“What is clear to one man is not clear to another.”Voltaire · Dicționar filozofic · 1764 · Question à examiner
The obvious is just the familiar: a truth's clarity depends on the eye that sees it, not on the truth itself.
Voltaire attacks the notion that truth enforces itself through sheer clarity. Each person sees through the lens of upbringing, experience, and prejudice, so two minds can look at the same fact and see different things. The mechanism is psychological: what strikes us as obvious is often merely familiar. An argument that seems decisive to us may say nothing to another person, not because they are stupid but because they start from other premises. Tolerance begins here.
Voltaire teaches us that evidence is not a property of the fact, but of the mind looking at it. So the useful first move in a dispute is not to repeat your argument louder, but to ask: what premises is the other person starting from? If the premises differ, the same reasoning leads to opposite conclusions. Example: two neighbors argue about a fence. One believes his property starts at the fence; the other, at the tree. They are not really arguing about the fence, but about the map. Once you see this, the next question becomes: how do you notice the premises that are invisible to you?
Why it matters Useful in any debate: if the other person does not see what you see, the issue may be the premises, not their intelligence.