Have you ever tried to imagine a world that is perfect & flawless in every way possible? That doesn’t know the meaning of destruction, death, or discrimination? If such world exists, it exists in a vision that is clean, pure and pristine; it exists through the lenses of a perfect pair of glasses; it exists without cracks, bends or any else that might falter our vision even the slightest. The world would be a complete union of empiricism and rationalism, with our thoughts being a fusion of both human knowledge and our senses.
However, a world as such does not exist; we all do not look through the world from the same pair of polished glasses. We choose our own path in life, deciding what kind of lenses we want to perceive the world through. The question is: is this a good thing or a bad thing? Would you rather live in a perfect world, where everyone had the same opinion about everything? Or a world where thought and reason differed from person to person?
This extended metaphor no doubt created many new questions in my mind, along with the ones I had before. If Sophie looks through red-tinted glasses, she will see everything in ‘crimson…pink’, no matter where she is. These glasses ‘limit the way you perceive reality’- everything in Sophie’s world is limited to these colours when her glasses are on. But when someone else is seeing the same things she is, only with different coloured lenses, does that mean their reality isn’t the same as hers? Or is it the same, just perceived differently?
What Gaarder is really giving us is a union of the empiricists & rationalists; a fusion of their ideas; where the rationalists forgot about the ‘importance of experience’, the empiricists refused to let their minds influence them. A mix of these ideas creates a balanced and a very realistic view on how we see the world. Kant agrees with neither, but uses their fundamental ideas as the base of his own.
As we come into this world, one thing that we instantly notice is the fact that everyone is different; different in the way they look at the world. The very idea of having different perspectives is what creates the individuality in humans. It would frustrate me to no end if I wasn’t able to argue with anyone because they had an opinion that differed from mine. Going back to our faculty of wondering, would it even be possible to imagine or wonder if we all had fixed and universal viewpoints on everything? Wondering wouldn’t exist if we all looked at the world through the lenses of a perfect pair of glasses. We wouldn’t have an imagination; it would just be the same as everyone else’s.
If the world was indeed seen as flawless from an immaculate vision, then it would be the end of individuality.
2 comments:
VERY VERY good piece. Impressive. Only thing, you need to relate more to sophies world and the paragraph. Awesome job otherwise!
I think what you've written completely makes sense, but you should relate to Sophie's World a little bit more.
What exactly do you mean when you said that some people look at the world through polished glasses and some through unpolished?
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