Theory of Colours

Theory of Colours (original German title Zur Farbenlehre) is a work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colours and how these are perceived by humans, 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.^[2] 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.

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.^[3]

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^[4]). 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."^[5]

[Goethe] delivered in full measure what was promised by the title of his excellent work: Data for a Theory of Color. They are important, complete, and significant data, rich material for a future theory of color. He has not, however, undertaken to furnish the theory itself; hence, as he himself remarks and admits on page xxxix of the introduction, he has not furnished us with a real explanation of the essential nature of color, but really postulates it as a phenomenon, and merely tells us how it originates, not what it is. The physiological colors ... he represents as a phenomenon, complete and existing by itself, without even attempting to show their relation to the physical colors, his principal theme. ... it is really a systematic presentation of facts, but it stops short at this.

—Schopenhauer, On Vision and Colors, Introduction

The crux of his color theory is its experiential source: rather than impose theoretical statements, Goethe sought to allow light and color to be displayed in an ordered series of experiments that readers could experience for themselves." (Seamon, 1998^[6]). As such, he would reject both the wave and particle theories because they are conceptually inferred and not directly perceived by the human senses. According to Goethe, "Newton's error... was trusting math over the sensations of his eye."

—Jonah Lehrer, Goethe and Color, December 7, 2006

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 crucis for Goethe's theory of colour.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour

Historical background

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.^[7]

Along with the rest of the world I was convinced that all the colours are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in the subject.

—Goethe

In 1740, Louis Bertrand Castel published a criticism of Newton's spectral description of prismatic colour,^[8] 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.^[9]

Goethe's starting point: Newton's supposed error

But how I was astonished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some darkened area, it showed some colour, then at last, around the window sill all the colours shone... It didn't take long before I knew here was something significant about colour to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the Newtonian teachings were false.

—Goethe^[10]

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").^[11] His starting point was the supposed discovery of how Newton erred, in the prismatic experiment.^[12] However, by 1794, Goethe began to shift away from this view, sensing more and more strongly the meaning of the physiological side of colours.^[13]

Announcing the publication of the Theory of Colours, he stated:

The theory but that we postulate with certainty indeed also begins with colourless light, avails itself of outward conditions, to produce coloured phenomena; but it concedes worth and dignity to these conditions. It does not arrogate to itself developing colours from the light, but rather seeks to prove by numberless cases that colour is produced as well by light as by what is pitted against this.

—Goethe^[14]

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.

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).

...they maintained that shade is a part of light. It sounds absurd when I express it; but so it is: for they said that colours, which are shadow and the result of shade, are light itself.

—Johann Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, entry: January 4, 1824; trans. Wallace Wood

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:

Modern natural science sees darkness as a complete nothingness. According to this view, the light which streams into a dark space has no resistance from the darkness to overcome. Goethe pictures to himself that light and darkness relate to each other like the north and south pole of a magnet. The darkness can weaken the light in its working power. Conversely, the light can limit the energy of the darkness. In both cases color arises.

—Rudolf Steiner, 1897^[15]

Goethe writes:^[16]

Yellow is a light which has been dampened by darkness Blue is a darkness weakened by light.

Experiments with turbid media

The action of turbid media was to Goethe the ultimate fact — the Urphänomen — of the world of colours.

—John Tyndall, 1880^[17]

Goethe's studies of colour began with subjective experiments which examined the effects of turbid media 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.

The highest degree of light, such as that of the sun... is for the most part colourless. This light, however, seen through a medium but very slightly thickened, appears to us yellow. If the density of such a medium be increased, or if its volume become greater, we shall see the light gradually assume a yellow-red hue, which at last deepens to a ruby colour. If on the other hand darkness is seen through a semi-transparent medium, which is itself illumined by a light striking on it, a blue colour appears: this becomes lighter and paler as the density of the medium is increased, but on the contrary appears darker and deeper the more transparent the medium becomes: in the least degree of dimness short of absolute transparence, always supposing a perfectly colourless medium, this deep blue approaches the most beautiful violet.

—Goethe, Theory of Colours, pp. 150–151

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

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.

Light and dark spectra

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's colour wheel

When the eye sees a colour it is immediately excited and it is its nature, spontaneously and of necessity, at once to produce another, which with the original colour, comprehends the whole chromatic scale.

— Goethe, Theory of Colours

Goethe anticipated Ewald Hering's Opponent process theory^[18] 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^[19]).

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).^[20]

"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."^[21]

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.^[22]

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.^[23]

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."^[24]

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^[15])

Table of differences

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.

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 translated the text into English in 1840, he omitted the content of Goethe's polemic against Newton.

Significantly (and regrettably), only the 'Didactic' colour observations appear in Eastlake's translation. In his preface, Eastlake explains that he deleted the historical and entoptic parts of the book because they 'lacked scientific interest', and censored Goethe's polemic because the 'violence of his objections' against Newton would prevent readers from fairly judging Goethe's color observations.

—Bruce MacEvoy,  Handprint.com, 2008^[25]

Influence on the arts

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." ^[26]

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.^[27] 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.^[28] Wassily Kandinsky considered it "one of the most important works."^[29]

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 Miranda. 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).

Reception by scientists

As early as 1853, in Hermann von Helmholtz'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) ^[30]

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.^[31]

Goethe's colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics. But victory, and hence influence on the research of the following century, has been Newton's.

— Werner Heisenberg, 1952

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.

Most of Goethe's explanations of color have been thoroughly demolished, but no criticism has been leveled at his reports of the facts to be observed; nor should any be. This book can lead the reader through a demonstration course not only in subjectively produced colors (after images, light and dark adaptation, irradiation, colored shadows, and pressure phosphenes), but also in physical phenomena detectable qualitatively by observation of color (absorption, scattering, refraction, diffraction, polarization, and interference). A reader who attempts to follow the logic of Goethe's explanations and who attempts to compare them with the currently accepted views might, even with the advantage of 1970 sophistication, become convinced that Goethe's theory, or at least a part of it, has been dismissed too quickly.

—Judd, 1970^[32]

Mitchell Feigenbaum has coined the phrase "Goethe had been right about colour!"^[21]

As Feigenbaum understood them, Goethe's ideas had true science in them. They were hard and empirical. Over and over again, Goethe emphasized the repeatability of his experiments. It was the perception of colour, to Goethe, that was universal and objective. What scientific evidence was there for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our perception?

— James Gleick, Chaos^[33]

Current status

Goethe started out by accepting Newton's physical theory. He soon abandoned it... finding modification to be more in keeping with his own insights. One beneficial consequence of this was that he developed an awareness of the importance of the physiological aspect of colour perception, and was therefore able to demonstrate that Newton's theory of light and colours is too simplistic; that there is more to colour than variable refrangibility.

—Michael Duck, 1988^[34]

Developments in understanding how the brain interprets colours, such as colour constancy 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).^[26]

Quotations

See also

• Theory of painting
• Checker shadow illusion (Same color illusion)

Notes and references

Bibliography

• Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. ISBN 0-262-57021-1
• Bockemuhl, M., Turner. Koln: Taschen, 1991. ISBN 3-8228-6325-4.
• Duck, Michael, “Newton and Goethe on colour: Physical and physiological considerations”, Annals of Science 45(5), September 1988. pp. 507–519.
• Gleick, James, Chaos, London: William Heinemann, 1988. pp. 165–7
• Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color, Dornach: Steiner Books, 1986.
• Ribe, Neil and Friedrich Steinle, “Exploratory Experimentation: Goethe, Land, and Color Theory”, Physics Today 55(7), July 2002.
• Schopenhauer, On Vision and Colors, Providence: Berg, 1994. ISBN 0-85496-988-8
• Sepper, Dennis L., Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 0521531322
• Steiner, Rudolf, First Scientific Lecture-Course, Third Lecture, Stuttgart, 25 December 1919. GA320.
• Steiner, Rudolf, “Goethe's World View”, Chapter III The Phenomena of the World of Colors, 1897.
• Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. ISBN 0-520-03727-8

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)
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • John Tyndall, “Goethe's Farbenlehre-(Theory of Colors) I,” in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 17, June 1880.
  • John Tyndall, “Goethe's Farbenlehre-(Theory of Colors) II,” in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 17, July 1880.
• 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"