Sensual-moral effect of color

Colour circle, drawing by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The sensual-moral effect of color is described in "Zur Farbenlehre" (On the Theory of Colour), published by Goethe in 1810. Goethe shows there how every perception of color is accompanied by a quite characteristic, by no means accidental undertone of feeling, which is initially experienced only very subliminally, but can be brought more clearly into consciousness by increased attention. For this purpose, however, it must be separated from the purely personally conditioned and often much more prominent sympathy and antipathy that one feels for a certain color. This is best achieved when one exposes oneself to the pure color effect out of a completely conscious willful decision and fades out all other, disturbing external and internal influences.

„To feel these individual, significant effects completely, one must surround the eye completely with a color, e.g. be in a monochromatic room, look through a colored glass. One then identifies with the color; it harmonizes the eye and mind with itself.“

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: On the Theory of Color, § 763

Although this fine undertone of the externally perceived color can only be experienced subjectively inwardly mentally by the observer, it nevertheless does not depend on the observer's personal idiosyncrasy and insofar has at the same time an objective character. Certain color combinations arouse quite specific mental effects. These are of decisive importance for the artistic handling of color.

„Since color occupies such a high place in the series of primordial natural phenomena, filling the simple circle allotted to it with decided variety, we shall not be surprised to learn that it affects the sense of the eye, to which it is especially adapted, and through its mediation on the mind in its most general elementary phenomena, without reference to the nature or form of a material, on the surface of which we perceive it, it produces individually a specific, in combination a partly harmonious, partly characteristic, often also inharmonious, but always a decisive and significant effect, which is directly connected to the moral. Therefore color, considered as an element of art, can be used for the highest aesthetic purposes.“

– Goethe: On the Theory of Color, § 758

The actual perception of color and the accompanying emotional undertone are inseparably connected and arise as a whole from the essence of the respective color.

„Goethe starts from the physiological colors; I have shown you this when I characterized his way of coming to knowledge by other methods of investigation than the present methods of investigation. Then, however, his whole approach culminates in the chapter which he called "Sensual-moral effect of color". There Goethe goes, so to speak, directly from the physical into the spiritual, and he then characterizes the whole spectrum of colors with an extraordinary accuracy. He characterizes the impression that is experienced; it is, after all, something that is experienced quite objectively. Even if it is experienced in the subject, it is nevertheless something thoroughly objectively experienced in the subject, the impression which, let us say, the colors situated towards the warm side of the spectrum make, red, yellow. He describes them in their activity, how they, so to speak, have an exciting or stimulating effect on man. And he describes how then the colors which are situated towards the cold side have a stimulating effect, incite to devotion; and he describes how the green in the middle has a balancing effect.

So, in a sense, he is describing a spectrum of feelings. And it is interesting to visualize, how a soul-differentiated immediately jumps out of the ordered physical way of looking at things. Whoever understands such a course of investigation comes to the following results. He says to himself: The individual colors of the spectrum stand before us, they are experienced as entities which appear to be quite separate from man. In the ordinary perception of life we quite naturally and justifiably attach the greatest importance to directly grasping this objective element, let us say in the red, in the yellow. But there is an undertone everywhere. If we look at the immediate experience, it can only be separated in abstraction from that which is a so-called experience of the red nuance and the blue nuance, separated from the human being externally, in an objective sense; It is an abstract separation from that which is also directly experienced in the act of seeing, but which is only struck, which is, so to speak, experienced in a quiet undertone, but which can never remain away, so that in this field one can only look at it purely physically, if one first abstracts that which is experienced mentally from the physical.

So we have first the outer spectrum, and we have at this outer spectrum the undertone of the mental experiences. So we stand with our senses, with the eye, opposite the outer world, and we cannot adjust the eye in any other way than that mostly, even if often even unconsciously or subconsciously, soul experience runs along with it. We call what is experienced through the eye sensation. We are now accustomed, my dear present ones, to call that which is experienced at the sensation, which is experienced soulishly - at which a stimulus, which originates from the objectively spread out, presents itself as sensation - the subjective. But you see from the way in which I have just presented this, following Goethe, that we can, so to speak, set up a counter-spectrum, a soul counter-spectrum, which can be brought into parallel quite exactly with the outer optical spectrum.“ (Lit.:GA 73a, p. 254ff)

The "sensual-moral effect of color" described by Goethe can contribute to a better understanding of what the clairvoyant experiences, for example, imaginatively as color qualities of the aura.

„We can set up a spectrum of differentiated feelings: exciting, stimulating, balancing, devotional, and so on. If we look outward, we see the yellow; we sense from it as an undertone the stimulating, that which, as it were, actively acts upon us from the outside. What is the situation with the spiritual experience? This spiritual experience comes, as it were, from our inner being towards the outer world. But let us assume that we would be able to record exactly what we have experienced in the red, the yellow, the green, the blue, the violet. Let us assume that we would be able to record the feelings in a differentiated way so that we have a spectrum of feelings inside, like we have the usual optical spectrum from the outside. If we now imagine that from the outside the red, yellow, green, blue, violet, i.e. the objective, ignite the undertones of excitement, stimulation, compensation, devotion, we thus see it, so to speak, as something accompanying the outer appearances. Would it then be something so absurd to assume that also from within that could happen, which otherwise is the basis of this spectrum of feelings without our intervention from the outside? Would it be something so absurd that now the spectrum of feelings would be there inside and from it would spring forth in the experience of man the spectrum of colors which is now grasped in inner images? Just as otherwise the color spectrum is there and the inner emotional experiences are added by our being present, so it could also be that the emotional experiences, which can be represented in the differentiated spectrum, would be regarded as the objective, the inwardly located objective, and now jumps out as an undertone that which can now be compared with the objective color spectrum.

Now spiritual science claims nothing else than that a method is possible where what I have now presented to you as a postulate is really experienced [inwardly] as from the outer experience where the objective spectrum is there and, as it were, the subjective spectrum of feelings is drawn as a veil over the objective spectrum. In the same way, the spectrum of feelings can now be experienced inwardly, which is now followed by the experience of color. This can really be experienced, and it underlies what I characterized yesterday more abstractly as the imagination. That which is a phenomenon spread out in space, an outer phenomenon, can also be brought out of the human being as an inner phenomenon. And as the outer phenomenon dilutes towards us in cognition, so the inner experience condenses by being taken up by the consciousness unconsciously developed in us - as I indicated yesterday.

It is only necessary to be clear, my dear audience, that what appears in the spiritual science meant here are by no means nebulous fantasies, as are usually the results of some reveries known as "mystical world views". What is meant here as anthroposophical spiritual science is based on experiences which one does not have otherwise, which must first be developed, but which can be grasped in absolutely clear terms, which can be followed everywhere with absolutely clear terms.

One can therefore say that Goethe depicted the objectively external in the same way as a person who is half instinctively aware: There is an inner counter-image of what he describes externally; there is an inner view to the external view.

- Once one has found one's way into this train of thought, and if, secondly, one has made an effort in the direction indicated yesterday to really experience something like what I have now indicated, namely, to let that which is differentiated emotional life brighten up into imaginations which may then be addressed with the same words with which one describes the outer phenomena - if one has risen to these things, then one is offered the prospect of a comprehension of man which is precisely missing in the modern scientific views. How could one arrive at a view of man if one artificially separates everything that occurs in man's intercourse with the world, if one only wants to look outward and not inward at all? This, and nothing else, is ultimately what is again and again raised from the scientific side as an accusation against spiritual science, that it does not proceed scientifically. This is a prejudice that has arisen because from the outset only that which is separated from the human being is regarded as scientific observation, and no attention is paid to the undertones that characterize the human part. In this way one cannot find the transition to what man actually experiences in his inner being. The colors that I am referring to now, which emerge from the emotional spectrum just as the emotional spectrum emerges from the outer objective spectrum, these colors are experienced in imaginative viewing, and they form the mediation for spiritually recognizing the supersensible just as the outer spectral colors form the mediation for recognizing the outer sensory-physical. One could say that the surfaces of the outer bodies reveal themselves in the ordinary spectral colors. If I now express myself in a somewhat strange, seemingly paradoxical way, I would have to say: the surfaces of the spiritual - of course, every sensible person will know what I mean, that I therefore do not mean any sphere when I speak of a spiritual -, the surfaces of the spiritual, they express themselves in those colors which are evoked in the imagination from the spectrum of feelings. Instead of pursuing this thought first and saying to oneself, if the outer nature is just as it is, then also the other looking must be possible, then one must try to come to this looking - instead of saying this to oneself, thus to really draw the consequence from an outer view of nature, the opponents are much more concerned with pouring scorn and derision on what is called the human aura, which is nothing else than just that which is brought to the inner perceiving, in another field, as here in the field of the spectrum of feelings.“ (Lit.:GA 73a, p. 256ff)

Literature

• Olaf L. Müller: Mehr Licht: Goethe mit Newton im Streit um die Farben, S. Fischer Verlag, ISBN 978-3100022073, eBook ASIN B00OVFTIXU
• Rudolf Steiner: Fachwissenschaften und Anthroposophie, GA 73a (2005), ISBN 3-7274-0735-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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