Monday, October 5, 2009

Perceptions

So I was writing a paper tonight about Nietzsche and the way that words are perceived and understood in the world. I use an example from my childhood. It's a little weird to understand but can raise a lot of interesting questions and points so I thought I'd share an excerpt from my paper with you. Let me know what you think and if it made sense. Here goes:

(Not my Photo)
As I was trying to understand this concept it reminded me of some ideas I had when I was probably fourteen years old. I was very interested in the way in which people see things- their sense of vision and how that is interpreted and expressed to each other. I had recently done a career research paper on ophthalmologists and read how they examined the eyes and performed eye surgeries. In my research I learned how one actually is able to see things, the image being translated in the eye and then sent as a visual electric stimulus to the brain. At one point I began to wonder if everyone saw the world exactly as I did. For example, say I am looking at the sky and I see the color “blue” as signified by its hue, saturation, and brightness, and a friend of mine is also looking at the sky and seeing what he calls “blue.” I wondered if I were to switch consciousness with him in some way so that I could see out his eyes yet translate the color with my own brain would I still identify that color as “blue” or would it suddenly appear to have a different hue, saturation, and brightness so that I would call it turquoise or even green. As a fourteen year old I came to terms with the fact that I would probably never know if my theory was true, but I never forgot how intriguing it was to try to understand another’s perceptions of reality. I think this is what Nietzsche is trying to express.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Rachel Leslie said...

So why do we ever try? Isn't there anything in common, shared between people? sigh. No wonder Nietzsche went mad.

Charles Donaldson said...

Nietzsche does not expect us to be able to live in a reality where everything is metaphor and mankind cannot communicate with each other. If I wanted to express the beauty of the sky to my friend we would still need to use the word and metaphor “blue” and I we deceive ourselves into believing that we are both seeing the exact same color in order to understand and communicate.