The meaning of the red-tinted glasses metaphor is that the way we view life is limited by how we perceive the world around us, in Knox’s words for Sophie, it ‘limit[s] the way you perceive things’. Our knowledge of the world comes from the ‘material of knowledge’ which we have perceived through our senses and the ‘form of knowledge’ which is limited by our perception of ‘time and space’.
I could not agree with Kant more.
When I was reading the part about how reasons governed our senses, immediately I thought about the Nazis. I can relate to what you are thinking, Anna. The story of Nazi Germany is a classic example of how dangerous it is to justify one’s actions based upon reason (innate ability) and influence other people’s perception of the world. Unfortunately, there are still people out there, some of them are scientists, who believe that one gender or certain races are more superior to another in terms of genetic make up or brain structure. They justify their beliefs by ‘scientific studies’ which, in Knox’s words, ‘their material of knowledge is conformed to their attribute of reasons’. As shown by this example:
Men Smarter than Women, Scientist claims
www.livescience.com/health/060908_brainy_men.html
I can also relate to what Knox said about ‘totality’ because I have always felt how small the space human beings occupy in the universe. The ‘time and space’ we perceive on planet Earth may not be the same as a Martian.
2 comments:
interesting examples of scientists and racial superiority.
However, how can we make our tinted glasses as colourless as possible when we dont even know we have them because we were born with them? (sophie didnt know about the glasses until alberto told her)
If we have never experienced them, we can theorize them like how concepts such as imaginary numbers were theorized. Rationalists can find answers this way.
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