WITTGENSTEIN ON GOETHE
German Romantic painter Otto Runge (1777-1810) represented the colors on the surface of a sphere. Twelve pure hues were placed at the equator. The colors became darker or lighter in seven sequential steps towards the poles.
Newton used his color circle to propose a geometry of color mixing. Conceptually white was at the centre. Newton's own painstaking experiments with the complimentary colored pigments of the day never came close to yielding pure white:
All colour'd Powders do suppress and stop in them a very considerable Part of the Light by which they are illuminated. For they become colour'd by reflecting the Light of their own Colours more copiously, and that of all other colours more sparingly, and yet they do not reflect the Light of their own Colours so copiously as white Bodies do. ... And therefore by mixing such Powders, we are not to expect a strong and full White, such as is that of Paper, but some dusky obscure one, such as might arise from a Mixture of Light and Darkness... that is, a grey, or dun, or russet brown, such as are the Colours of a Man's Nail, or of a Mouse...
“We compare the Newtonian theory of colours to an old castle, which was at first constructed by its architect with youthful precipitation... All damages, whether inflicted by the hand of the enemy or the power of time, were quickly made good. As occasion required, they deepened the moats, raised the walls, and took care there should be no lack of towers, battlements, and embrasures... [T]he old castle was chiefly held in honour because it had never been taken, because it had repulsed so many assaults, had baffled so many hostile operations, and had always preserved its virgin renown... The building itself is already abandonded; its only inmates are a few invalids, who in simple seriousness imagine that they are prepared for war.
W]e find this eighth wonder of the world already nodding to its fall as a deserted piece of antiquity, and begin at once, without further ceremony, to dismantle it from gable and roof downwards; that the sun may at last shine into the old nests of rats and owls...”
Goethe (1840) Theory of Colours, Preface to the First Edition.
Colored Plate from Goethe's Theory of Colours.
May God us keep
From single vision, and Newton's sleep! William Blake, From a poem in a letter written to Thomas Butts (1802)
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
Newton's epitaph written by Alexander Pope (1727)
Blake, William (c. 1805) Newton. Colour print in ink and watercolour. Tate Gallery, London.
APHORISM 125
Goethe’s theory of the origin of the spectrum isn’t a theory of its origin that has proved unsatisfactory; it is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the sort we find in James’s psychology. There is no experimentum cruces for Goethe’s theory of colour.
Someone who agrees with Goethe finds that Goethe correctly recognized the nature of colour. And here ‘nature’ does not mean a sum of experiences with respect to colours, but it is to be found in the concept of colour.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1992) Remarks on Color. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe, University of California Press.
GOETHE ON NEWTON
In the introductory paragraph to The Elements of Color (1970: 7) Itten provides the following disclaimer:
Color effects are in the eye of the beholder. Yet the deepest and truest secrets of color effect are. I know, invisible even to the eye, and are beheld by the heart alone. The essential eludes conceptual formulation.
Itten. Johannes (1970) The Elements of color (Kunst Der Farbe). Translated from the original German by Ernst Van Hagen. Chapman and Hall, London.
Bahaus painting master Johannes Itten (1888-1967) flattened Runge's sphere to produce a two dimensional star. This configuration, and the color theory and teaching derived from it, pertains to the subtractive color mixing of artists pigment rather than additive mixing of colored light.
Turner, William (1843) Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - The Morning after the Deluge - Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London.
Goethe's color wheel is fully symmetrical and reflects his own experimental findings with regard to after-images, and the oppositions inherent in colored shadows and complementary colors. Goethe was interested in the psychological aspects of color.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1810) Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors)
GOETHE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLOR
Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm (1786) Goethe in The Roman Campagna. Oil on canvas. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.
Newton realized that colors like purple and magenta existed in nature but were not part of the natural spectrum. However, he found that they could be generated by overlapping the opposite ends of two spectra. In similar vein, Newton joined the two ends of a single spectrum to produce his color circle. Extraspectral purple provides the missing gradation between Rubreus (red) and Violaceus (violet).
FROM NEWTON’S OPTICKS
In a very dark Chamber at a round Hole, about one third Part of an Inch broad, made in the Shut of a Window, I placed a Glass Prism, whereby the Beam of the Sun's Light, which came in at that Hole, might be refracted upwards toward the opposite Wall of the Chamber, and there form a colour'd Image of the Sun.
Isaac Newton (1704) Opticks or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. Book I, Part I, Prop. II. The Royal Society, London.
