Abstract
In the preceding chapter we spoke of Schopenhauer’s personal encounter with Goethe in the autumn of 1813, yet this was not quite the first time the two had met, or at least had been present in the same room at the same time. Here is how they had begun to make one another’s acquaintance. On gaining permission from his mother to drop a commercial career, Arthur had entered the gymnasium at Gotha in the spring of 1807, in order to acquire the command of Greek and Latin required for entrance to the academy; but his stay there was not to be a very long one. A verse mocking one of his teachers led to a conflict with the rector and, rather than apologizing, young Arthur chose to leave the school in December of the same year and to complete his classical studies in private. This he did with such quick progress that (so we recall) he could enroll at the university of Göttingen in the autumn of 1809. These almost two years of private study, then, he spent in Weimar, though not in his mother’s house. Well aware of her son’s somewhat difficult temperament, she preferred not to live with him under one roof, and strictly rationed him as to the number of visits he was allowed to pay her. Yet Johanna Schopenhauer, née Trosiener, did admit him to the literary tea-parties she used to give in her drawing-room (just like every other self-respecting and cultivated lady at the time, and the more so since she was herself a successful author of society novels).
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Goethe had proceeded to formally manying Christiane Vulpius out of gratitude towards her for saving him, by her resolute behaviour, from marauding French soldiers who had entered the house at the Frauenplan during the sack of Weimar in October 1806. The town was given free for plunder as a punishment for the little duchy’s siding with Prussia — about which minister von Goethe had had his doubts — during the war which for Prussia had ended so disastrously at Jena (where the decisive battle took place, followed by the humiliating peace-treaty of Tilsit).
One of these quarrels culminated in a dialogue too funny to withhold from the reader. Angered by an irreverent remark by his mother on the title of the dissertation he had brought home (“this is probably meant for pharmacists?”), Arthur exploded into the prophecy that his name would still be immortal at a time when not a single copy of his mother’s novels would still be found anywhere in the world; upon which Johanna — having a ready tongue, too — retorted: “And of your book the whole first edition will still be there to be had”.
“Auf Alles was ich als Poet geleistet habe [pflegte er wiederholt zu sagen], bilde ich mir gar nichts ein. Es haben treffliche Dichter mit mir gelebt, es lebten noch Trefflichere vor mir, und es werden ihrer nach mir seyn. Daß ich aber in meinem Jahrhundert in der schwierigen Wissenschaft der Farbenlehre der Einzige bin, der das Rechte weiß, darauf thue ich mir etwas zu gute, und ich habe daher ein Bewußtseyn der Superiorität über viele.”
This in spite of the fact that Leonardo had already written a treatise on painting (posthumously published in 1651), in which he had tried to lay down the laws, not only of perspective but also those that govern the phenomenon of colour. Goethe, too, seems not to have known it, for he does not mention it in the remarks about Leonardo in the chapter on the ‘history of coloration since the restoration of art’ (‘Geschichte des Kolorits seit Wiederherstellung der Kunst’; a title which, let it be said in passing, is characteristic of the author’s classicist contempt of medieval art) from the historical part of the Theory of Colours.
“Es bedurfte keiner langen Überlegung, so erkannte ich, daß eine Gränze nothwendig sei, um Farbe hervorzubringen, und ich sprach wie durch einen Instinct sogleich vor mich laut aus, daß die Newtonsche Farbenlehre falsch sei.”
“For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour.”
It would be somewhat otherwise if it were true that Newton had a priori denied the possibility of the existence of such invisible radiation as was actually to be discovered about a century later (the infrared part of the spectrum by Sir William, originally Friedrich Wilhelm, Herschel in 1800; the ultraviolet part shortly afterwards by Johann Wilhelm Ritter). Rudolf Laemmel, in his biography of Newton, mentions a letter by Newton to a certain Dr Maddock (dated 7 February 1679), who had suggested this possibility, only to see it rejected by Newton. Richard Westfall mentions this letter in his biography of Newton, but expresses his doubts about its authenticity, because “its tone of light irony resembles Newton’s style about as much as a gazelle resembles a tiger”.
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The matter is biographically interesting since as a matter of fact efforts spent by Newton to improve the already existing refracting telescope by grinding differently shaped lenses (in order to get rid of the chromatic interferences that used to appear at the edges of the projected image) had originally stimulated his interest in optical studies. His experimentum crucis, however, convinced him (wrongly) that this was impossible; he therefore gave up the attempt and turned instead to the construction of a novel kind of telescope (the reflecting telescope). That it was a modern technological problem which aroused Newton’s interest in the phenomenon of colour whereas it was an aesthetic one in the case of Goethe may well be regarded as symbolic of their differing frames of mind!
This pair of concepts (Polarität and Steigerung), which did not yet appear in the wellknown fragment by Georg Christoph Tobler (composed by the latter during a visit to Goethe in 1781 under the title ‘Die Natur’ and anonymously published two years later in the Tiefurter Journal, 32. Stück, 1783), was adopted by Goethe from Schelling, in whose philosophy of nature it plays a central part (cf. our remarks on the relation between Goethe and Romantic Naturphilosophie in Chapter I, p. 34). That Tobler was the true author of the fragment was already revealed by Frau von Stein in a letter (28 March 1783) to Karl Ludwig von Knebel, who took Goethe to be the author, in spite of a confirmation to the contrary by Goethe himself in a letter (3 March 1783) to the same adress. Much later however, in a letter to Chancellor von Müller (24 May 1828), Goethe writes that, although he does not remember it, he thinks it probable that he himself is the author since it is in accordance with his views at that time, and since the manuscript (found shortly before in the posthumously published correspondence of Duchess Anna Amalia of Sachsen-Weimar) betrays the handwriting of his secretary at that time.
According to modern theories of colours there are three kinds of colour receptors (cones) in the eye: those that are receptive of short-wave, medium-wave and long-wave light, respectively; thus there are three primary light-colours (ultramarine blue, green and red). The additive combination (cf footnote on p. 61) of all three together naturally produces white, the additive combination of only two of them produces the three primary pigmentcolours, i.e., cyanide blue (from ultramarine blue and green), magenta (from ultramarine blue and red) and yellow (from green and red). The additive combination of these with the primary light-colour left out in each case (i.e., cyanide blue with red, magenta with green and yellow with ultramarine blue) naturally produces white again; the three possible subtractive combinations of the primary pigment-colours produce the three primary lightcolours again (ultramarine blue from magenta and cyanide blue, green from cyanide blue and yellow, red from yellow and magenta). Thus in the cases of magenta vs. green, cyanide blue vs. red, and yellow vs. ultramarine blue we are indeed concerned with the three pairs of complementary contrast colours we find in Goethe’s colour ring (with the important proviso that their additive union does produce white; and with the terminological proviso that Goethe calls ‘purple’ or ‘true red’ what we call now ‘magenta’, and ‘blue’ what we call now ‘cyanide blue’ or simply ‘cyanide’, whereas at the same time he does not sharply differentiate between (spectral) red and orange (calling them Gelbrot, i.e. ‘yellowish red’ and Rotgelb, i.e. ‘reddish yellow’, respectively, but sometimes using ‘orange’ for both of them and moreover sometimes confusing them) nor between ultramarine blue and violet (calling them Rotblau, i.e., ‘reddish blue’ and Blaurot, i.e., ‘bluish red’, respectively, but sometimes using ‘violet’ for both of them and again sometimes confusing them). As we shall see, Schopenhauer (who rightly remarked that Goethe was inconsistent insofar as he originally called blue [i.e., cyanide] — instead of violet [today we would rather say ultramarine blue] — and yellow polar opposites) drew indeed from this the almost inevitable (but from Goethe’s point of view unacceptable) conclusion that each of these complementary contrast pairs must produce white (as lights, not as pigments, to be sure).
“Daß alle Farben zusammengemischt Weiß machen, ist eine Absurdität, die man nebst andern Absurditäten schon ein Jahrhundert gläubig und dem Augenschein entgegen zu wiederholen gewohnt ist.”
In additive colour mixing the eye receives the sum of the light energies that gather in one place, e.g. when differently coloured lights are superimposed on a projection screen; since there is in this case a greater activation of one or more of the three kinds of colour receptors in the retina than the activation produced by one single colour the resulting colour is brighter than each of its components. In subtractive mixing there is, on the contrary, a lesser activation of one or more of the three kinds of colour receptors in the retina than the activation produced by one single colour, since by mixing pigments or by laying coloured transparencies over each other, the absorption process (and thus the diminishing of the total light energy that reaches the eye) is reinforced, and the resulting colour is darker than each of its components. This effect is produced by the fact that the colours of pigments and the local colours of objects result from the light they reflect after their surfaces have absorbed their specific part of the wavelength area; e.g. a red surface absorbs everything but the wavelengths corresponding to red.
“Daß Newton bei seinen prismatischen Versuchen die Öffnung so klein als möglich nahm, um eine Linie zum Lichtstrahl bequem zu symbolisieren, hat eine unheilbare Verirrung über die Welt gebracht, an der vielleicht noch Jahrhunderte leiden. Durch dieses kleine Löchlein ward Malus zu einer abenteuerlichen Theorie getrieben ...”.
“Das unselige kleine Löchlein, wodurch Newton seine captiösen Versuche eingeführt, verblindet noch immer die Experimentierenden. Malus bezog seinen Spiegelungs-Apparat gleichfalls auf eine solche Öffnung und Seebeck, so lange er dieser Angabe folgte, konnte selbst nicht zu der wahren Anschauung gelangen.”
‡ Malus on his part had on 31 July 1811 written a review of the Theory of Colours which passes over the fourth and fifth chapter of the didactic part because, according to the reviewer, in these final chapters facts and metaphysical arguments are mixed together in a way which makes a clear analysis of them impossible (“dans ces derniers chapitres les faits et les raisonnements métaphysiques sont tellement confondus ensemble, qu’il serait impossible d’en faire analyse”), and which arrives at a general conclusion about this part in which it is acknowledged that Goethe (if you leave his vague metaphysical explanations aside) has given a rather complete description of the most important optical phenomena which betrays his knowledge of all experiments and his having repeated them himself, but which makes clear, too, that he has never measured any phenomenon; hence the vagueness of his theory (“Si l’on considère cette première partie de l’ouvrage de M.Goethe, indépendamment de la métaphysique et des explications vagues qu’elle renferme, on y trouve une description assez complète des principaux phénomènes de l’optique. On voit que l’auteur a connu toutes les expériences, et les a répetées lui-même; mais on s’apperçoit en même temps qu’il n’a mesuré aucun phénomène, ce qui est la cause du vague qui règne dans sa théorie”). He likewise passed over the historical part; and as to the polemical part: after having mentioned some concrete points of Goethe’s critique of Newton he proceeds to the way in which Goethe speaks about Newton and his partisans, namely, as if they belong in a lunatic asylum and that their skulls ought to be inspected by Dr Gall [the famous phrenologist, PL], and expresses his amazement about Goethe’s using such arguments in a work on physics which, according to the reviewer, makes clear that the author does not possess that frame of mind which belongs to a man who sincerely seeks truth, so that one may safely assume that he will not get many followers and that it is not in this book that one will track down the real errors that Newton may have committed (“On est surpris de voir M.Goethe employer de semblables arguments dans un ouvrage de physique, et l’on s’apperçoit trop souvent qu’il n’est pas dans la disposition d’esprit qui convient à ceux qui cherchent franchement la vérité. Il est donc probable, qu’il fera peu de prosélites, malgré son excessive intolérance. Comme il condamne indistinctement toutes les opinions du Traité d’optique, ce n’est pas dans son livre qu’on osera rechercher les erreurs que Newton peut avoir commises”).
“Das Copernikanische System beruht auf einer Idee, die schwer zu fassen war und doch täglich unseren Sinnen widerspricht. Wir sagen nur nach, was wir nicht erkennen, noch begreifen. Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen widerspricht gleichfalls unseren Sinnen.”
Dresden is where he completed his magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.
* “Gerade die erstaunliche Objektivität seines Geistes, welche seinen Dichtungen überall den Stämpel des Genies aufdrückt, stand ihm im Wege, wo es galt, auf das Subjekt, hier das sehende Auge selbst, zurückzugehen, um daselbst die letzten Fäden, an denen die ganze Erscheinung der Farbenwelt hängt, zu erfassen; während hingegen ich, aus Kant’s Schule kommend, dieser Anforderung zu genügen auf’s Beste vorbereitet war: daher konnte ich, ein Jahr nachdem ich Goethes persönlichem Einfluß entzogen war, die wahre, fundamentale und unumstößliche Theorie der Farbe herausfinden.”
On the usage of the terms “intuition” and “perception” in the present book, see footnote on p. 43.
‡ The reader should be aware that, just as with the Fourfold Root, there exist two versions of On Vision and Colours with a considerable time lag between them. Other than with the second version of the Fourfold Root, the principal thesis of On Vision and Colours displays no further essential development but (apart from a new preface in which Schopenhauer gives a more detailed account of his relation with Goethe and of the differences between them than naturally was possible in the first version) only some (if sometimes considerable) enlargements, some updating (especially on the wave-theory), and, of course, some freshly added mud-slinging. Therefore we feel entitled to refrain in this case from a systematic comparison between the two versions. Only when we refer to an argument which as such appears solely in the second version, we mention its absence from the first version.
It must be noted, however, that Schopenhauer does mention Müller with approval in another context, which proves an at least partial acquaintance with the latter’s work.
* “Das Kind, in den ersten Wochen seines Lebens, empfindet mit allen Sinnen: aber es schaut nicht an, es apprehendirt nicht: daher starrt es dumm in die Welt hinein. Bald indessen fängt es an den Verstand gebrauchen zu lernen, das ihm vor aller Erfahrung bewußte Gesetz der Kausalität anzuwenden und es mit den ebenso a priori gegebenen Formen aller Erkenntniß, Zeit und Raum, zu verbinden: so gelangt es von der Empfindung zur Anschauung, zur Apprehension: und nunmehr blickt es mit klugen, intelligenten Augen in die Welt. Da aber jedes Objekt auf alle füünf Sinne verschieden wirkt, diese Wirkungen dennoch auf eine und die nämliche Ursache zurückleiten, welche sich eben dadurch als Objekt darstellt; so vergleicht das die Anschauung lernende Kind die verschiedenartigen Eindrücke, welche es vom nämlichen Objekt erhält: es betastet was es sieht, besieht was es betastet, geht dem Klange nach zu dessen Ursache, nimmt Geruch und Geschmack zu Hüülfe, bringt endlich auch für das Auge die Entfernung und Beleuchtung in Anschlag, lernt die Wirkung des Lichts und des Schattens kennen und endlich, mit vieler Mühe, auch die Perspektive, deren Kenntniß zu Stande kommt, durch Vereinigung der Gesetze des Raums mit dem der Kausalität, die beide a priori im Bewußtseyn liegen und nur der Anwendung bedürfen, wobei nun sogar die Veränderungen, welche, beim Sehn in verschiedene Entfernungen, theils die innere Konformation der Augen, theils die Lage beider Augen gegen einander erleidet, in Anschlag gebracht werden müssen: und alle diese Kombinationen macht für den Verstand schon das Kind, für die Vernunft, d.h. in abstracto, erst der Optiker. Dergestalt also verarbeitet das Kind die mannigfaltigen Data der Sinnlichkeit, nach den ihm a priori bewußten Gesetzen des Verstandes, zur Anschauung, mit welcher allererst die Welt als Objekt für dasselbe daist. Viel später lernt es die Vernunft gebrauchen: dann fängt es an die Rede zu verstehn, zu sprechen und eigentlich zu denken.”
“Die Farben sind Thaten des Lichts, Thaten und Leiden.”
The reader should be warned that the word “spectrum” is used by Schopenhauer as well as by Goethe in the unusual sense of ‘after-image’.
As already mentioned in a footnote on p. 57, and as we shall see further on, Schopenhauer differs here from Goethe insofar as he considers not yellow and blue but yellow and violet to be the original polar opposites.
“Vergleiche ich Ihre Farbenlehre einer Pyramide, so ist meine Theorie die Spitze derselben, der untheilbare mathematische Punkt, von dem aus das ganze große Gebäude sich ausbreitet, und der so wesentlich ist, daß es ohne ihn keine Pyramide mehr ist, während man von unten immer abschneiden kann ohne daß es aufhört Pyramide zu seyn.”
“... diese Farben, welche das Fundament der ganzen Lehre machen ...”
* “Diese Phänomene sind von der größten Wichtigkeit, indem sie uns auf die Gesetze des Sehens hindeuten und zu künftiger Betrachtung der Farben eine notwendige Vorbereitung sind. Das Auge verlangt dabei ganz eigentlich Totalität und schließt in sich selbst den Farbenkreis ab. In dem vom Gelben geforderten Violetten liegt das Rothe und Blaue; im Orange das Gelbe und Rothe, dem das Blaue entspricht; das Grüne vereinigt Blau und Gelb und fordert das Rothe, und so in allen Abstufungen der verschiedensten Mischungen.”
Such a gentleman’s solution (which would, we repeat, have been wholly unacceptable to Goethe) was to be suggested much later by Werner Heisenberg.
* Schopenhauer rightly believed that Newton distinguished between seven colours only for the benefit of an analogy to the seven intervals of the gamut; according to him there were only four colours in the prismatic spectrum, since he (like Goethe) did not sharply differentiate between violet and ultramarine blue on the one hand and between (prismatic) red and orange on the other; and since, moreover, he claims that green appears only when, at a greater distance from the prism, the blue (i.e., cyanide) and yellow components overlap. As already mentioned in our footnote on p. 59, contemporary theories of colour, just like those of Goethe and Schopenhauer, accept six basic colours roughly corresponding with theirs in fact, though not in terminology.
It is unclear why this should imperatively follow from Newton’s theory. Moreover, Schopenhauer fails to mention what for him must have been the most important reason for opting for Goethe’s theory: it is only the Goethean polarity of cold (or dark or passive) and warm (or bright or active) colours which can account for the otherwise (at least for us) rather inexplicable fact that red (magenta) and green appear as different colour sensations, although according to Schopenhauer they both represent 1/2 of the activity of the retina!
In fact there is a historical rather than a necessary connection here insofar as in principle it might also have been possible on the basis of a modified emission theory; yet not in any way on the basis of the Goethean-Schopenhauerian theory of the homogeneous nature of light.
“Goethe on the other hand was too old when these phenomena [the polarization of light] were discovered, and began to ramble.” (“Goethe wieder war zu alt, als diese Phänomene entdeckt wurden, — fieng an zu radotiren.”). This remark, as well as Schopenhauer’s polemic against the wave theory generally and also (in connection with it) against some contemporary physicists, is to be found in the fourteenth and final section (“Some additions to Goethe’s doctrine on the origin of physical colours”; “Einige Zugaben zu Goethes Lehre von der Entstehung der physischen Farben”) of the second edition — a section which is therefore a considerably enlarged version of the seventeenth section (simply headed “Conclusion”; “Beschluß”) of the first edition. In his rejection of the wave theory Schopenhauer points especially (and, in retrospect surely, with justice) to the “completely hypothetical, nay, mythological nature” of “a certain aether”, the vibrations of which are supposed to be the cause of the colour-phenomenon; particularly amusing in this context is for him the circumstance that the quickest vibrations are attributed to the darkest and least effective of all colours, namely violet, and the slowest to the lively red which even excites animals (evidently Schopenhauer, like most people for that matter, still thought that the bull is provoked by the red colour of the swung cloth rather than by the swinging itself). Somewhat further on he attempts, therefore, an explanation of his own for the phenomenon of polarized light; we refer the interested reader to Schopenhauer’s text itself.
Allusion to Schiller’s famous essay ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’ (‘On naive and sentimental poetry’). Goethe’s attitude towards his self-opinionated disciple, and towards any criticism of his theory of colours in general, is illuminatingly revealed in a conversation with Eckermann on 19 February 1829. Eckermann had allowed himself to put forward some criticism of Goethe’s explanation of coloured shadows, and, consequently, provoked the master’s wrath; according to Eckermann’s account Goethe compared the fate of his theory of colours with that of Christianity: for a time one thinks one has faithful disciples, but they deviate and become a sect. “You are a heretic like others” (“Sie sind ein Ketzer wie die anderen auch”), poor Eckermann was told; “the others” are not mentioned by name in the text, but are marked by dots for reasons of discretion; but in the editor’s postscript a letter from Eckermann to Varnhagen von Ense of 14 June 1836 is quoted, from which it appears that Schopenhauer was one of them. Eckermann seems to have been a little puzzled by Goethe’s intolerant attitude to even the slightest objection to his theory of colours, since this stands in marked contrast with Goethe’s liberal attitude to criticism of his literary work; he seeks to explain this difference through Goethe’s sense of being misjudged as a scientist (whereas there was no reason for such feelings for Goethe as a poet).
Provided that Pouillet, like Schopenhauer, and also Goethe, did not sharply differentiate between spectral red and orange (cf. our footnotes on pages 59 and 75); for, as we know, the additive combination of red and green light does indeed produce yellow light.
Nor does, by the way, 1/4 (Schopenhauer’s fraction number for violet) + 2/3 (likewise for orange) yield 1/2 (the fraction number for ‘red’, i.e. magenta); but characteristically Schopenhauer had no problem with the latter’s resulting from the former two, probably because the prismatic result happens to coincide here roughly with the pigmental result.
“Wir nehmen nie die Gegenstände der Aussenwelt unmittelbar wahr, sondern wir nehmen nur Wirkungen dieser Gegenstände auf unsere Nervenapparate wahr, und das ist vom ersten Augenblick unseres Lebens an so gewesen. Auf welche Weise sind wir denn nun zuerst aus der Welt der Empfindungen unserer Nerven hinübergelangt in die Welt der Wirklichkeit? Offenbar nur durch einen Schluss: wir müssen die Gegenwart äusserer Objekte als Ursache unserer Nervenerregung voraussetzen, denn es kann keine Wirkung ohne Ursache sein.”
“Ich habe später jenen Namen der unbewussten Schlüsse vermieden, um der Verwechslung mit der, wie mir scheint, gänzlich unklaren und ungerechtfertigten Vorstellung zu entgehen, die Schopenhauer und seine Nachfolger mit diesem Namen bezeichnen.”
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Lauxtermann, P.F.H. (2000). Colours. In: Schopenhauer’s Broken World-View. Science and Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9369-4_4
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