Түстер туралы теория: Гёте көзқарасы

1810 book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre) is a book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colours and how they are perceived by humans. It was published in German in 1810 and in English in 1840. Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic treatment of colour, 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 comments on Goethe's theory in Remarks on Colour and in Jonathan Westphal's Commentary on this work (1991).

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. Goethe's starting point was the supposed discovery of how Newton erred in the prismatic experiment, and by 1793 Goethe had formulated his arguments against Newton in the essay "Über Newtons Hypothese der diversen Refrangibilität" ("On Newton's hypothesis of diverse refrangibility"). Yet, by 1794, Goethe had begun to increasingly note the importance of the physiological aspect of colours. As Goethe notes in the historical section, Louis Bertrand Castel had already published a criticism of Newton's spectral description of prismatic colour in 1740 in which he observed that the sequence of colours split by a prism depended on the distance from the prism—and that Newton was looking at a special case. "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." (Alex Kentsis, Between Light and Eye)

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 of his entire study of nature. Recently, experiments by physicist Matthias Rang have demonstrated Goethe's discovery of complementarity as a symmetric property of spectral phenomena.

Goethe's studies of colour began with experiments which examined the effects of turbid media, such as air, dust, and moisture 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. He then proceeds with numerous experiments, systematically observing the effects of rarefied mediums such as dust, air, and moisture on the perception of colour.

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 (i. e. a shaft of light in a surrounding darkness), 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. Unfortunately an optical mixture of blue and yellow gives white, not green, and so Goethe's explanation of Newton's spectrum fails. 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—and where these edges overlap, we find (extraspectral) magenta. Olaf Müller presented the matter in the following way, "According to Newton, all spectral colors are contained in white sunlight, according to Goethe, the opposite can be said — that all colors of the complementary spectrum are contained in the dark."

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 [demands] blue; purple [demands] green; and vice versa: thus all intermediate gradations reciprocally evoke each other; the simpler colour demanding the compound, and vice versa (

Qualities of lightNewton (1704)Goethe (1810)HomogeneityWhite light is composed of coloured elements (heterogeneous). Light is the simplest most undivided most homogenous thing (homogeneous). DarknessDarkness is the absence of light. Darkness is polar to, and interacts with light. SpectrumColours 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). PrismThe prism is immaterial to the existence of colour. As a turbid medium, the prism plays a role in the arising of colour. Role of refractionLight becomes decomposed through refraction, inflection, and reflection. Refraction, inflection, and reflection can exist without the appearance of colour. AnalysisWhite light decomposes into a spectrum of all colors. There are only two pure colours—blue and yellow; the rest are degrees of these. Citation: (Theory of Colours, Volume 3, Paragraph 201/202)SynthesisJust as white light can be decomposed, it can be put back together. Colours recombine to shades of grey. Particle or wave?ParticleNeither, since they are inferences and not observed with the senses. Colour wheelAsymmetric, 7 coloursSymmetric, 6 colours

Goethe's reification of darkness is rejected by modern physics. Both Newton and Huygens defined darkness as an absence of light. Young and Fresnel showed that Huygens' wave theory (in his Treatise on Light) could explain that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Physicists today attribute both a corpuscular and undulatory character to light—comprising the wave–particle duality.

The first edition of the Farbenlehre was printed at the Cotta'schen Verlagsbuchhandlung on May 16, 1810, with 250 copies on grey paper and 500 copies on white paper. It contained 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, 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 was initially induced to occupy himself with the study of colour 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." This aim came to some fulfillment when several pictorial artists, above all Philipp Otto Runge, took an interest in his colour studies. 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."

During a party in Weimar in the winter of 1785, Goethe had a late night conversation with the South American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda. In a letter written to Count Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov (1792), Miranda recounted how Goethe, fascinated with his exploits throughout the Americas and Europe, told him, "Your destiny is to create in your land a place where primary colours are not distorted." He proceeded to clarify what he meant:

In the nineteenth century Goethe's Theory was taken up by Schopenhauer in On Vision and Colors, who developed it into a kind of arithmetical physiology of the action of the retina, much in keeping with his own representative idealism ["The world is my representation or idea"]. In the twentieth century the theory was transmitted to philosophy via Wittgenstein, who devoted a series of remarks to the subject at the end of his life. These remarks are collected as Remarks on Colour, (Wittgenstein, 1977). Wittgenstein was interested in the fact that some propositions about colour are apparently neither empirical nor exactly a priori, but something in between: phenomenology, according to Goethe. However, Wittgenstein took the line that 'There is no such thing as phenomenology, though there are phenomenological problems.' He was content to regard Goethe's observations as a kind of logic or geometry. Wittgenstein took his examples from the Runge letter included in the "Farbenlehre", e. g. "White is the lightest colour", "There cannot be a transparent white", "There cannot be a reddish green", and so on. The logical status of these propositions in Wittgenstein's investigation, including their relation to physics, has been discussed in Jonathan Westphal's Colour: a Philosophical Introduction (Westphal, 1991).