Perception of the world - red-tinted glasses

The metaphor/experiment of the “red-tinted glasses” is used to explain Kant’s idea of how certain conditions in the human mind affect our conception of the world. Our sense perceptions provide us with our knowledge of the world. However, we are limited to the conclusions of the world which we arrive at with just our sense perceptions because our minds are innately functioned in a way that influences the way we apprehend the world.

Basically in the novel, the glasses limit Sophie from seeing the true colours of the world. The glasses are functioned to make everything look like the shades of red and if Sophie wore those glasses since the day she was born and never took them off, then she would be convinced that the world is actually coloured with the shades of red. In reality, the world as we know it is not the shades of red. The glasses apply a certain condition to our sensory perception which controls the way we see the world. This is precisely what our minds do.

The “red-tinted glasses” is a metaphor which compares it with the way our minds work. The fact that our minds have certain conditions, which influence how we experience the world, is innate, like the way the glasses influence how we see the world as being red from the moment you wear it. Rationalists and empiricists’ ideas are valid up to an extent in the meaning of this metaphor. The empiricists believed that our senses determined all our knowledge of the world and the rationalists believed that reason explained all of our knowledge. The question of whether the world is exactly as we perceive it, or it is the way it appears to our reason is answered through the metaphor. It points out that ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ were both important in our conception of the world and that there is no definite answer because we will never know how the world is really like if all we have is our senses. As the metaphor conveys, our senses or reasons are influenced by “decisive factors” in the human mind which determine how we perceive the world.

This question of perspective can be applied to the professional function of canon digital cameras, which is changing the colour of the actual object into any custom colour. If I take a photo of a standard HK taxi and change the red colour to white, and show it to somebody who knows nothing about HK then they would probably be convinced that taxis in HK are white. This is because they don’t have the true/real knowledge of taxis in HK (excluding the ability to research it) and they trust their sense perception of it being white.

In conclusion, we can conceive the world anyway we like through our senses and we rely on it so much that we unconsciously believe that what we sense is the reality of the world. However, Kant’s idea and the “red-tinted glasses” metaphor is there to confirm to us that our sense perceptions and reason may not be the reality and that it is not completely reliable when we want to discuss how the world is truly like. I feel that we have our sense perceptions and reasons in order to create the picture of the world we live in and it is the only perception we can depend on when thinking about the looks of the world.