"All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren't noticing, which makes you see something that isn't even visible"
About this Quote
Strauss turns “thinking” into a chain reaction that begins with the smallest, almost embarrassing spark: noticing. Not reasoning from first principles, not compiling evidence, just catching a detail that most people glide past. The line is disarmingly modest at the start, then quietly radical in where it ends. If real thought is triggered by the noticeable, it means the mind is less a fortress of logic than a responsive instrument, tuned to anomalies, tensions, and the stray fact that refuses to fit.
The structure matters. Each clause pushes you from perception to re-perception to something like insight: first you see what’s there, then you see what your habits have been hiding, then you “see” what isn’t visible at all. Strauss is smuggling in a theory of interpretation. The “invisible” isn’t mystical; it’s the organizing principle, the assumption, the motive, the political or philosophical constraint that can’t be pointed at directly but shapes everything you can point at. It’s also a sly defense of reading between the lines, a signature Straussian move in a century where writers often had reasons to conceal what they meant.
Context sharpens the edge. Strauss wrote in the shadow of totalitarianism and mass ideology, suspicious of modern social science’s pretense that everything important can be measured and made explicit. His subtext: the most consequential truths in politics and philosophy are often indirect, protected, or accessible only to readers trained to notice what looks like a mere detail. Thinking, here, is the disciplined art of letting the obvious lead you to what power, convention, or your own complacency has rendered unseen.
The structure matters. Each clause pushes you from perception to re-perception to something like insight: first you see what’s there, then you see what your habits have been hiding, then you “see” what isn’t visible at all. Strauss is smuggling in a theory of interpretation. The “invisible” isn’t mystical; it’s the organizing principle, the assumption, the motive, the political or philosophical constraint that can’t be pointed at directly but shapes everything you can point at. It’s also a sly defense of reading between the lines, a signature Straussian move in a century where writers often had reasons to conceal what they meant.
Context sharpens the edge. Strauss wrote in the shadow of totalitarianism and mass ideology, suspicious of modern social science’s pretense that everything important can be measured and made explicit. His subtext: the most consequential truths in politics and philosophy are often indirect, protected, or accessible only to readers trained to notice what looks like a mere detail. Thinking, here, is the disciplined art of letting the obvious lead you to what power, convention, or your own complacency has rendered unseen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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