Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and ThoughtLehrs, Ernst
Religion
Man or Matter: Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought
Lehrs, Ernst
Anthroposophy; Cosmology; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832
Considerations of this kind, and they alone, enable us also to draw
true comparisons between the different sense-organs. Take the organ of
hearing. Usually the ear is assumed to fill the same role in the field
of hearing as does the eye in the field of seeing. In fact the ear
corresponds to only one half of the eye; the other half must be looked
for in the larynx. In other words, the two parts of the eye are
represented in the realm of hearing by two separate organs, ear and
larynx. Speaking from the aspect of metamorphosis, the vital part of
our eye may be regarded as our 'light-ear'; the crystalline part, as
our 'light-larynx'. In order to come consciously to a perception of
sight we must 'listen' to the 'deeds and sufferings' of light, while at
the same time we meet them with the help of the 'speaking' of our inner
light. Something similar holds good for hearing. In fact, observation
reveals that we take in no impression of hearing unless we accompany it
with an activity of our larynx, even though a silent one. The
significance of this fact for the total function of hearing will occupy
us more fully later.
*
Our insight into the polar nature of visual activity will enable us now
to link the external interplay of Light and Dark - to which the
physical colours owe their existence - to that play of forces which we
ourselves set in motion when our eye meets the world of colours in
their polar differentiation.
We established earlier that in the cold colours the role of darkness
belongs to the pole of levity or negative density, and the role of
lightness to the pole of gravity or positive density, whereas in the
case of the warm colours the roles are reversed. Let us now unite with
this the insight we have meanwhile gained into the two kinds of
activity in seeing - the receptive, 'left-eyed' and the radiating,
'right-eyed' - which mediate to us the experience of the positive or
negative density of space spread out before our eyes. Taking together
the results of outer and inner observation, we can express the polarity
ruling in the realm of colour as follows.
If lightness and darkness as elements of colour, meet us in such a way
that lightness, by reason of its positive density, calls forth
'left-eyed' activity, and darkness, by reason of its negative density,
'right-eyed' activity, then our soul receives the impression of the
colour blue and colours related to blue. If lightness and darkness meet
us so that we see the former in a 'right-eyed', and the latter in a
'left-eyed' way, then we experience this as the presence of yellow and
the colours related to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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