The glasses of reason

In ‘Kant’, the “red-tinted glasses” is a symbol of the limitation of perception; the glasses serve as the “conditions” in our mind, in which we experience the world. Immanuel Kant believed that although we saw the world using our senses, our cognition, or reason, is the ‘glasses’ that limit the way we perceive reality. However, Sophie also says that everything she sees is “exactly the same as before, except that it’s all red”. Although we perceive that the world is red due to the coloured lenses, we know that it is simply due to these glasses that the world is red, in reality it is not. Here it is revealed to us that there are always two different points of view in any given situation.

One example is the contradiction between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists believed reason was innate and all knowledge relies on our cognitive processes; the sensory world was unreliable. In contrast, empiricists believed that there was nothing in the mind that has not been experienced by the senses first. Kant on the other hand, believed that all sensory information would have to conform through reason. This sensory information can be seen as water being poured into a ‘glass pitcher’ – the water adapts into the form of the pitcher, which is our reason. This illustrates how ‘things conform to the mind’, the same way that ‘the mind can conform to things’, as shown when our vision is filtered by the tinted glasses

In a sense, Kant had combined both the views of the rationalists and the empiricists, whilst they themselves had been forming their own philosophical theories based on their own ways of perception. In effect, they were wearing their own tinted glasses and looking at the world. This, I believe, gives way to an individual’s personal beliefs – each person had their own tinted glasses to perceive the world in, and this mode of perception was innate and develops through experience and social circumstances. It is these ‘glasses’ that everyone wears, that gives personal basis for how we perceive other people (such as when forming impressions or stereotyping). Kant also states that we cannot take off these “glasses of reason”, thus we all hold distinct, individual views on the world around us.

An example of the different perspectives that lie within people is a recent encounter with an uncle of mine. Upon answering his question on why I was so tanned with accounts of beach trips this summer, he looked puzzled. I assumed that he moved to London in his twenties, and had a childhood during a period of time when most Chinese in Hong Kong were impoverished and had no time or resources for leisurely activities such as beach trips. Therefore I assumed again that it must have been a long time ago that he sunbathed. With these in mind, he must have been confused of my situation because of the lack of experience – or, in Kant’s terms, lack of sensory material – to process the ideas in his mind. In a sense, he had the glass pitcher but not enough water. However, with my assumptions, I am also looking through tinted glasses, as he is but in a different colour. We hold different views on how I got tanned due to the contrasting experiences we had growing up.