Remarks on Colour

Remarks on Colour (German: Bemerkungen über die Farben) 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 colour.^[1] Believing that philosophical puzzles about colour can only be resolved through attention to the involved language-games, Wittgenstein distinguishes between the science of optics, as developed by Newton, and Goethe's phenomenology of colour, remarking that:

Remarks on Colour is generally considered a very difficult work, partially on account of its fragmentation.^[1]

This was one of Wittgenstein's last works and was written during a visit to Vienna in 1950 and while he was dying of cancer in Cambridge the following year.^[2] His last remarks, which he wrote during the last months of his life, his last remark dating from but a few days before his death, are now known under the title On Certainty (German: Über Gewissheit). Although he was never really satisfied with his remarks on colour, his last work is considered to be one of his most clear and sparkling collection of remarks, inspired by G.E. Moore's insistence that he could prove the existence of the external world, dealing with the fundamental feuds between idealists (scepticists) and realists about what one can meaningfully say about the existence of the external world, starting from those assertions which Moore took to be undubitable like "I know, that this is a hand."

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