Essay- “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.”

7.) “We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.” Discuss this claim in relation to at least two ways of knowing.

The claim of “we see and understand things not as they are but as we are” is a true statement based on the usage of perception and emotion to discover what are believed truths are. Perception’s downfall is that we do not know what other people see and fell and thus it is hard for us to come to the same underlining truths between each other. I know what the color red is yet someone else may see the red as something else. Emotion’s downfall is that it affects our known judgments. Judgment is our raw believed truth on what is morally right and wrong based on the influenced we gained through our life. These ways of knowing are seen as a way to describe how we “belief” what are the “truths” in life.

Perception is based off our past and present biases. We start off as small young children who are unknowledgeable. The most common example of how a child learns through perception is when the child would accidently touch a hot pan or cooking pot and learns that touching this pot is hot and dangerous. This can be related to Plato’s Cave. The people sitting on the chairs can only see the shadows on the cave’s wall. In connecting this to the burning of the child’s hand, the hot pot resembles the shadows on the wall and the child becomes enlightened when he touches the pot and thus the child essentially leaves the cave. Another tie to Plato’s Cave is in the reading of Brave New World. In the book the children go through shock treatments when they are first trying to learn new things in the world. This new things they are trying to learn are books and flowers but when the go over to look at them the floor would electrocute them. They “learn” that the books and flowers are bad and thus they stay away from them.