrounding fragments rather than replacing it with a modern technical term. The description does not by itself establish that every easy belief is true.

Places to read: I, p. 149, entry 1, ¶1.