Almost Nothing Is Self-Evident

"It's just self-evident," fools say about things that in no way verify themselves, as self-evidence necessitates that one must rely on the very truth in question to deny or doubt that truth.  Very little is self-evident.  It is not self-evident, for example, that Earth will not suddenly become a volcanic wasteland with no warning, that there is not an invisible and malevolent entity just waiting several more moments before eating you, that killing every living thing is not morally obligatory and thus good, or that a number of other seemingly unlikely things are untrue.  Only things that result in contradictions if they are not true are self-evident, the same as being self-verifying.  By nature, this category of facts is very small.

Only logical axioms--which are far from all logical truths--and one's own conscious existence are self-evident.  They need only themselves (as well as reason in the case of recognizing one's own existence) to be proven.  All other things require these to already be at least indirectly grasped in order to even be understood, much less proven, disproven, or identified as unknowable given one's epistemological limitations.  This makes everything that stands atop logical axioms and the basic existence of one's own consciousness inherently less clear and thus less easy to demonstrate as one ventures further and further from the only truths that cannot be any other way without depending on other truths.

The existence of an external world of matter, the issue of free will, whether or not there are any moral obligations, the existence of an uncaused cause, and an enormous range of other ideas and truths are not obvious at all in themselves.  One must reason one's way to certain truths about them even if not all truths about everything can be known.  It might be obvious that some truths which are not self-evident are true after one has proven the prerequisite truths and intentionally reflected on the matter, but this only means that some things are clear in light of more foundational truths.  Very few things are as foundational as could be, and it is only this small class of truths that are evident in themselves.

In other words, nothing else has to be true for logical axioms and my own existence to be a part of reality.  Other truths follow from them or do not conflict with them.  All that is self-evident is that deductive reasoning without fallacies is inherently true, that there are some truths, and that one exists as a consciousness, alongside a few other truths like how two mutually exclusive concepts cannot both be true.  Plenty of other basic but vital philosophical facts follow from these, but even the ones closest to these utter foundations of epistemology are not evident in themselves.  If a truth or idea requires any other thing at all to be even slightly grasped in order to understand them, then it cannot be self-evident because it needs more than just itself to be either true or knowable.

All rationalists will have to realize most of these facts at some point in order to be a genuine rationalist in the first place.  However, the extreme importance of such things means one never truly leaves them behind, even if one does not focus on them in the same way as before.  All actual knowledge--that is, awareness of things that can actually be known as opposed to just assumed--is either of self-evident truths or that which logically follows from them or at least is consistent with them.  It is just that the only self-evident or philosophically obvious truths are so foundational that, despite being inescapably true, they are overlooked by most people who do not search for them.