Assignment 2

Revisit the "red-tinted glasses" extended metaphor in 'Kant'. What is the meaning of it? How do these questions of perspective apply to your own life? Use examples from the novel and your life to illustrate your understanding of the "red-tinted glasses" metaphor/experiment.

In Chapter 25, Alberto Knox presents Sophie with a pair of red tinted glasses in order to clarify about Kant’s philosophy. During the experiment of the red tinted glasses, we understand how the colour red deceives Sophie’s sense and causes her eyes to believe that the world around her is red. The reason for this is that the glasses she wears limits the way she perceives the world and reality as it only alters how a single individual sees it. This explains the disparity between perception and reason and is also a method of telling us why Kant does not agree with the empiricists or the rationalists. What we perceive from our senses can be wrong due to limits, like the red colour of the glasses.

The rationalists who believe that the basis of human knowledge comes from our mind as ‘reason is a primary source of knowledge’, and that one forms knowledge and opinion by relying upon reason alone. On the other hand, empiricists believed that pure reasoning alone is not sufficient to obtain knowledge, but experience is also required, and that that all knowledge of the world comes from our senses and experience of the world. This can be proven to be false through the example of the “red-tinted glasses”. In this experiment, we are seeing the same world but now different through our eyes from without the glasses. We are capable of observe the world in many different ways, but that does not necessarily mean the world is as we see it.

From what I believe, our mind and feeling takes an important position when we see things around us as it determines what we actually see. I believe the way in which we perceive everything around us also incorporates the mind and our feelings. These two issue influences the way we see things as each and every one of us are different and experience different things through the process of life. Every one of us thinks in a unique approach as we all wear a personal pair of ‘glasses’.

In conclusion, I consider the metaphor of the “red-tinted glasses” just portrays the many different ways in which we perceive the world. Without either reasoning or experience human beings will not have the same views as each person would have a different pair of 'glasses' in which to view at certain thing. Both perception and senses should not be relied on as when one is to be left alone, we would be coming up with misleading conclusions and answers.