Theory of Colours
Encyclopedia
Theory of Colours is a work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
about the poet's views on the nature of colour
s and how these are perceived by man, published in 1810. It contains some of the earliest published descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows
, refraction
, and chromatic aberration
.
The work originated in Goethe's occupation with painting and mainly exerted an influence onto the arts (Philipp Otto Runge
, J. M. W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wassily Kandinsky
).
Although Goethe's work was never well received by physicists, a number of philosophers and physicists have concerned themselves with it, including Thomas Johann Seebeck
, Arthur Schopenhauer
(see: On Vision and Colors), Hermann von Helmholtz
, Rudolf Steiner
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
, Werner Heisenberg
, Kurt Gödel
, and Mitchell Feigenbaum
.
In his book, Goethe provides a general exposition of how colour is perceived in a variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton
's observations to be special cases. Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic measurement of colour phenomenon, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human colour perception as presented by Goethe - a subject analyzed at length by Wittgenstein in his exegesis of Goethe in Remarks on Colour
.
It is hard to present Goethe's "theory", since he refrains from setting up any actual theory; "its intention is to portray rather than explain" (Scientific Studies). For Goethe, "the highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory."
At Goethe's time, it was generally acknowledged that, as Isaac Newton
had shown in his Opticks
in 1704, colourless (white) light
is split up into its component colours when directed through a prism
.
In 1740, Louis Bertrand Castel
published a criticism of Newton's spectral description of prismatic colour, where he observed that the colours of light split by a prism depended on the distance from the prism, and that Newton was looking at a special case. This was an argument that Goethe later developed.
Goethe already in 1793 formulated his arguments against Newton in his essay "Über Newtons Hypothese der diversen Refrangibilität" ("On Newton's hypothesis of diverse refrangibility"). His starting point was the supposed discovery of how Newton erred, in the prismatic experiment. However, by 1794, Goethe began to shift away from this view, sensing more and more strongly the meaning of the physiological side of colours.
Announcing the publication of the Theory of Colours, he stated:
Instead of relying on a single crucial experiment to gain knowledge of the nature of colour, Goethe strove to overcome what he perceived as mere interpretation of the phenomena by developing an ordered series of experiments from which to draw his conclusions, and thus gain an insight into the complete phenomenon.
As a look through the prism shows, one does not see white areas split evenly into seven colours, but rather colour exists at light-dark boundaries. Yellow-red edges meet blue-violet edges, and where these overlap, there arises green. From these observations, Goethe concluded that the spectrum
is not a primary, but a compound phenomenon.
Based on his experiments with turbid media, Goethe characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of darkness and light. Rudolf Steiner
gives the following analogy:
Goethe writes:
on the perception of light and dark. The poet observed that light seen through a turbid medium appears yellow, and darkness seen through an illuminated medium appears blue.
Starting from these observations, he began numerous experiments, observing the effects of darkening and lightening on the perception of colour in many different circumstances.
When viewed through a prism, the orientation of a light-dark boundary with respect to the prism's axis is significant. With white above a dark boundary, we observe the light extending a blue-violet edge into the dark area; whereas dark above a light boundary results in a red-yellow edge extending into the light area.
Goethe was intrigued by this difference. He felt that this arising of colour at light-dark boundaries was fundamental to the creation of the spectrum (which he considered to be a compound phenomenon).
Varying the experimental conditions by using different shades of grey shows that the intensity of coloured edges increases with boundary contrast.
Since the colour phenomenon relies on the adjacency of light and dark, there are two ways to produce a spectrum: with a light beam in a dark room, and with a dark beam (i.e. a shadow) in a light room.
Goethe recorded the sequence of colours projected at various distances from a prism for both cases (see Plate IV, Theory of Colours). In both cases, he found that the yellow and blue edges remain closest to the side which is light, and red and violet edges remain closest to the side which is dark. At a certain distance, these edges overlap – and we obtain Newton's spectrum. When these edges overlap in a light spectrum, green results; when they overlap in a dark spectrum, magenta results.
With a light spectrum, coming out of the prism, one sees a shaft of light surrounded by dark. We find yellow-red colours along the top edge, and blue-violet colours along the bottom edge. The spectrum with green in the middle arises only where the blue-violet edges overlap the yellow-red edges.
With a dark spectrum (i.e. a shadow surrounded by light), we find violet-blue along the top edge, and red-yellow along the bottom edge – where these edges overlap, we find magenta.
Goethe anticipated Ewald Hering
's Opponent process
theory by proposing a symmetric colour wheel. He writes, "The chromatic circle... [is] arranged in a general way according to the natural order... for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands violet; orange, blue; red, green; and vice versa: thus... all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other; the simpler colour demanding the compound, and vice versa. (Goethe, Theory of Colours).
Goethe also expressed his understanding of the light and dark spectra in including magenta in his colour wheel. Whereas for Newton magenta was an 'extraspectral' colour, for Goethe magenta was a natural result of violet and red being mixed in a dark spectrum (see top of colour wheel), just as green resulted from the mixing of blue and yellow in the light spectrum (bottom of colour wheel).
"For Newton, only spectral colors could count as fundamental. By contrast, Goethe's more empirical approach led him to recognize the essential role of (nonspectral) magenta in a complete color circle, a role that it still has in all modern color systems."
Goethe attributed inner qualities to the several colours of the wheel. Red is associated to the beautiful, orange to the noble, yellow to the good, green to the useful, blue to the mean, and violet to the unnecessary.
Because Newton
understands white light to be composed of individual colours, and Goethe sees colour arising from the interaction of light and dark, they come to different conclusions on the question: is the optical spectrum a primary or a compound phenomenon?
For Newton, the prism is immaterial to the existence of colour, as all the colours already exist in white light, and the prism merely fans them out according to their refrangibility. Goethe sought to show that, as a turbid medium, the prism was an integral factor in the arising of colour.
"Whereas Newton observed the colour spectrum cast on a wall at a fixed distance away from the prism, Goethe observed the cast spectrum on a white card which was progressively moved away from the prism... As the card was moved away, the projected image elongated, gradually assuming an elliptical shape, and the coloured images became larger, finally merging at the centre to produce green. Moving the card farther led to the increase in the size of the image, until finally the spectrum described by Newton in the Opticks was produced... The image cast by the refracted beam was not fixed, but rather developed with increasing distance from the prism. Consequently, Goethe saw the particular distance chosen by Newton to prove the second proposition of the Opticks as capriciously imposed."
Whereas Newton narrowed the beam of light in order to isolate the phenomenon, Goethe observed that with a wider aperture, there was no spectrum. He saw only reddish-yellow edges and blue-cyan edges with white between them, and the spectrum arose only where these edges came close enough to overlap. For him, the spectrum could be explained by the simpler phenomena of colour arising from the interaction of light and dark edges.
Newton explains "the fact that all the colors appear only when the prism is at a certain distance from the screen, whereas the middle otherwise is white... [by saying] the more strongly diverted lights from the upper part of the image and the more weakly diverted ones from the lower part fall together in the middle and mix into white. The colors appear only at the edges because there none of the more strongly diverted parts of the light from above can fall into the most weakly diverted parts of the light, and none of the more weakly diverted ones from below can fall into the most strongly diverted ones." (Steiner, 1897)
As a catalogue of observations, Goethe's experiments are useful data for understanding the complexities of human colour perception. Whereas Newton sought to develop a mathematical model for the behaviour of light, Goethe focused on exploring how colour is perceived in a wide array of conditions.
Goethe's reification
of darkness has caused almost all of modern physics to reject Goethe's theory. Both Newton and Huygens defined darkness as an absence of light. Young
and Fresnel
combined Newton's particle theory with Huygen's wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Physicists today attribute both a corpuscular and undulatory character to light, which is the content of the so-called Wave–particle duality
. Curiously, since the crux of Goethe's theory is tied to what is experiential, he would reject both the wave and particle theories since they are conceptually inferred and not directly perceived by the human senses.
From its publication in 1810, the book was controversial for its stance against Newton. So much so, that when Charles Eastlake
translated the text into English in 1840, he omitted the content of Goethe's polemic against Newton.
Goethe initially was induced to occupy himself with the theory of colours by the questions of hue
in painting. "During his first journey to Italy (1786-88), he noticed that artists were able to enunciate rules for virtually all the elements of painting and drawing except color and coloring. In the years 1786—88, Goethe began investigating whether one could ascertain rules to govern the artistic use of color."
It was a highly welcome acknowledgement of his aim, for him, when several pictorial artists, above all Philipp Otto Runge
, took an interest in his colour studyings. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake
in 1840, the theory became widely adopted by the art world – especially among the Pre-Raphaelites. J. M. W. Turner studied it comprehensively and referenced it in the titles of several paintings. Wassily Kandinsky
considered it "one of the most important works."
. This conversation inspired Miranda, as he later recounted, in his designing the yellow, blue and red flag of Gran Colombia, from which the present national flags of Colombia
, Venezuela
and Ecuador
are derived. (See Flag of Colombia#History).
's lecture on Goethe's scientific works -- he says of Goethe's work that he depicts the perceived phenomena -- "circumstantially, rigorously true to nature, and vividly, puts them in an order that is pleasant to survey, and proves himself here, as everywhere in the realm of the factual, to be the great master of exposition" (Helmholtz 1892). Helmholtz ultimately rejects Goethe's theory as the work of a poet, but expresses his perplexity at how they can be in such agreement about the facts of the matter, but in violent contradiction about their meaning -- 'And I for one do not know how anyone, regardless of what his views about colours are, can deny that the theory in itself is fully consequent, that its assumptions, once granted, explain the facts treated completely and indeed simply'. (Helmholtz 1892)
Although the accuracy of Goethe's observations does not admit a great deal of criticism, his theory's failure to demonstrate significant predictive validity eventually rendered it scientifically irrelevant. Thomas Johann Seebeck
was the only prominent scientist among Goethe's contemporaries who acknowledged the theory, but later also saw it critically.
Much controversy stems from two different ways of investigating light and colour. Goethe was not interested in Newton's analytic treatment of colour – but he presented an excellent rational description of the phenomenon of human colour perception. It is as such a collection of colour observations that we must view this book.
Mitchell Feigenbaum
has coined the phrase "Goethe had been right about colour!"
and Edwin H. Land
's retinex theory bear striking similarities to Goethe's theory (Ribe & Steinle, 2002).
A modern treatment of the book is given by Dennis L. Sepper in the book, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
about the poet's views on the nature of colour
Color
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
s and how these are perceived by man, published in 1810. It contains some of the earliest published descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows
Complementary color
Complementary colors are pairs of colors that are of “opposite” hue in some color model. The exact hue “complementary” to a given hue depends on the model in question, and perceptually uniform, additive, and subtractive color models, for example, have differing complements for any given color.-...
, refraction
Refraction
Refraction is the change in direction of a wave due to a change in its speed. It is essentially a surface phenomenon . The phenomenon is mainly in governance to the law of conservation of energy. The proper explanation would be that due to change of medium, the phase velocity of the wave is changed...
, and chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration
In optics, chromatic aberration is a type of distortion in which there is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point. It occurs because lenses have a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light...
.
The work originated in Goethe's occupation with painting and mainly exerted an influence onto the arts (Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge was a Romantic German painter and draughtsman. He made a late start to his career and died young, nonetheless he is considered among the best German Romantic painters.- Life and work :...
, J. M. W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
).
Although Goethe's work was never well received by physicists, a number of philosophers and physicists have concerned themselves with it, including Thomas Johann Seebeck
Thomas Johann Seebeck
Thomas Johann Seebeck was a physicist who in 1821 discovered the thermoelectric effect.Seebeck was born in Reval to a wealthy Baltic German merchant family. He received a medical degree in 1802 from the University of Göttingen, but preferred to study physics...
, Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
(see: On Vision and Colors), Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...
, Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher...
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
, Werner Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...
, Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the...
, and Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum is a mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants.- Biography :...
.
In his book, Goethe provides a general exposition of how colour is perceived in a variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
's observations to be special cases. Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic measurement of colour phenomenon, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human colour perception as presented by Goethe - a subject analyzed at length by Wittgenstein in his exegesis of Goethe in Remarks on Colour
Remarks on Colour
Remarks on Colour is a collection of notes by Ludwig Wittgenstein on Goethe's Theory of Colours. The work consists of Wittgenstein's reactions to Goethe's thinking, and an attempt to clarify the use of language about color...
.
Goethe's theory
In the preface to the Theory of Colours, Goethe explained that he tried to apply the principle of polarity, in the work – a proposition that belonged to his earliest convictions and was constitutive for all his study of nature.It is hard to present Goethe's "theory", since he refrains from setting up any actual theory; "its intention is to portray rather than explain" (Scientific Studies). For Goethe, "the highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory."
Historical background
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
had shown in his Opticks
Opticks
Opticks is a book written by English physicist Isaac Newton that was released to the public in 1704. It is about optics and the refraction of light, and is considered one of the great works of science in history...
in 1704, colourless (white) light
Light
Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...
is split up into its component colours when directed through a prism
Prism (optics)
In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that refract light. The exact angles between the surfaces depend on the application. The traditional geometrical shape is that of a triangular prism with a triangular base and rectangular sides, and in colloquial use...
.
In 1740, Louis Bertrand Castel
Louis Bertrand Castel
Louis Bertrand Castel was a French mathematician born in Montpellier, and entered the order of the Jesuits in 1703. Having studied literature, he afterwards devoted himself entirely to mathematics and natural philosophy...
published a criticism of Newton's spectral description of prismatic colour, where he observed that the colours of light split by a prism depended on the distance from the prism, and that Newton was looking at a special case. This was an argument that Goethe later developed.
Goethe's starting point: Newton's supposed error
Announcing the publication of the Theory of Colours, he stated:
Instead of relying on a single crucial experiment to gain knowledge of the nature of colour, Goethe strove to overcome what he perceived as mere interpretation of the phenomena by developing an ordered series of experiments from which to draw his conclusions, and thus gain an insight into the complete phenomenon.
As a look through the prism shows, one does not see white areas split evenly into seven colours, but rather colour exists at light-dark boundaries. Yellow-red edges meet blue-violet edges, and where these overlap, there arises green. From these observations, Goethe concluded that the spectrum
Spectrum
A spectrum is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary infinitely within a continuum. The word saw its first scientific use within the field of optics to describe the rainbow of colors in visible light when separated using a prism; it has since been applied by...
is not a primary, but a compound phenomenon.
Light and darkness
Unlike his contemporaries, Goethe didn't see darkness as an absence of light, but rather as polar to and interacting with light; colour resulted from this interaction of light and shadow. For Goethe, light is "the simplest most undivided most homogenous being that we know. Confronting it is the darkness" (Letter to Jacobi).Based on his experiments with turbid media, Goethe characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of darkness and light. Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher...
gives the following analogy:
Goethe writes:
Experiments with turbid media
Goethe's studies of colour began with subjective experiments which examined the effects of turbid mediaTurbidity
Turbidity is the cloudiness or haziness of a fluid caused by individual particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye, similar to smoke in air. The measurement of turbidity is a key test of water quality....
on the perception of light and dark. The poet observed that light seen through a turbid medium appears yellow, and darkness seen through an illuminated medium appears blue.
Starting from these observations, he began numerous experiments, observing the effects of darkening and lightening on the perception of colour in many different circumstances.
Boundary conditions
Goethe was intrigued by this difference. He felt that this arising of colour at light-dark boundaries was fundamental to the creation of the spectrum (which he considered to be a compound phenomenon).
Varying the experimental conditions by using different shades of grey shows that the intensity of coloured edges increases with boundary contrast.
Light and dark spectra
Goethe recorded the sequence of colours projected at various distances from a prism for both cases (see Plate IV, Theory of Colours). In both cases, he found that the yellow and blue edges remain closest to the side which is light, and red and violet edges remain closest to the side which is dark. At a certain distance, these edges overlap – and we obtain Newton's spectrum. When these edges overlap in a light spectrum, green results; when they overlap in a dark spectrum, magenta results.
With a light spectrum, coming out of the prism, one sees a shaft of light surrounded by dark. We find yellow-red colours along the top edge, and blue-violet colours along the bottom edge. The spectrum with green in the middle arises only where the blue-violet edges overlap the yellow-red edges.
With a dark spectrum (i.e. a shadow surrounded by light), we find violet-blue along the top edge, and red-yellow along the bottom edge – where these edges overlap, we find magenta.
Goethe's colour wheel
Ewald Hering
Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering was a German physiologist who did much research into color vision and spatial perception...
's Opponent process
Opponent process
The color opponent process is a color theory that states that the human visual system interprets information about color by processing signals from cones and rods in an antagonistic manner...
theory by proposing a symmetric colour wheel. He writes, "The chromatic circle... [is] arranged in a general way according to the natural order... for the colours diametrically opposed to each other in this diagram are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. Thus, yellow demands violet; orange, blue; red, green; and vice versa: thus... all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other; the simpler colour demanding the compound, and vice versa. (Goethe, Theory of Colours).
Goethe also expressed his understanding of the light and dark spectra in including magenta in his colour wheel. Whereas for Newton magenta was an 'extraspectral' colour, for Goethe magenta was a natural result of violet and red being mixed in a dark spectrum (see top of colour wheel), just as green resulted from the mixing of blue and yellow in the light spectrum (bottom of colour wheel).
"For Newton, only spectral colors could count as fundamental. By contrast, Goethe's more empirical approach led him to recognize the essential role of (nonspectral) magenta in a complete color circle, a role that it still has in all modern color systems."
Goethe attributed inner qualities to the several colours of the wheel. Red is associated to the beautiful, orange to the noble, yellow to the good, green to the useful, blue to the mean, and violet to the unnecessary.
Newton and Goethe
Due to their different approaches to a common subject, many misunderstandings have arisen between Newton's mathematical understanding of optics, and Goethe's experiential approach.Because Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
understands white light to be composed of individual colours, and Goethe sees colour arising from the interaction of light and dark, they come to different conclusions on the question: is the optical spectrum a primary or a compound phenomenon?
For Newton, the prism is immaterial to the existence of colour, as all the colours already exist in white light, and the prism merely fans them out according to their refrangibility. Goethe sought to show that, as a turbid medium, the prism was an integral factor in the arising of colour.
"Whereas Newton observed the colour spectrum cast on a wall at a fixed distance away from the prism, Goethe observed the cast spectrum on a white card which was progressively moved away from the prism... As the card was moved away, the projected image elongated, gradually assuming an elliptical shape, and the coloured images became larger, finally merging at the centre to produce green. Moving the card farther led to the increase in the size of the image, until finally the spectrum described by Newton in the Opticks was produced... The image cast by the refracted beam was not fixed, but rather developed with increasing distance from the prism. Consequently, Goethe saw the particular distance chosen by Newton to prove the second proposition of the Opticks as capriciously imposed."
Whereas Newton narrowed the beam of light in order to isolate the phenomenon, Goethe observed that with a wider aperture, there was no spectrum. He saw only reddish-yellow edges and blue-cyan edges with white between them, and the spectrum arose only where these edges came close enough to overlap. For him, the spectrum could be explained by the simpler phenomena of colour arising from the interaction of light and dark edges.
Newton explains "the fact that all the colors appear only when the prism is at a certain distance from the screen, whereas the middle otherwise is white... [by saying] the more strongly diverted lights from the upper part of the image and the more weakly diverted ones from the lower part fall together in the middle and mix into white. The colors appear only at the edges because there none of the more strongly diverted parts of the light from above can fall into the most weakly diverted parts of the light, and none of the more weakly diverted ones from below can fall into the most strongly diverted ones." (Steiner, 1897)
Table of differences
| Qualities of Light | Newton (1704) | Goethe (1810) |
|---|---|---|
| Homogeneity | White light is composed of coloured elements (heterogeneous). | Light is the simplest most undivided most homogenous thing (homogenous). |
| Darkness | Darkness is the absence of light. | Darkness is polar to, and interacts with light. |
| Spectrum | Colours are fanned out of light according to their refrangibility (primary phenomenon). | Coloured edges which arise at light-dark borders overlap to form a spectrum (compound phenomenon). |
| Prism | The prism is immaterial to the existence of colour. | As a turbid medium, the prism plays a role in the arising of colour. |
| Role of Refraction | Light becomes decomposed through refraction, inflection, and reflection. | Refraction, inflection, and reflection can exist without the appearance of colour. |
| Analysis | White light decomposes into seven pure colours. | There are only two pure colours – blue and yellow; the rest are degrees of these. |
| Synthesis | Just as white light can be decomposed, it can be put back together. | Colours recombine to shades of grey. |
| Particle or Wave? | Particle | Neither, since they are inferences and not observed with the senses. |
| Colour Wheel | Asymmetric, 7 colours | Symmetric, 6 colours |
As a catalogue of observations, Goethe's experiments are useful data for understanding the complexities of human colour perception. Whereas Newton sought to develop a mathematical model for the behaviour of light, Goethe focused on exploring how colour is perceived in a wide array of conditions.
Goethe's reification
Reification
Reification generally refers to bringing into being or turning concrete.Specifically, reification may refer to:*Reification , making a data model for a previously abstract concept...
of darkness has caused almost all of modern physics to reject Goethe's theory. Both Newton and Huygens defined darkness as an absence of light. Young
Thomas Young (scientist)
Thomas Young was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work...
and Fresnel
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Augustin-Jean Fresnel , was a French engineer who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally....
combined Newton's particle theory with Huygen's wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Physicists today attribute both a corpuscular and undulatory character to light, which is the content of the so-called Wave–particle duality
Wave–particle duality
Wave–particle duality postulates that all particles exhibit both wave and particle properties. A central concept of quantum mechanics, this duality addresses the inability of classical concepts like "particle" and "wave" to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects...
. Curiously, since the crux of Goethe's theory is tied to what is experiential, he would reject both the wave and particle theories since they are conceptually inferred and not directly perceived by the human senses.
History and influence
The original German edition of the Farbenlehre has three sections: i) a didactic section in which Goethe presents his own observations, ii) a polemic section in which he makes his case against Newton, and iii) a historical section.From its publication in 1810, the book was controversial for its stance against Newton. So much so, that when Charles Eastlake
Charles Lock Eastlake
Sir Charles Lock Eastlake RA was an English painter, gallery director, collector and writer of the early 19th century.-Early life:...
translated the text into English in 1840, he omitted the content of Goethe's polemic against Newton.
Influence on the arts
Hue
Hue is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically , as "the degree to which a stimulus can be describedas similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow,"...
in painting. "During his first journey to Italy (1786-88), he noticed that artists were able to enunciate rules for virtually all the elements of painting and drawing except color and coloring. In the years 1786—88, Goethe began investigating whether one could ascertain rules to govern the artistic use of color."
It was a highly welcome acknowledgement of his aim, for him, when several pictorial artists, above all Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge
Philipp Otto Runge was a Romantic German painter and draughtsman. He made a late start to his career and died young, nonetheless he is considered among the best German Romantic painters.- Life and work :...
, took an interest in his colour studyings. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake
Charles Lock Eastlake
Sir Charles Lock Eastlake RA was an English painter, gallery director, collector and writer of the early 19th century.-Early life:...
in 1840, the theory became widely adopted by the art world – especially among the Pre-Raphaelites. J. M. W. Turner studied it comprehensively and referenced it in the titles of several paintings. Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
considered it "one of the most important works."
Influence on Latin American flags
During a party in Weimar in the winter of 1785, Goethe had a late-night conversation on his theory of primary colours with the South American revolutionary Francisco de MirandaFrancisco de Miranda
Sebastián Francisco de Miranda Ravelo y Rodríguez de Espinoza , commonly known as Francisco de Miranda , was a Venezuelan revolutionary...
. This conversation inspired Miranda, as he later recounted, in his designing the yellow, blue and red flag of Gran Colombia, from which the present national flags of Colombia
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
, Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
and Ecuador
Ecuador
Ecuador , officially the Republic of Ecuador is a representative democratic republic in South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is one of only two countries in South America, along with Chile, that do not have a border...
are derived. (See Flag of Colombia#History).
Reception by scientists
As early as 1853, in Hermann von HelmholtzHermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...
's lecture on Goethe's scientific works -- he says of Goethe's work that he depicts the perceived phenomena -- "circumstantially, rigorously true to nature, and vividly, puts them in an order that is pleasant to survey, and proves himself here, as everywhere in the realm of the factual, to be the great master of exposition" (Helmholtz 1892). Helmholtz ultimately rejects Goethe's theory as the work of a poet, but expresses his perplexity at how they can be in such agreement about the facts of the matter, but in violent contradiction about their meaning -- 'And I for one do not know how anyone, regardless of what his views about colours are, can deny that the theory in itself is fully consequent, that its assumptions, once granted, explain the facts treated completely and indeed simply'. (Helmholtz 1892)
Although the accuracy of Goethe's observations does not admit a great deal of criticism, his theory's failure to demonstrate significant predictive validity eventually rendered it scientifically irrelevant. Thomas Johann Seebeck
Thomas Johann Seebeck
Thomas Johann Seebeck was a physicist who in 1821 discovered the thermoelectric effect.Seebeck was born in Reval to a wealthy Baltic German merchant family. He received a medical degree in 1802 from the University of Göttingen, but preferred to study physics...
was the only prominent scientist among Goethe's contemporaries who acknowledged the theory, but later also saw it critically.
Much controversy stems from two different ways of investigating light and colour. Goethe was not interested in Newton's analytic treatment of colour – but he presented an excellent rational description of the phenomenon of human colour perception. It is as such a collection of colour observations that we must view this book.
Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum is a mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants.- Biography :...
has coined the phrase "Goethe had been right about colour!"
Current status
Developments in understanding how the brain interprets colours, such as colour constancyColor constancy
Color constancy is an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions. A green apple for instance looks green to us at midday, when the main...
and Edwin H. Land
Edwin H. Land
Edwin Herbert Land was an American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. Among other things, he invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and his retinex theory of color vision...
's retinex theory bear striking similarities to Goethe's theory (Ribe & Steinle, 2002).
A modern treatment of the book is given by Dennis L. Sepper in the book, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Quotations
On the catalytic moment
External links
- Complete book content in German language
- Scanned copy of English translation as a Google book
- Physics Today – Exploratory Experimentation: Goethe, Land, and Colour Theory, 2002
- Goethe's Prismatic Experiments; Fotos by Sakae Tajima
- Light, Darkness and Colour, a film by Henrik Boëtius (1998)
- Connections That Have a Quality of Necessity: Goethe's Way Of Science As a Phenomenology of Nature
- Colour Mixing and Goethe's Triangle (Java Applet)
- Critical review of Goethe's Theory of Colours
- A list of links relating to Goethe's investigation of colour
- Essay discussing color psychology and Goethe's theory
- Google Scholar: Works citing "Theory of Colours"