12. The Relationships Between Spiritual Science and Individual Academic Subjects II

In Goethe's view, the theory of colors is all about considering colors in connection with what is happening in the human organism itself. You only need to open Goethe's Theory of Colors to see that Goethe starts out from the physiological colors, from the behavior of the eye, which he, however, basically considers differently, one might say, than it is considered today. Today, we actually look at the eye in such a way that we think of it as being separate from the whole human organism, that we sort of isolate it from this organism, that we look at it as an optical apparatus and then try to get to know how – when this eye is taken out of the organism, when it is looked at as an optical apparatus – how the impressions on the eye, the stimuli on the eye and so on are presented. Just try to visualize how this approach actually works. If you want to clarify something in relation to the eye, if you want to answer the question: How does the eye relate to any visible object? , with this mode of observation one can hardly do otherwise than to draw the eye itself in some average on the board, to lead lines from the object to the eye and so on; then one can still ask: How do the different parts of the eye relate to that which exerts a stimulus there?