the red tinted glasses

In my opinion, the “red-tinted glasses” metaphor in the chapter is stating that everyone has their own personal view and personal limits to what they see, what they believe and what they accept. This is all shaped by the way we were brought up and what we came to consider ‘normal’ and ‘usual’ and therefore it is different for everyone.

Everyone is born with their own set of “glasses”. Everyone has something that makes them perceive things in their own way even though in reality we are looking at the same thing. However that is only how we feel and generally speaking, we, as humans, do not base everything purely on how we feel like the empiricists. Nor are we like the rationalists and base everything on facts and our knowledge. Therefore I agree with Kant’s reasoning that in reality, the way we perceive things is due to a mixture of both and that everyone has their own “decisive factors”.

This can be applied to everyday life. For example, when looking at a piece of surrealist or abstract art everyone has a different view on it. This is based on how we interpret the piece of art and what we ‘see’ and using our knowledge we come to our conclusion.

I believe Kant was trying to tell everyone that there are basically two sides to everything. People should not base everything on how they feel or everything they ‘know’ because looks can be deceiving. What they feel might not be the whole truth, what they know might be fully wrong. However I think to truly know the “truth” and “reality” we have to not have any “glasses” at all, which is not exactly possible as everyone is bound to have a limit to what they believe in.