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We find ourselves faced here with an instance of the problem, ‘Discovery or Manufacture?’ dealt with by Eddington in the manner described in our previous chapter. This very instance is indeed used by Eddington himself as a case in which the answer is definitely in favour of ‘manufacture’. Nevertheless, Eddington complains, experts, in spite of knowing better, keep to the traditional way of speaking about the spectral colours as being originally contained in the light. ‘Such is the glamour of a historical experiment.’3 It is for the same reason that Goethe’s discovery continues to be unrecognized by the majority of scientists, who prefer, instead of examining the question for themselves, to join in the traditional assertion that ‘Goethe never understood Newton’.

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It was clear to Goethe that to trace the law of the genesis of colour in nature by reading her phenomena, he must keep a look-out for occurrences of colours which satisfied the conditions of the Ur-phänomen, as he had learned to know it. This meant that he must ask of nature where she let colours arise out of light and darkness in such a way that no other conditions contributed to the effect.

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It needs only a glance through the prism into the sunlit world to make one convinced of the natural appearing of this delicate and at the same time powerfully luminous colour. For a narrow dark object on a light field is a much commoner occurrence in nature than the enclosing by two broad objects of a narrow space of light, the condition necessary for the emergence of a continuous colour-band with green in the middle. In fact, the spectrum which science since the time of Newton regards as the only one, appears much more rarely among natural conditions than does Goethe’s counter-spectrum.

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As Goethe relates at the conclusion of the ‘historical’ part of his Farbenlehre,4 he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics. He felt too close to poetry to be able to study it with sufficient detachment, so he turned to painting – an art with which he felt sufficiently familiar without being connected with it creatively – hoping that if he could discover the laws of one art they would prove applicable to others.

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He saw that such an effect was presented to his eye when he turned his gaze on the one hand to the blue sky, and on the other to the yellowish luminous sun. Where we see the blue of the heavens, there, spread out before our eyes, is universal space, which as such is dark. Why it does not appear dark by day as well as by night is because we see it through the sun-illumined atmosphere. The opposite role is played by the atmosphere when we look through it to the sun. In the first instance it acts as a lightening, in the second as a darkening, medium. Accordingly, when the optical density of the air changes as a result of its varying content of moisture, the colour-phenomenon undergoes an opposite change in each of the two cases. Whilst with increasing density of the air the blue of the sky brightens up and gradually passes over into white, the yellow of the sun gradually darkens and finally gives way to complete absence of light.

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With the peach-blossom a fresh proof is supplied that what man experiences in his soul is in harmony with the objective facts of nature. As with green, we experience peach-blossom as a colour that leaves us in equilibrium. With peach-blossom, however, the equilibrium is of a different kind, owing to the fact that it arises from the union of the colour-poles, not at their original stage but in their ‘heightened’ form. And so green, the colour of the plant-world harmony given by nature, stands over against ‘purple’, the colour of the human being striving towards harmony. By virtue of this quality, purple served from antiquity for the vesture of those who have reached the highest stage of human development for their time. This characteristic of the middle colours of the two spectra was expressed by Goethe when he called green ‘real totality’, and peach-blossom ‘ideal totality’.

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His visit to Italy, a land rich both in natural colour and in works of art, gave him a welcome opportunity to pursue this inquiry, but for a long time he made no headway. The paintings he saw suggested no inherent law in their arrangement of colours, nor could the painters he questioned tell him of one. The only qualitative distinction they seemed to recognize was between ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ colours.

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The ur-phenomenon having once been discovered in the heavens, could then easily be found elsewhere in nature on a large or small scale-as, for instance, in the blue of distant hills when the air is sufficiently opaque, or in the colour of the colourless, slightly milky opal which looks a deep blue when one sees it against a dark background, and a reddish yellow when one holds it against the light. The same phenomenon may be produced artificially through the clouding of glass with suitable substances, as one finds in various glass handicraft objects. The aesthetic effect is due to the treated glass being so fashioned as to present continually changing angles to the light, when both colour-poles and all the intermediate phases appear simultaneously. It is also possible to produce the ur-phenomenon experimentally by placing a glass jug filled with water before a black background, illuminating the jug from the side, and gradually clouding the water by the admixture of suitable substances. Whilst the brightness appearing in the direction of the light goes over from yellow and orange to an increasingly red shade, the darkness of the black background brightens to blue, which increases and passes over to a milky white.

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From this standpoint Goethe was able to smile at the Newtonians. He could say that if they persisted in asserting that the colourless, so-called ‘white’ light is composed of the seven colours of the ordinary spectrum – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet – then they were in duty bound to maintain also that the colourless, ‘black’ darkness is composed of the seven colours of the inverted spectrum – yellow, orange, red, purple, violet, indigo, blue.

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His own observations led him to a definite experience of the quality of the colour blue, for which he coined the phrase ‘feebleness of blue’ (‘Ohnmacht des Blau’). In some way this colour seemed to him to be related to black. In order to rouse his artist friends and to stimulate their reflexions, he liked to indulge in paradoxes, as when he asserted that blue was not a colour at all. He found, however, as time went on, that in this way he came no nearer his goal.