In chapter 25, Alberto does an experiment in which Sophie puts on a pair of "red tinted glasses". Obviously, the room she was in becomes coloured in shades of red. This was done to show how the glasses limited Sophie's vision of the world around her as we are all limited by the "glasses of reason". Sophie learnt early about he rationalists (such as Descartes and Spinoza) and the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley and Hume). Rationalists believed that the basis of human knowledge layed in the mind and "shut their eyes" as well as their senses off from the world. Empiricists on the other hand believed that all the knowledge from the world was proceeded from our senses and denied reason. When Sophie puts on the red tinted glasses, she senses the room around her as being in shades of red but her reason tells her that she is just looking through a red filter and that the room is actually perfectly normal. This demonstrates how Kant agreed with both the Rationalists and the Empiricists as Sophie was able to sense the world around her being in shades of red but her reason told her otherwise and the truth.
I agree with Kant in that the way we percieve things incorporates both our senses and our mind. However, I also think that everybody in the world is wearing many pairs of glasses to the way they view certain things, ideas and events. One example would be racial stereotyping. Some people view other races as inferior and unimportant and this belief is caused by the "racial glasses" that they are wearing. In this case their upbringing or ideas/events that caused them to think like this would be the optician whom made the glasses to be fitted on the individual. In reality of course, and individual would be wearing many pairs of filtering glasses that would limit the way in which they percieve things.
To conclude, I believe that the experiment was a good way to show Sophie the flaws of both the Rationalists and the Empiricists and that we need both our senses and reasoning to completely understand the world we live in eventhough we may never completely remove all our filters.
I was going to post only one question in response to the assignment but feared getting in trouble so I did not. This could also be another example of how my "glasses" have limited my perceptions in that posting only one question in response would get me in trouble. Anyway, here is what I was going to ask:
"Why do the glasses HAVE to filter your view/perception of the world......if your eyesight is poor but the lens is correct, could the glasses not steer you in the right direction and clear up your vision of the world around you?"
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"Why do the glasses HAVE to filter your view/perception of the world......if your eyesight is poor but the lens is correct, could the glasses not steer you in the right direction and clear up your vision of the world around you?"
Great question, this highlights one of the important points of philosophy; to think of a situation in more than one way.
If one's 'eyesight' was poor, it would mean his perception of the world around him would be poor. His upbringing could perhaps alter and improve his perception but we are unsure why his perception is so poor. However, I do believe that in some cases, the upbringing of a person can 'improve' their perception of ideas, one example could be autistic or other children with special psychological handicaps who interact with people differently perhaps because of malfunctions with their senses.
It is good to see something new brought up in your post unlike the typical 'Explanation of Red Tinted Glasses, What is an empiricist, What is a rationalist, What Kant thought' response.
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