Steiner's claim that red slightly destroys blood and nerve in the eye, which the body then revives with oxygen, while blue leaves both untouched.
Red and Blue in Blood and Nerve in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of how the two colour poles act physiologically on the human eye and, through the eye, on the whole organism. Speaking to the Goetheanum workmen at Dornach on 21 February 1923, in the lectures collected as GA 349, Steiner named the blood the organ of life and the nerves the organ of consciousness. Red, which he understood as light seen through darkness, enters the fine blood vessels of the eye and destroys a little of the blood, and with the blood the nerve that blood feeds. The body answers by sending oxygen upward, and that answering current vitalises the head and gives a healthy colour to the face. Blue, darkness seen through light, leaves blood and nerve undestroyed, so a person feels inwardly well and grows meek. Red rouses. Blue quiets. Waldorf and anthroposophic colour practice still works from that difference.
Red and Blue in Blood and Nerve is the practical core of Steiner's colour teaching: colour is not a private sensation but a physiological transaction. A red surface asks the body for oxygen and is paid in oxygen. A blue surface asks for nothing. Steiner drew his consequences for churches, nurseries and sickrooms before he drew any conclusion about optics, and he named Isaac Newton as the man who had confused the question.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now consider the eye. Within it you have nerves and blood. When the eye looks at red, let us say at the dawn or at something red, what does it experience? You see, when the eye looks at red then these quite fine little blood-arteries become permeated by the red light, and this light has the peculiarity of always destroying the blood a little. It therefore destroys the nerve at the same time, for the nerve can live only when it is permeated by blood. So that when the eye confronts red, when red comes into the eye, then the blood in the eye is always somewhat destroyed and the nerve with it.
What it Means Today
Nineteenth century physiology reached a similar shape by a different road. Ewald Hering, professor at Prague and later at Leipzig, published Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne in 1878, arguing against Hermann von Helmholtz that colour vision rests on three antagonistic pairs: red against green, yellow against blue, white against black. Hering's language is the striking part. He held that one member of each pair works by dissimilation, a breaking down of the visual substance, and the other by assimilation, a building up. Red, yellow and white dissimilate. Green, blue and black assimilate. Leo Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson put numbers to that scheme in 1957 in Psychological Review, and opponent processing is now ordinary retinal and thalamic physiology.
Steiner, lecturing to the Goetheanum builders five years after Hering died, described red as tearing down blood and nerve and blue as leaving both whole. The vocabulary of expenditure and preservation is nearly Hering's, though Steiner placed the process in the blood rather than in a photochemical substance. Read honestly: no laboratory has found that red light destroys blood in the vessels of the eye, and this entry does not claim that it does.
Thalira synthesis: the durable content of this passage is not a measurement but a ledger of attention, in which red is bought with bodily expenditure and answered, and blue is received at no cost. Anyone choosing the colour of a sickroom wall, a first-grade classroom, or a chapel in Advent is already keeping that ledger, whichever physics they hold.
Where to Read More
- The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity, GA 349
- Steiner's colour lectures at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]