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The philosophical idea of Kant’s Spectacles, discussed by Adrian Moore on this episode of Philsophy Bites, is usefully summarized by interviewer Nigel Warburton this way: “[For] Kant, reality is not really accessible to us. What is accessible is the perceptual apparatus that we are endowed with, which is like a pair of spectacles. If the spectacles have a rose tint, everything we perceive necessarily has a rose tint. Space and time are like the colors we take to be out there because of our perceptual apparatus, rather than something independent of us.” A more in-depth explanation (including a reference to The Matrix) here.
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“What I want to be able to say, in the end, is that friendship is incredibly valuable in life, and in fact is not just valuable but absolutely necessary—that you can’t live without it—but that its value, distinct as it is, is not the “values” that our moral behavior exhibits or expresses. A whole other set of values—which we have tended to neglect in philosophy—is involved in friendship, and I believe these [neglected] values are also involved in the arts and in our attitudes towards the arts. To put it very bluntly and very roughly, the values of morality are values that depend on our commonalities: the similarities we have among other people and the similarities we want to create among us. The values of friendship are exactly the opposite: they are the values that distinguish us from one another, that make us distinct and interesting individuals, the values that differentiate one person from another.” Princeton Professor Alexander Nehamas speaking on my favorite podcast Philiosophy Bites draws parallels between friendship and the arts and aligns friendship with the individual, opposing it to morality, which is a common (or shared) state. In other words, books make friends, but not every book will make any friend. However, despite the fact that we are disinclined to read some books, and we may not even be friendly with someone who would, morality dictates that we should accept and respect them regardless.
