Prompt #4

Elizabeth Piatt

Mrs. Wilhelmus

AP English Language

30 July 2013

Red-Tinted Glasses

            The red-tinted glass experiment is a visual way to explain Immanuel Kant’s theory about how one’s reasoning affects how one see’s the world compared to others. Before Sophie put on the red- tinted glasses everything around her looked as it always had. After Sophie put on the red-tinted glasses the world around her looked the same except for one difference. The colors she saw before were altered by the glasses to look like shades of pink and red, but the world around her stayed the same.

            I found the red-tinted glasses experiment very interesting. It is a simple way to show how two different people can see the same world but in different ways. The questions of perspective apply to my life because I always wondered if other people see the world differently than I do. Kant says that we can not know exactly what the world is like ‘in itself’ but only what it looks like in our minds or others. “We can only know how things ‘appear’ to us,” (page 324). This statement raises many philosophical questions. How can the world look different to me than to others? I often ask myself this question because it is interesting to think about how others might see the world differently and why.

            The red-tinted gasses experiment was very interesting to me. It is a way to show how the world is different in everyone’s eyes even if we don’t know it. The idea of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes is truly enlightening.