Lecture XIV

Now let us consider the human eye, and its specific insertion into the human organism. The process of sight depends on the power of the human ego to penetrate this isolated part in our organism. There is very little of the animal process in the eye, the sense of sight depends on the fact that man with his soul and spirit nature penetrates a region which has ceased to be animal; so that man can identify himself with the external world, not only with his internal processes. If you identify yourself with a muscle, you identify yourselves from inside, with the formative process of man. But if you identify yourself with the eyes, you really identify yourself with the external world. For this reason, I have already called this organ a gulf which the external extends physiology to neglect the facts, thereby engendering those foolish fairy stories of “subjectivity” and so forth. For it is the fashion today to ignore the fact that “objectivity” is intruded upon us and that within this “objectivity” we share in a part of the processes of the external world. For the last century and a half, every sort of sensory physiology has been founded upon subjectivity because there has been no inkling of the entry of the external world into these organic gulfs, by which we participate, through our senses, in the processes outside ourselves. To understand this rightly means also to understand the action of some foreign substance in this fine dispersal.