Revisit the "red-tinted glasses" extended metaphor in Chapter 25 ('Kant'). What's 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.
Alberto Knox used the ‘red-tinted glasses’ metaphor to show Sophie that people’s view of the world is affected by the experiences and the way the think and perceive the world. During the childhood of any person, they begin to acquire memories and it is with those memories with which they shape into a pair of glasses through which they view the world. For example if a child was bitten and chased by a dog, they would learn to see dogs as something evil and dangerous. In this example the child has formed a ‘dogs are bad’ glasses for him to see the world in.
In chapter 25 of Sophie’s World, we can see that Sophie during the period that Sophie had her glasses on that everything she could see with her eyes had a reddish tinge to it, once she takes it off her vision returns to normal. This experiment leads Sophie to realize that we see the world as it is from our own perspective and values. This experiment however also hints at the weakness and the flaws of the way the Empiricists think as the red tinted glasses have altered the way Sophie perceives the world yet her (Rationalist) thinking reasons that her senses are only clouded because she is seeing the world she has associated with through her experiences. Another fault of thinking with our experiences and senses is that we ourselves only have limited senses, we humans are only able to hear, feel, see, smell and taste. It is because of our senses and the receptors of these senses that we are limited in our ability to perceive the world, we can only see and understand our 3 dimension along with time, although it is not said in the book I would think that the rim of the glasses would be a metaphor for the edge and the limit that can be perceived with just our senses. Thinking with just logic and reason does have its disadvantages as well. The human mind is limited in its complexity, we cannot understand or reason with things we have never known about, nor can we think about things on a scale far greater than anything we have associated ourselves with.
In this chapter we are explained the thought that Kant put into merging the two contrasting way of thinking from the Rationalists and Empiricists. The former uses logic and reason to see the world as it is, with the latter basing the world and how it appears to us with the five senses of our body and our experience with it. I think what Alberto is trying to say is that Kant understood that both ways of thinking had their own points yet also had faults. We realize that neither reason nor thought is the correct way to see the world, hence parts of both ways of thinking should be taken into account of.
In conclusion, Kant’s story is meant to tell us how there is more than one way of perceiving the world, instead we can perceive the world in at least two or more ways. This is hinted by the usage of glasses instead of a monocle. By having more than one way of seeing the world we are in we can see things with a much more easily a clearer picture. Using the example of the pitcher and water, by just limiting our way of thinking to one narrow path we have to try and see the world in the moving water, with a pitcher containing the water we can easily examine the water. By looking at the world from two different view points, decisions about what we see can be perceived easily this is in a way similar to how we use our pair of eyes to judge distance.
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