Colours as 'Deeds and Sufferings of Light'
'As for what I have done as a poet, I take no pride in it whatever.
Excellent poets have lived at the same time as myself; poets more
excellent have lived before me, and others will come after me. But that
in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult
science of colours - of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here
I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.'
In these words spoken to his secretary, Eckermann, in 1829, a few years
before his death, Goethe gave his opinion on the significance of his
scientific researches in the field of optical phenomena. He knew that
the path he had opened up had led him to truths which belong to the
original truths of mankind. He expressed this by remarking that his
theory of colour was 'as old as the world'.
If in this book we come somewhat late to a discussion of Goethe's
colour-theory, in spite of the part it played in his own scientific
work, and in spite of its significance for the founding of a physics
based on his method, the reasons are these. When Goethe undertook his
studies in this field he had not to reckon with the forms of thought
which have become customary since the development of mechanistic and
above all - to put it concisely - of 'electricalistic' thinking. Before
a hearing can be gained in our age for a physics of Light and Colour as
conceived by Goethe, certain hindrances must first be cleared away. So
a picture on the one hand of matter, and on the other of electricity,
such as is given when they are studied by Goethean methods, had first
to be built up; only then is the ground provided for an unprejudiced
judgment of Goethe's observations and the deductions that can be made
from them to-day.
As Professor Heisenberg, in his lecture quoted earlier (Chapter II),
rightly remarks, Goethe strove directly with Newton only in the realms
of colour-theory and optics. Nevertheless his campaign was not merely
against Newton's opinions in this field. He was guided throughout by
the conviction that the fundamental principles of the whole Newtonian
outlook were at stake. It was for this reason that his polemics against
Newton were so strongly expressed, although he had no fondness for such
controversies. In looking back on that part of the Farbenlehre which he
had himself called 'Polemical' in the title, he said to Eckermann: 'I
by no means disavow my severe dissections of the Newtonian statements;
it was necessary at the time and will also have its value hereafter;
but at bottom all polemical action is repugnant to my nature, and I can
take but little pleasure in it.'
The reason why Goethe chose optics as the field of conflict, and
devoted to it more than twenty years of research and reflexion, amidst
all the other labours of his rich life, lay certainly in his individual
temperament - 'zum Sehen geboren, zum Schauen bestellt'.1 At the same
time one must see here a definite guidance of humanity. Since the hour
had struck for mankind to take the first step towards overcoming the
world-conception of the one-eyed, colour-blind onlooker, what step
could have been more appropriate than this of Goethe's, when he raised
the eye's capacity for seeing colours to the rank of an instrument of
scientific cognition?
In point of fact, the essential difference between Goethe's theory of
colour and the theory which has prevailed in science (despite all
modifications) since Newton's day, lies in this: While the theory of
Newton and his successors was based on excluding the colour-seeing
faculty of the eye, Goethe founded his theory on the eye's experience
of colour.
*
In view of the present scientific conception of the effect which a
prismatic piece of a transparent medium has on light passing through
it, Goethe's objection to Newton's interpretation and the conclusions
drawn from it seems by no means as heretical as it did in Goethe's own
time and for a hundred years afterwards. For, as Lord Rayleigh and
others have shown, the facts responsible for the coming into being of
the spectral colours, when these are produced by a diffraction grating,
invalidate Newton's idea that the optical apparatus serves to reveal
colours which are inherent in the original light. Today it is known
that these colours are an outcome of the interference of the apparatus
(whether prism or grating) with the light. Thus we find Professor R. W.
Wood, in the opening chapter of his Physical Optics, after having
described the historical significance of Newton's conception of the
relation between light and colour, saying: 'Curiously enough, this
discovery, which we are taking as marking the beginning of a definite
knowledge about light, is one which we shall demolish in the last
chapter of this book,2 for our present ideas regarding the action of
the prism more nearly resemble the idea held previous to Newton's
classical experiments. We now believe that the prism actually
manufactures the coloured light.'
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'.
*
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.
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.
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.
Although the splendour of colour in the Italian sky and the Italian
landscape made a powerful impression on Goethe, he found not enough
opportunity for systematic study to allow him to arrive at more than a
dim surmise of some law underlying the occurrence of colour in nature.
Still, there was one thing he took home with him as a result of his
labours. He had grown convinced that 'the first approach to colours as
physical phenomena had to be sought from the side of their occurrence
in nature, if one would gain an understanding of them in relation to
art'.
Back at home, he strove to recollect the theory of Newton as it was
being taught in schools and universities - namely, that 'colours in
their totality are contained in light'. Hitherto he had had no occasion
to doubt the correctness of this theory. Like everyone else, he had
heard it expounded in lectures as an incontestable result of empirical
observation, though without this ever having been shown to him by way
of experiment. He convinced himself by consulting a manual that his
recollection was correct, but at the same time he found that the theory
there set forth gave no help in answering his questions.5 So he decided
to examine the phenomena for himself.
For this purpose he borrowed a set of prisms from a friend living in
near-by Jena, the physicist, Büttner. Since, however, he had at that time
no opportunity of arranging a dark chamber on Newton's lines, where the
necessary ray of light from a tiny hole in the window-covering was sent
through a prism, he postponed the whole thing, until in the midst of
all his many other interests and duties it was forgotten. In vain Büttner
pressed many times for the return of the prisms; at last he sent a
mutual acquaintance with the injunction not to return without them.
Goethe then searched for the long-neglected apparatus and determined to
take a rapid glance through one of the prisms before he gave them back.
He recalled dimly his pleasure as a boy at the vision of the world
given him through a bit of similarly shaped glass. 'I well remember
that everything looked coloured, but in what manner I could no longer
recollect. I was just then in a room completely white; remembering the
Newtonian theory, I expected, as I put the prism to my eye, to find the
whole white wall coloured in different hues and to see the light
reflected thence into the eye, split into as many coloured lights.
'But how astonished was I when the white wall seen through the prism
remained white after as before. Only where something dark came against
it a more or less decided colour was shown, and at last the window-bars
appeared most vividly coloured, while on the light-grey sky outside no
trace of colouring was to be seen. It did not need any long
consideration for me to recognize that a boundary or edge is necessary
to call forth the colours, and I immediately said aloud, as though by
instinct, that the Newtonian doctrine is false.'
For Goethe, there could be no more thought of sending back the prisms,
and he persuaded Büttner to leave them with him for some time longer.
Goethe adds a short account of the progress of the experiments he now
undertook as well as of his efforts to interest others in his
discovery. He makes grateful reference to those who had brought him
understanding, and who had been helpful to him through the exchange of
thoughts. Among these, apart from Schiller, whom Goethe especially
mentions, we find a number of leading anatomists, chemists, writers and
philosophers of his time, but not a single one of the physicists then
active in teaching or research. The 'Guild' took up an attitude of
complete disapproval or indifference, and so have things remained till
a hundred years after his death, as Goethe himself prophesied.
One of the first systematic pieces of work which Goethe undertook in
order to trace the cause of the Newtonian error was to go through Book
I of Newton's Optics, sentence by sentence, recapitulate Newton's
experiments and rearrange them in the order which seemed to him
essential. In so doing he gained an insight which was fundamental for
all future work, and often proved very beneficial in the perfecting of
his own methods. His examination of the Newtonian procedure showed him
that the whole mistake rested on the fact that 'a complicated
phenomenon should have been taken as a basis, and the simpler explained
from the complex'. Nevertheless, it still needed 'much time and
application in order to wander through all the labyrinths with which
Newton had been pleased to confuse his successors'.
*
It seems a small thing, and yet it is a great one, which Goethe, as the
above description shows, discovered almost by chance. This is shown by
the conclusions to which he was led in the systematic prosecutions of
his discovery. An account of them is given in his Beiträge zur Optik,6
published in 1791, the year in which Galvani came before the public
with his observations in the sphere of electricity.
Goethe describes in this book the basic phenomena of the creation of
the prismatic colours, with particulars of a number of experiments so
arranged that the truth he had discovered, contrary to Newton's view,
comes to light through the very phenomena themselves. Only much later,
in the year 1810, and after he had brought to a certain conclusion four
years previously the researches which he had pursued most carefully the
whole time, did he make public the actual masterpiece, Entwurf einer
Farbenlehre.7 (An English translation of the didactic part appeared
about ten years after Goethe's death.)
While leaving a more detailed description of the composition of
Goethe's Entwurf for our next chapter, we shall here deal at once with
some of the essential conclusions to which the reader is led in this
book. As already mentioned, Goethe's first inspection of the
colour-phenomenon produced by the prism had shown him that the
phenomenon depended on the presence of a boundary between light and
darkness. Newton's attempt to explain the spectrum out of light alone
appeared to him, therefore, as an inadmissible setting aside of one of
the two necessary conditions. Colours, so Goethe gleaned directly from
the prismatic phenomenon, are caused by both light and its counterpart,
darkness. Hence, to arrive at an idea of the nature of colour, which
was in accord with its actual appearance, he saw himself committed to
an investigation of the extent to which the qualitative differences in
our experience of colours rests upon their differing proportions of
light and darkness.
It is characteristic of Goethe's whole mode of procedure that he at
once changed the question, 'What is colour?' into the question, 'How
does colour arise?' It was equally characteristic that he did not, as
Newton did, shut himself into a darkened room, so as to get hold of the
colour-phenomenon by means of an artificially set-up apparatus.
Instead, he turned first of all to nature, to let her give him the
answer to the questions she had raised.
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.
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.
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.
It had already become clear to Goethe in Italy that all
colour-experience is based on a polarity, which he found expressed by
painters as the contrast between 'cold' and 'warm' colours. Now that
the coming-into-being of the blue of the sky and of the yellow of the
sun had shown themselves to him as two processes of opposite character,
he recognized in them the objective reason why both colours are
subjectively experienced by us as opposites. 'Blue is illumined
darkness - yellow is darkened light' - thus could he assert the
urphenomenon, while he expressed the relation to Light of colours in
their totality by saying: 'Colours are Deeds and Sufferings of Light.'
With this, Goethe had taken the first decisive step towards his goal -
the tracing of man's aesthetic experience to objective facts of nature.
If we use the expressions of preceding chapters, we can say that
Goethe, in observing the coloured ur-phenomenon, had succeeded in
finding how from the primary polarity, Light-Dark, the opposition of
the yellow and blue colours arises as a secondary polarity. For such an
interplay of light and darkness, the existence of the air was seen to
be a necessary condition, representing in the one case a lightening, in
the other, a darkening element. That it was able to play this double
role arose from its being on the one hand pervious to light, while yet
possessing a certain substantial density. For a medium of such a nature
Goethe coined the expression trübes Medium.
There seems to be no suitable word in English for rendering the term trübe
in the sense in which Goethe used it to denote the optical resistance
of a more or less transparent medium. The following remarks of
Goethe's, reported by his secretary Riemer, will give the reader a
picture of what Goethe meant by this term, clear enough to allow us to
use the German word. Goethe's explanation certainly shows how
inadequate it is to translate trübe by 'cloudy' or 'semi-opaque' as
commentators have done. 'Light and Dark have a common field, a space, a
vacuum in which they are seen to appear. This space is the realm of the
transparent. Just as the different colours are related to Light and
Dark as their creative causes, so is their corporeal part, their
medium, Trübe, related to the transparent. The first diminution of the
transparent, i.e. the first slightest filling of space, the first
disposition, as it were, to the corporeal, i.e. the non-transparent -
this is Trübe.'8
After Goethe had once determined from the macrotelluric phenomenon that
an interplay of light and darkness within Trübe was necessary for the
appearance of colour in space, he had no doubt that the prismatic
colours, too, could be understood only through the coming together of
all these three elements. It was now his task to examine in what way
the prism, by its being trübe, brings light and darkness, or, as he also
expressed it, light and shadow, into interplay, when they meet at a
boundary.
We must remember that on first looking through the prism Goethe had
immediately recognized that the appearance of colour is always
dependent on the existence of a boundary between light and darkness -
in other words, that it is a border phenomenon. What colours appear on
such a border depends on the position of light and darkness in relation
to the base of the prism. If the lighter part is nearer to the base,
then blue and violet tints are seen at the border, and with the reverse
position tints of yellow and red (Plate B, Fig. i). Along this path of
study Goethe found no reason for regarding the spectrum-phenomenon as
complete only when both kinds of border-phenomena appear simultaneously
(let alone when - as a result of the smallness of the aperture through
which the light meets the prism - the two edges lie so close that a
continuous band of colour arises). Hence we find Goethe - unlike Newton
- treating the two ends of the spectrum as two separate phenomena.
In this way, the spectrum phenomenon gave Goethe confirmation that he
had succeeded in expressing in a generally valid form the law of the
origin of the blue and the yellow colours, as he had read it from the
heavens. For in the spectrum, too, where the colour blue appears, there
he saw darkness being lightened by a shifting of the image of the
border between light and dark in the direction of darkness; where
yellow appears, he saw light being darkened by a shifting of the image
in the direction of light. (See the arrow in Fig. i.)
In the colours adjoining these - indigo and violet on the blue side,
orange and red on the yellow side - Goethe recognized 'heightened'
modifications of blue and yellow. Thus he had learnt from the
macro-telluric realm that with decreasing density of the corporeal
medium, the blue sky takes on ever deeper tones, while with increasing
density of the medium, the yellow of the sunlight passes over into
orange and finally red. Prismatic phenomenon and macrotelluric
phenomenon were seen to correspond in this direction, too.
Faithful to his question, 'How does colour arise?' Goethe now proceeded
to investigate under what conditions two borders, when placed opposite
each other, provide a continuous band of colour - that is, a
colour-band where, in place of the region of uncoloured light, green
appears. This, he observed, came about if one brought one's eye, or the
screen intercepting the light, to that distance from the prism where
the steadily widening yellow-red and the blue-violet colour-cones merge
(Fig. ii).9 Obviously, this distance can be altered by altering the
distance between the two borders. In the case of an extremely narrow
light-space, the blue and yellow edges will immediately overlap. Yet
the emergence of the green colour will always be due to a union of the
blue and yellow colours which spread from the two edges. This convinced
Goethe that it is inadmissible to place the green in the spectrum in
line with the other colours, as is customary in the explanation of the
spectrum since Newton's time.
This insight into the relation of the central colour of the continuous
spectrum to its other colours still further strengthened Goethe's
conviction that in the way man experiences nature in his soul,
objective laws of nature come to expression. For just as we experience
the colours on the blue side of the spectrum as cold colours, and those
on the yellow side as warm colours, so does green give man the
impression of a neutral colour, influencing us in neither direction.
And just as the experience of the two polar colour-ranges is an
expression of the objective natural law behind them, so too is the
experience of green, the objective conditions of whose origin give it a
neutral position between the two. With this it also became clear why
the vegetative part of the plant organism, the region of leaf and stem
formation, where the light of the sun enters into a living union with
the density of earthly substance, must appear in a garment of green.
*
Having in this way found the clue to the true genesis of the spectrum,
Goethe could not fail to notice that it called for another - a
'negative' spectrum, its polar opposite - to make the half into a
whole. For he who has once learnt that light and darkness are two
equally essential factors in the birth of colour, and that the opposing
of two borders of darkness so as to enclose a light is a 'derived'
(abgeleitet) experimental arrangement, is naturally free to alter the
arrangement and to supplement it by reversing the order of the two
borders, thus letting two lights enclose a darkness between them.
If one exposes an arrangement like this to the action of the prism,
whose position has remained unchanged, colours appear on each of the
two edges, as before, but in reverse order (Fig. iii). The spectral
phenomenon now begins at one side with light blue and passes into
indigo and violet, with uncoloured darkness in the centre. From this
darkness it emerges through red and passes through orange to yellow at
the other end.
Again, where the two interior colour-cones merge, there an additional
colour appears. Like green, it is of a neutral character, but at the
same time its quality is opposite to that of green. In Newtonian
optics, which assumes colour to be derived from light only, this colour
has naturally no existence. Yet in an optics which has learnt to reckon
with both darkness and light as generators of colour, the complete
spectrum phenomenon includes this colour equally with green. For lack
of an existing proper name for it, Goethe termed it 'pure red' (since
it was free from both the blue tinge of the mauve, and the yellow tinge
of the red end of the ordinary spectrum), or 'peach-blossom'
(pfirsichblüt), or 'purple' (as being nearest to the dye-stuff so called
by the ancients after the mollusc from which it was obtained).10
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.
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'.
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.
Despite the convincing force of this argument, the voice of the Hans
Andersen child speaking through Goethe failed to gain a hearing among
the crowd of Newtonian faithful. So has it been up to the present day -
regardless of the fact that, as we have shown, modern physics has
reached results which make a contradiction of the Newtonian concept of
the mutual relation of light and colour no longer appear so heretical
as it was in Goethe's time.
*
When we compare the way in which Goethe, on the one hand, and the
physical scientist, on the other, have arrived at the truth that what
Newton held to be 'discovery' was in actual fact 'manufacture', we find
ourselves faced with another instance of a fact which we have
encountered before in our study of electricity. It is the fact that a
truth, which reveals itself to the spectator-scientist only as the
result of a highly advanced experimental research, can be recognized
through quite simple observation when this observation is carried out
with the intention of letting the phenomena themselves speak for their
'theory'.
Furthermore, there is a corresponding difference in the effect the
knowledge of such truth has on the human mind. In the field of
electricity we saw that together with the scientist's recognition of
the absolute qualities of the two polar forms of electricity a false
semblance of reality was lent to the hypothesis of the atomic structure
of matter. Something similar has occurred in the field of optics. Here,
after having been forced to recognize the fallacy of Newton's theory,
the spectator's mind has been driven to form a concept of the nature of
light which is further than ever from the truth. For what then remains
of light is - in Eddington's words - a 'quite irregular disturbance,
with no tendency to periodicity', which means that to light is assigned
the quality of an undefined chaos (in the negative sense of this word)
sprung from pure chance.
Moreover, as Eddington shows, the question whether the optical
contrivance 'sorts out' from the chaotic light a particular
periodicity, or whether it 'impresses' this on the light, becomes just
'a matter of expression'.11 So here, too, the modern investigator is
driven to a resigned acknowledgment of the principle of Indeterminacy.
No such conclusions are forced upon the one who studies the spectrum
phenomenon with the eyes of Goethe. Like the modern experimenter, he,
too, is faced with the question 'Discovery or Manufacture?' and he,
too, finds the answer to be 'Manufacture'. But to him nature can
disclose herself as the real manufacturer, showing him how she goes to
work in bringing about the colours, because in following Goethe he is
careful to arrange his observations in such a way that they do not veil
nature's deeds.
1 'To see is my dower, to look my employ.' Words of the Tower-Watcher
in Faust, II, 5, through which Goethe echoes his own relation to the
world.
2 The last chapter but two in the edition of 1924.
3 For the drastic and as such very enlightening way in which Eddington
presents the problem, the reader is referred to Eddington's own
description.
4 Konfession des Verfassers.
5 Colour as quality being no essential factor in the scientific
explanation of the spectrum.
6 Contributions to Optics.
7 Outline of a Theory of Colour.
8 See Rudolf Steiner's edition of Goethe's Farbenlehre under
Paralipomena zur Chromatik, No. 27.
9 Goethe's own representation of the phenomenon. (The diagram is
simplified by omitting one colour on each side.)
10 This is not to be confused with the meaning of 'purple' in modern
English usage.
11 This follows from the application of Fourier's Theorem, according to
which every vibration of any kind is divisible into a sum of periodic
partial vibrations, and therefore is regarded as compounded of these.