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{{GZ|An excited child must be surrounded with red or red-yellow colors and have clothes made for him in such colors; on the other hand, in the case of an unexcited child, blue or blue-green colors should be used. It depends on the color that is produced as a counter color inside. This is, for example, in the case of red the green color, in the case of blue the orange-yellow color, as one can easily convince oneself if one looks for a while at a correspondingly colored surface, and then quickly directs the eye to a white surface. This counter color is produced by the physical organs of the child and causes the corresponding organ structures necessary to the child. If the excited child has a red color in its environment, it generates the green counter-image within itself. And the activity of producing green has a calming effect, the organs absorb the tendency of calming.|34|326f}}
{{GZ|An excited child must be surrounded with red or red-yellow colors and have clothes made for him in such colors; on the other hand, in the case of an unexcited child, blue or blue-green colors should be used. It depends on the color that is produced as a counter color inside. This is, for example, in the case of red the green color, in the case of blue the orange-yellow color, as one can easily convince oneself if one looks for a while at a correspondingly colored surface, and then quickly directs the eye to a white surface. This counter color is produced by the physical organs of the child and causes the corresponding organ structures necessary to the child. If the excited child has a red color in its environment, it generates the green counter-image within itself. And the activity of producing green has a calming effect, the organs absorb the tendency of calming.|34|326f}}
== The different character of colors in the physical, soul and spiritual world ==
[[File:Goethe's Colour Circle.jpg|thumb|Six part [[color circle]], drawing by [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]].]]
In the physical world, colors appear as external colors that adhere to the surface of things; in the astral world (soul world), on the other hand, they show up as internal colors and in the spiritual world as radiant colors:
{{GZ|The colors are known to us in the physical world only on spatial things. Even where they are present without object, they become noticeable only through them. Only in the borderline cases of physical life one can see colors without object, for example the rainbow.
The colors in the astral world are not bound to a fixed, spatial limit. They are still psychic, the expression of a being at which they are. A sensual passion expresses itself differently than a highly striving thought. Here is immediate harmony; it floats freely, but it is connected with what it expresses. It is not external, but internal color. The bell, for example, does not care whether it is yellow or green, it does not affect its tone. When one gets beyond the astral world, there are also colors; but these are not only inner colors, but they are creative, bring themselves forth, they are radiant colors.
Now when man rises into the mental space, he first loses the ability to perceive the mental colors in the same way, that is why one speaks of the sounding world. The ability occurs to perceive sound and tone. Only when one gets higher again, then one perceives the radiant colors. When the human being has again come to the color, he is in the Arupa. If we could take color from a physical object and take it like a skin and bring it to Devachan, the color would shine there. Therefore, Devachan is also called the world of radiant colors. If one wants to communicate something to a fellow human being here, one says it to him through the sound; in Devachan it would shine in corresponding color.
Such a world, where all beings live in radiant colors, is called the first elementary kingdom. When the matter of these beings becomes a little denser, descends into the rupic, they begin to make themselves heard through sounds: This is the second elementary kingdom. The beings who live in it are very mobile. In the third elementary kingdom, the shape is added to the rest. The inner color is shaped. Passion shows itself in lightning form, sublime thoughts in plant form. In higher realms they are sparks and shines, here they are forms of monochromatic and tonal world.
All our beings have passed through three elemental kingdoms. Gold, copper and so on have now passed into the mineral kingdom. Gold in the lunar round did not look like now, but like a star radiating to different sides, through which one could reach. By a similar process, water, when it freezes into snow, becomes a small crystal. The metals are the condensed forms of the third elementary kingdom. Therefore metal is not internally uniform, but internally shaped (Chladnian sound figures). According to lines and figures the whole mineral kingdom is animated, and in the third elementary kingdom it is colored. By the fact that the forms solidify, surface becomes, and now the color arises at the surface.
We have thus:
# Elementary kingdom of radiant colors
# Elementary kingdom of free tones
# Elementary kingdom of the colored forms
# Elementary kingdom of the colored bodies.
The physical world contains all three elementary kingdoms as coagulated in itself. The tone is much more connected with the inside of a being than the color, the latter is more surface. The radiant colors are still more inwardly connected.|291a|188f}}


== Literature ==
== Literature ==

Revision as of 06:18, 14 July 2022

Isaac Newton, seven-part color wheel of the pure spectral colors (around 1700)

Colors, in contrast to dyes, are those sensory qualities that are conveyed to man through the eye, insofar as he thereby disregards the form and structure of what he sees[1] and are associated with very specific emotional color sensations. According to Goethe, colors are "deeds of light, deeds and sufferings."[2] A distinction can be made between light colors, which emanate directly from a self-luminous light source,[3][4] and body colors, which are produced by transillumination or reflection on material objects. In contrast to chromatic colors, white, black, and all intermediate neutral grays without a color cast are called achromatic. What has no colors is colorless. Colors can be characterized in the HSV color space by hue, saturation and value.

The pure spectral colors, which are also called primary colors or primary colors, have the greatest color saturation (chromaticity). Secondary colors are mixtures of two, tertiary colors of three primary colors. Depending on the mixing ratio, the most diverse (ideally all) color tones can be achieved. Glaring, screaming colors with particularly high luminosity and color saturation are also called neon colors. Luminous paints, some of which also glow or afterglow in the dark, emit more light in the visible range than they absorb from the outside.

Warm and cool colors

Red to yellow and brown hues are mostly experienced as pleasant active warm colors. Green and blue to violet hues, on the other hand, are usually experienced as passive cold colors, as Goethe also described in detail in his Theory of Colours under the "sensual-moral effect of color". Warm colors also objectively lead to a measurable increase in blood pressure and respiratory and pulse rates in test subjects, while these decrease with cold colors.[5]

The reality of colors

The colors have no physical reality, but they are nevertheless no mere subjective phenomena, but belong as objective soul reality to the soul world, more exactly to the region of mobile sensitivity.

„Physics should leave it at the mere existence of light in space. The observation of the colored cannot happen at all without being lifted up into the soul. For it is mere foolish talk if one says that the colored is only a subjective. And if one then goes over to saying that there is some objective cause outside and that it acts on us, on our I - it is nonsense; the I itself is inside the color. The I and the human astral body cannot be distinguished at all from the colored, they live in the colored and are insofar outside the physical body of man as they are connected with the colored outside; and the I and the astral body, they only form the colors in the physical body and in the etheric body. That is what matters. So the whole question about the effect of an objective of the colored on a subjective is nonsense; for in the color lies already that which is I, what is astral body, and with the color comes in the I and the astral body. The color is the carrier of the I and the astral body into the physical and into the etheric body. So that the whole way of looking at things must simply be reversed and turned around, if one wants to advance to reality.

What has crawled into physics, and what is embraced by physics with its lines and strokes, must come out again. A period would have to occur at first, where one disdains to draw at all, if one speaks of color in physics, where one should try to grasp color in its fluctuation, in its life.“ (Lit.:GA 291, p. 59f)

Effect of complementary colors on children

In the education of the child, special attention should be paid to the fact that not the external colors have an immediate effect on children, but the complementary colors produced in the organ. A very lively, nervous child will therefore be calmed precisely by yellow and red hues, because he feels the calming effect of the blue and green complementary colors inside him. Conversely, a passive child can be stimulated to activity by blue-green hues.

„An excited child must be surrounded with red or red-yellow colors and have clothes made for him in such colors; on the other hand, in the case of an unexcited child, blue or blue-green colors should be used. It depends on the color that is produced as a counter color inside. This is, for example, in the case of red the green color, in the case of blue the orange-yellow color, as one can easily convince oneself if one looks for a while at a correspondingly colored surface, and then quickly directs the eye to a white surface. This counter color is produced by the physical organs of the child and causes the corresponding organ structures necessary to the child. If the excited child has a red color in its environment, it generates the green counter-image within itself. And the activity of producing green has a calming effect, the organs absorb the tendency of calming.“ (Lit.:GA 34, p. 326f)

The different character of colors in the physical, soul and spiritual world

Six part color circle, drawing by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In the physical world, colors appear as external colors that adhere to the surface of things; in the astral world (soul world), on the other hand, they show up as internal colors and in the spiritual world as radiant colors:

„The colors are known to us in the physical world only on spatial things. Even where they are present without object, they become noticeable only through them. Only in the borderline cases of physical life one can see colors without object, for example the rainbow.

The colors in the astral world are not bound to a fixed, spatial limit. They are still psychic, the expression of a being at which they are. A sensual passion expresses itself differently than a highly striving thought. Here is immediate harmony; it floats freely, but it is connected with what it expresses. It is not external, but internal color. The bell, for example, does not care whether it is yellow or green, it does not affect its tone. When one gets beyond the astral world, there are also colors; but these are not only inner colors, but they are creative, bring themselves forth, they are radiant colors.

Now when man rises into the mental space, he first loses the ability to perceive the mental colors in the same way, that is why one speaks of the sounding world. The ability occurs to perceive sound and tone. Only when one gets higher again, then one perceives the radiant colors. When the human being has again come to the color, he is in the Arupa. If we could take color from a physical object and take it like a skin and bring it to Devachan, the color would shine there. Therefore, Devachan is also called the world of radiant colors. If one wants to communicate something to a fellow human being here, one says it to him through the sound; in Devachan it would shine in corresponding color.

Such a world, where all beings live in radiant colors, is called the first elementary kingdom. When the matter of these beings becomes a little denser, descends into the rupic, they begin to make themselves heard through sounds: This is the second elementary kingdom. The beings who live in it are very mobile. In the third elementary kingdom, the shape is added to the rest. The inner color is shaped. Passion shows itself in lightning form, sublime thoughts in plant form. In higher realms they are sparks and shines, here they are forms of monochromatic and tonal world.

All our beings have passed through three elemental kingdoms. Gold, copper and so on have now passed into the mineral kingdom. Gold in the lunar round did not look like now, but like a star radiating to different sides, through which one could reach. By a similar process, water, when it freezes into snow, becomes a small crystal. The metals are the condensed forms of the third elementary kingdom. Therefore metal is not internally uniform, but internally shaped (Chladnian sound figures). According to lines and figures the whole mineral kingdom is animated, and in the third elementary kingdom it is colored. By the fact that the forms solidify, surface becomes, and now the color arises at the surface.

We have thus:

  1. Elementary kingdom of radiant colors
  2. Elementary kingdom of free tones
  3. Elementary kingdom of the colored forms
  4. Elementary kingdom of the colored bodies.

The physical world contains all three elementary kingdoms as coagulated in itself. The tone is much more connected with the inside of a being than the color, the latter is more surface. The radiant colors are still more inwardly connected.“ (Lit.:GA 291a, p. 188f)

Literature

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.

References

  1. According to the definition in DIN 5033, color is "the visual perception of a part of the visual field that appears structureless to the human eye, by which this part alone can be distinguished from an adjacent district that is seen at the same time and is also structureless, when observed with the unaided eye.
  2. Goethe: Zur Farbenlehre (1810), Vorwort
  3. DIN 5033-1:2009-05 : Farbmessung – Teil 1: Grundbegriffe der Farbmetrik. „Lichtfarbe: Farbe eines Selbstleuchters.“
  4. DIN EN 12464-2:2007-10 : Licht und Beleuchtung – Beleuchtung von Arbeitsstätten – Teil 2: Arbeitsplätze im Freien. „Die Lichtfarbe einer Lampe bezieht sich auf die wahrgenommene Farbe (Farbart) des abgestrahlten Lichtes. “
  5. According to studies conducted by Harry Wolhfarth (1921-1996) at the University of Alberta (Canada) in 1955: „... research involved nearly 200 volunteers who stared for five minutes at a colored card calibrated using a standard color scale. Before and twice after, various measurements of pulse, blood pressure and respiration were made. To counter external stimuli, the subjects used gloves and earplugs. Based on this and similar research, Wohlfarth was able to show that there is indeed an effect of color on the autonomic nerve system, and this was both measurable and predictable. Red, orange and yellow stimulated the autonomic nerve system in the order of red (minimum), orange (medium) and yellow (maximum). A depressive effect was found in the sequence of green (minimum), blue (medium), and black (maximum).“ [1]