Stereoscopic Vision and Color Discrimination: Their Typological Polarity and Relations to Pictorial Creativeness

Abstract

Form and color are the two essential, clearly distinct qualities of visual perception. We can further distinguist two different aspects of visual perception of both form and color, a somatic or physical aspect, which may be termed “sensation” (in German: Empfindung), and a psychic aspect, which we may call “real perception” or better: “true vision” or contemplation (Schauung). Contemplation, which according to Kiages stands in polarity to sensation in the same way as the soul to the body is not to be confused with the conscious act of apprehension, which relates to the conceptual isolation of certain forms or colors in visual experience. In contemplation, the totality of visual experience is connected to former experiences of a similar kind and evaluated comparatively. Sensation is dependent on sensation; for there is a form of contemplation, which does not involve sensation, such as that which is possible in dreams, or in day dreams, when the eyes are closed. Contemplation is then the essential metaphysical event within visual experience. In a conscious act of apprehension only those sense data are received which can be ordered to the contemplation, that is to say, to the image in the soul. In the act of apprehension, by contrast, one becomes conscious of those data which are incompatible with contemplation or which draw the attention to particular details.

For the eye, pictorial art is more real than reality itself. It establishes what man would like and ought to see, not what he usually sees.

Goethe, The Eye

If the eye were not like a sun, it could never glimpse the sun. If God’s own power did not reside in us, how could we be enraptered by the divine essence?

Goethe, Zahme Xenien