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 GCSE Psychology, I was taught that sensation refers to the physical stimulation of the sensory receptors, in other words, our merely responding to the things that happen around us. Perception on the hand refers to the process of interpreting, organising and elaborating on sensory information. This requires our deeper understanding of the things that we see. In a way, I believe the ‘red-tinted glasses’ is portrayed as a filter. It is the difference from our being able to respond to and our understanding of things. With the glasses on, we may see the world in one perspective, but with them off we may have a completely different idea.
Hume and the empiricists mention that ‘all our knowledge of the world comes from our sensations’. I do not agree with them. The rationalists on the other hand believe that ‘the basis for all human knowledge lay in the mind.’ I do not fully agree with this either. Merely using our senses to view things can lead to stereotyping and only using our minds may not be enough to perceive things fairly. For example, many people portray those with dark coloured skin as ‘dangerous’ or ‘evil’. Many white people and Asians commit terrible crimes too, yet majority of the population still look down upon the people with dark skin. Why is this? They have not thought about the different perspectives and variables that may lead to such discrimination. I believe apart from sensation, our mind, experiences and social background (our age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) also affects our knowledge of the world.
My family and I once went to the cinema to watch a movie shown three dimensionally. The movie was not actually 3D though, we wore special glasses and the images were designed so that with the glasses on, the images appear to be 3D. We soon learnt that when we take the glasses off, the images are 2D and when we have them on, they appear 3D. This is an example of how our mind and previous experience affect our perspective of things. We know that the images on the screen are not actually 3D and it is the way it is designed and the glasses that make it seem 3D. This example backs up Alberto’s ‘red-tinted glasses’ experiment: with the red glasses on, Sophie saw the world in a completely different perspective and we learn that ‘you cannot say the world is red even though you conceive it as being so’. My 3D example also supports his point that ‘everything you see is part of the world around you, but how you see it is determined by the glasses you are wearing.’ In simpler words, there are ‘decisive factors that determine how we perceive the world around us’, just like the rationalists mentioned.
To conclude, I believe the whole idea of the metaphor in this chapter is to suggest how humans perceive from more than one point of view. As well as our senses, ‘time’ and ‘space’ like Kant suggested, also alters the way in which we our minds and experiences interpret the world. Just like Kant’s example of ‘pouring water into a class pitcher’ and how the water adapts itself to the pitcher’s form, he illustrates that our perceptions adapt themselves to our ‘forms of intuition’. Basically, from this metaphor we learn that both our senses and experiences are a necessity for us to determine things, so we do not end up seeing things from a biased view. We cannot merely judge a book by its cover.
2 comments:
This is a fabulous piece of writing.You see your way through with excellent examples and some very cogent thinking,written personally with exdamples drawn fromm your life.As you say,our experiences and our senses help us to dtermine things. What else do we use? Will all this stop us from being biased?
Our knowledge - what we already know, what we were taught, and our social and cultural backgrounds also affects our perception of things. For example, we may be told that the world was created by God. But others may be taught that it all started with the Big Bang.
Culture is another variable that affects the way we perceive. In Gweilo for instance, Martin Booth and the Chinese believed that the cause of the earthquake was due to the Chinese God 'Yen Lo' who got 'angry' and that 'burning some money' would 'make him happy' and stop the earthquake. Most people however, know that the earthquake occurs due to the movements of tectonic plates. This example shows how superstition and cultural believes may affect our perception.
In a way, our points are always biased because most people are satisfied with one or two explanations of things and rarely go further and more in depth to understand something. However, whether we are biased also depends on how others see our points. Those who agree with you might not think you are biased, and those who don't agree might think we are. But if we see the situation from every perspective, it may be possible to not be biased.
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