SOURCE: "Goethe against Newton: Towards Saving the Phenomenon," in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, Harvey Wheeler, eds., D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 175-93.

[In the following essay, Sepper studies Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's attack on Newton's theory of white light and colors, maintaining that while Goethe's critique is sometimes flawed by "excessive vehemence" and an "all-encompassing condemnation" of Newton's theory, Goethe nevertheless presents a justified opposition to Newton's methods.]

Wer ein Phanomen vor Augen hat, denkt
schon oft druber hinaus; wer nur davon
erzahlen hort, denkt gar nicht.
(Goethe, Maximen, No. 1227)

In all the scientific work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe nothing is more notorious than his polemic against Isaac Newton's theory of white light and colors.' This "great error" has been a constant source of embarrassment to reverers of Goethe that seemingly can be explained only by analyzing his psyche or his poetic metaphysics. Not a few, including Hermann von Helmholtz, thought that precisely Goethe's poetic talent prevented him from understanding modern natural science. His advocacy of direct and immediate experience, it is said, made possible his contributions to descriptive sciences like plant and animal morphology but also kept him from real insight into the abstract techniques and power of mathematico-physical science (1971, pp. 21-44). His polemics against Newton are taken to be the clearest testimony of Goethe's one-sidedness; the most one can say in his defense, it seems, is that in the struggle to assert the rights of the world of appearances he sinned against a truth that can only be uncovered by methods that go behind and beyond the phenomena. Of course in the twentieth century there has been a partial rehabilitation of the Farbenlehre, especially in its treatment of physiological and psychological aspects of color, and a greater readiness to acknowledge its virtues (e.g. concreteness) vis-a-vis modern theoretical physics. Yet we still tend by and large to construe Goethe's undertaking as directed against modern physics, not least because of the polemic against Newton.

Is Goethe an opponent of modern physics? He opposed Newton's optics; but few realize that he spoke approvingly of the wave-theory of light, which was formulated in a much more sophisticated mathematics than was Newton's.²I do not propose to give an unambiguous yes or no to the question of Goethe's attitude towards modern physics here; rather, I wish to reopen it by arguing that Goethe's theory of color and in particular his polemic against Newton's theory have been largely misconceived, even by Goetheans, as the result of ahistorical presuppositions about the character and extent of Newton's achievement and the principal aims of Goethe's science. To put things as succinctly as possible: Goethe was not a poet who blundered into the alien territory of physics, but rather someone who actually looked at the phenomena and compared them with what the prevailing theory said; someone who knew Newton's writings on optics and colors far better than anyone except perhaps Newton himself; someone who knew the history of chromatics and not just the history of optics; someone who gave prolonged thought to the methodological and philosophical problems implicit in experimental science, especially those of claiming factuality, of proving theory by experiment, and of mathematizing phenomenal description. Goethe made his initial foray into the sciences of optics and color because he noted a condition that had been overlooked in most eighteenth-century statements of the theory and that led to certain inconsistencies between what was expected and what actually happened. He went about this work with the intention of creating a rigorously and comprehensively inductive science that kept facts or phenomena strictly separated from hypotheses. Through research that was historical as well as experimental, he become ever more aware how theory and fact are intertwined, how every attentive look at the world already involves theorizing.³ Yet he did not abandon the distinction between theory and phenomenon as a result, for especially from the example of Newton's theory he realized that the more one puts hypotheses and abstractly theoretical statements (and their proof) at the focal point of science the harder it becomes to look at the phenomena with an unprejudiced eye; indeed, abstractly theoretical seeing distorts actual seeing. In opposition to the theory-centered approach of Newtonian chromatics Goethe proposed to make phenomena and their ways of appearing the heart of science. Concomitantly he explored and tried to incorporate into science the variety of ways in which phenomena can be experienced and conceived (what he called the Vorstellungsarten—'modes of conceptualization'). Accordingly the major aim of natural science could no longer be to establish the truth of an hypothesis, e.g. by showing there is an (approximately) exact fit between prediction and experimental result in a few "crucial" cases, but rather to strive for overall fidelity in one's way of seeing (theoria) to the variety of phenomena conceived as comprehensively as possible. Far from repudiating quantity and exactitude, this approach rather locates them within the network of which they are a part: the array of knowledge, praxis, and experience that ranges from the circumstances of everyday life to the sophisticated and highly-instrumentalized inquiries of the abstract theorist. Goethe feared that by neglecting this context the natural sciences risked becoming deracinated and irrational, and that in cultivating hypotheses more intently than phenomena they exposed themselves to the vagaries of undisciplined imagination.⁴

The Farbenlehre is thus far more than an alternative 'theory' or 'doctrine' of color; it is in fact a reconstitution of chromatics, the science of color as distinguished from optics, and a refoundation of the principles and methods of the empirical natural sciences. It embraces experimental science, history of science, and philosophy of science, understood not as independent undertakings but as the three major aspects of the single human project of encountering and comprehending nature.

Elsewhere⁵ I have substantiated the preceding claims and have narrated how and why phenomenality became for Goethe the chief foundational principle for the empirical natural sciences and their historical continuity. Here I can indicate only in a general way the origins of Goethe's confrontation with Newton and the historical horizon of the Farbenlehre—and therefore run the risk of oversimplification, a problem endemic to accounts of Goethe's science, both pro and contra.

What was Goethe opposing when he criticized Newton's theory? First and foremost, a theory that misrepresented the phenomena; second, a method that misconceived the proper relationship between theory and phenomenon; third, a community of science that for more than a century had failed to examine critically work esteemed as much for the sake of the man who wrote it as for its content.

Newton's optical work of course is considered today the foundation of modern color science, and from his experimental techniques a fundamental tool of modern physics, spectroscopy, grew. Moreover, if we consider the history of the natural sciences in the eighteenth century we recognize that the method Newton employed in presenting his theory became that century's major paradigm of how experimental science should be conducted and what it can achieve. With so much in Newton's favor, both then and now, Goethe's critique was bound to provoke incredulity. Nevertheless it was by and large justified, even though it is marred by passages of excessive vehemence and a sometimes too all-encompassing condemnation of Newton's theory in every aspect.

Newton's theory indeed has many aspects, and one cannot understand the major thrusts of Goethe's critique unless one has a fairly clear sense of at least a few of them. A bit of history can perhaps explain some of the issues. Before Newton, optics and the science of color were only tenuously connected; it would probably be an exaggeration to say that before him there was a full-fledged science of color. But Newton joined the two into a unified science by combining the mathematical approach of geometrical optics with the approach of empirical physics and thereby made the study of light and color a mathematico-physical, empirical science. The chief tool of the new approach was the experimentum crucis, or crucial experiment, the paradigm case of which is to be found under that name in a letter of Newton's to the Royal Society of London from February 1672 (1959, vol. 1, pp. 92-102). Into a darkened room he admitted a beam of sunlight through a narrow opening; this beam was refracted by a glass prism (with a large refracting angle, approximately 60°); it was almost immediately intercepted by a board with a small circular aperture; the light that passed through this aperture proceeded to a second board, about 12 feet from the first and also provided with a small circular hole; the light that passed through this was immediately refracted by a second prism similar to the first and cast on the wall. By rotating the first prism in this set-up Newton was able to make the spectrum that appeared on the second board move up or down, so that any small segment of the spectrum desired might be made to fall on the hole; in this way different rays could be isolated and refracted by the second prism. With this apparatus and technique he was able to show that the light most refracted the first time (i.e. the light appearing at the violet end of the spectrum cast on the second board) is also the most refracted the second time—with both prisms arranged to refract upwards it will appear highest on the wall—and as you proceed through the spectrum towards the opposite end you find that the second refraction is progressively less, and at a minimum with red. Newton concluded that ordinary light is composite, i.e. that different kinds of rays with different degrees of refrangibility exist already in the original white light (the doctrine of diverse refrangibility). Moreover, the same experiment shows that there is a close correlation between refrangibility and color (note that the crucial experiment seems to depend only on position, not on color, though for the sake of easy reference it is convenient to mention the colors), and Newton proceeded immediately to elaborate a corollary theory of color, according to which there was a "very precise and strict" proportion between degree of refrangibility and color. He claimed that he had put the properties of diverse refrangibility and color beyond suspicion of doubt, indeed that he had made the science of colors mathematical.⁶

Although Newton later went on to explore other phenomena of color and light, he retained this basic theory with only slight modifications. The first book of the Opticks presents it in a quasi-Euclidean format, where the proof no longer depends on a single crucial experiment but rather proceeds through series of them, each of which is meant to prove theorems and confirm or refute propositions.⁷

Scientists of the eighteenth century were greatly impressed and influenced by this theory and its presentation. They accepted the basic theory as proven fact, as clearly and indubitably true, just as Newton had intended. Yet they seem also to have accepted that the science of color was essentially complete—apart from leaving unexplained the exact workings of the eye and the 'sensorium,' Newton certainly cultivated this impression—and were thus discouraged from doing further color research. After Newton the eighteenth century has relatively little to show in the science of color and even in optics; and we must always keep in mind when considering Goethe's polemics, which savaged the inertia of Newton's successors even more than the errors of the master, that the century he looked back upon had added virtually nothing to the original doctrine and in many cases had corrupted it. We who look back on the rich progress of chromatics since the middle of the nineteenth century and who therefore know that a great deal remained to be done tend to forget this. We also easily overlook that after Goethe's lifetime the. notion of what kind of certainty and durability scientific theories can have started to change. A scientist today could not responsibly make the kinds of truth-claims that Newton did. Furthermore, historians in this century have revealed that Newton's arguments are neither perfectly cogent nor free of underlying hypotheses—Newton's assertions to the contrary notwithstanding—and that he sometimes described phenomena tendentiously and even occasionally misrepresented them.⁸ If we ignore these things we will have overlooked some of the major foci of Goethe's attacks, in particular the fetish of exactitude and absolutely certain and exhaustive proof that was integral to Newton's theory and that became an ideal manque of eighteenth-century experimental science.

Thus, although there is no doubt that Newton introduced important tools and concepts and that many of his insights eventually proved immensely fruitful, the immediate effect was not so fortunate. Besides the dogmatism and the excessive claims about the theory's validity and scope already noted, Newton created certain conceptual tensions in the science of color. For example, today we commonly distinguish between the physics of color and the perception of color, and we know that the former, which corresponds to the bulk of Newton's work, cannot in itself explain the latter.⁹ Although Newton occasionally drew this same kind of distinction, the entire tendency of his work was to reduce color to a simple function of refrangibility and to endow the colors of spectral light with ontological primacy. The theory of (real!) colors was to be a corollary of the theory of diverse refrangibility. Even as his later work compelled him to make concessions to the difference between physics and perception (e.g. with his color circle), he tried to assimilate the results to diverse refrangibility. Indeed he had to, if he was to preserve the latter doctrine's aura of certainty intact, for its proof requires the closest connection between refrangibility and color.¹⁰

One does not need the sophisticated color research since Helmholtz and Grassmann to discover a certain incommensurability between color and the physical composition of light. For example, the phenomena of colored shadows, which Goethe explored thoroughly already in the early 1790s, demonstrate that light falling on the retina which is physically the same can produce radically different colors under different circumstances of ambient illumination. But one needn't go so far afield: Newton's spectrum itself is a witness against the strong version of his basic theory (i.e. that there is a strict proportionality or equivalence between refrangibility and color in the spectrum). Refrangibility is measured on an indifferent numerical or linear continuum; the visible solar spectrum produced by Newton on the other hand is continuous in the sense that it displays no gaps (with circular rather than linear apertures absorption lines do not appear), but its chromatic qualities are anything but indifferent. Arithmetically, 1.50 is equidistant from 1.49 and 1.51, but the spectral color corresponding to a given physical index (e.g. wavelength or refractive index) is very likely not to be equidistant in perceptual terms from two colors whose corresponding physical indexes are equally far from one another. Rather than showing an 'infinite' number of gradations of color, Newton's spectrum appears to display a limited number arrayed in broad, fairly distinct segments, with hardly any obvious variation in hue across each segment. Even if we isolate very narrow spectral bands and do a side-by-side comparison, the number of discriminable hues will be small compared to the several thousand we could enumerate in, say, whole-numbers of Angstroms.¹¹

It is interesting in this connection that Newton typically described the spectrum as consisting of red, yellow, green, blue, and violet (and added sometimes orange and indigo) and, as he would go on to say, all intermediate gradations. That is, despite the quantitative indifference there are good perceptual reasons for emphasizing certain hues rather than others, though on quantitative grounds all would have claim to equal status. He also spent much energy in vain trying to show that the proportions between the segments of color in the spectrum corresponded to the ratios of the diatonic musical scale—which once again reveals that there are relationships in the perceived spectrum that do not simply reduce themselves to refrangibility. These phenomena may not be as striking as the crucial experiment, but they intimate that some other kind of approach is needed to extend the science of color and make it more complete.

It is also highly significant that most subsequent eighteenth-century accounts of the theory overlooked the infinite gradations and sometimes even asserted the existence of just seven kinds of rays.)2 Newton cannot be held accountable for all the mistakes of his followers, but surely the consistent misinterpretation points to some dimly-felt need to resolve the tension between the continuous and the discrete, between the phenomenon according to theory and the phenomenon that is seen.

Goethe was chiefly interested in exploring precisely those properties and relationships of color that escape the rather elementary mathematics of the Newtonian theory. He tirelessly explored phenomena and aspects of them that lay beyond the standard theory's ken, and he was made all the more tenacious by the repeated insistence of his physicist acquaintances that Newton had already "perfectly explained" (HA 14, p. 260) the phenomena of color. He was, as it were, forced into a critical attitude towards Newton and the Newtonians. At any rate, the inertia of his contemporaries compelled him to undertake the effortful work of reperforming and analyzing Newton's experiments and proofs, of uncovering their misrepresentations of the phenomena, of elaborating their hidden assumptions and tendencies, and of bringing to light the logic and rhetoric of Newton's presentation. The result was the polemical part of the Farbenlehre, which is less a philippic than an exegesis (of the first book of the Opticks), less a venting of spleen on his great nemesis than an indictment of those who had come after and instead of setting about the work of reexamination, correction, and extension had fallen down in adulation. Goethe believed that it was necessary to refound chromatics, not as an appendage to optics but as a science in its own right, and to lay a foundation of phenomena rather than of theory. His efforts at elaborating from this foundation a positive doctrine were tentative and sometimes defective, and they were greatly weakened both by his failure to investigate light with the same thoroughness he had employed in his analyses of color—the Farbenlehre explicitly excludes a closer study of light from its scope, or rather presumes the existence of such a study (HA 13, pp. 315 and 323)—and by his unwillingness to take advantage in any way of the economy and precision that mathematical formulations and measurements can lend when appropriately applied to the study of nature. Although he did concede that number and measure could be applied to his work and urged others to undertake the task, he greatly damaged his cause by not showing from the beginning how they might be fruitfully employed in the Farbenlehre.

It would be misleading, however, to leave the impression that Goethe opposed Newton's theory for forty years and even resorted to polemics simply because Newton had gotten a few things wrong and Goethe wanted to supplant him with his own chromatics. That may be a viewpoint adequate for understanding his earliest studies but not their continuation. More than anything else Goethe was combatting a defective conception of science and scientific method that had helped bring about the dogmatic entrenchment of diverse refrangibility. The methodological focus of Goethe's critique, explained hardly at all in his earliest publications on color, the two Beitrage zur Optik of 1791 and 1792, but at length in an essay written almost contemporaneously with them (unfortunately not published until three decades later), 'The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject,"³ is the question of how one keeps one's experience of phenomena and experiments separate from what one thinks and hypothesizes about them. According to Goethe, the great danger of any science that aims at proving—and, we might add, disproving—hypotheses and theories is that it stirs up all the lurking enemies of truth in the human spirit, which longs to be able to claim the whole truth when it possesses just part, to have certainty when it can produce only plausibility. This kind of approach puts a premium on making the theory appear true: strong points are placed most favorably in view, while weak points are minimized or concealed. Science thus becomes rhetorical rather than rigorous and logical. As alternative Goethe proposed a method, painstakingly comprehensive, of experimentally producing the phenomena and enumerating and describing their essential circumstances as a foundation for the rest of the scientist's work. The best scientist, reflected Goethe, in the first instance stays close to his initial insight into the truth by studying intensively the phenomenon that first caught his attention. He does this by Vermannigfaltigung ('variegating'), which works gradually and systematically outward from the initial phenomenon (or the experiment that replicates it) by augmenting and ramifying it. He must articulate the experimental phenomenon, analyze it into its basic conditions, and then vary these. His first intention is not to isolate a cause, the study of which demands of the scientist considerable philosophical acumen, but to establish the correlations between changes in the conditions of the experiments and changes in the phenomenon, with the fullest possible elaboration of the relevant conditions. Indeed, this kind of work is essential even in trying to prove hypotheses, and it points up a major lacuna in Newton's procedure. Consider: Why did Newton choose the particular circumstances described in his experiments? The only possible answers are either that the circumstances are arbitrary, and thus not consonant with scientific discourse, or that precisely these circumstances produce some notable effect pre-eminently. The latter alternative shows that a choice has been made by comparing one instance with many others and thereby deriving criteria that dictate its use in preference to others. That is, Newton's choice can be justified only by a more complete acquaintance with the phenomena of refraction than his few specimens give.

The Goethean method might urge us to proceed somewhat as follows: Begin with the simpler rather than the more complex, for example with a single refraction as opposed to multiple refractions. For each of the particular circumstances of the experiment let us then introduce variation. In some cases we can vary a circumstance continuously; e.g. we can move the prism closer to or farther from the screen, we can change the distance of the prism from the aperture, we can (with an adjustable diaphragm) alter the aperture's size. In other cases we must be satisfied with discrete changes, though continuity may be more or less approximated: we can substitute glass prisms with larger and smaller refracting angles (with a hinged water-prism, however, we could again perform a continuous variation). Of course we shall also encounter conditions that may simply not lend themselves to continuous variation, e.g. the material of the prism; but by resorting to sequential or side-by-side comparisons, for instance by substituting identical refracting angles in different substances, we may, by persistent labor, analysis, and ingenuity, find some other principle of order. By varying all these circumstances we can actually watch and describe the phenomenon in evolution and thereby gain a fuller notion of how the initial experiment fits into the totality of phenomena of the same type. We should note that this technique really does circumscribe a range of phenomena which constitute a natural family (and which, taken discretely, would be infinite), and that it calls attention to what happens as one approaches limits which in actual practice may be unreachable (e.g. when the aperture has null diameter or the screen is at extreme distances).

By following this method of amplification and complication Goethe hoped, ca. 1792, to produce a completely unhypothetical presentation of virtually all the phenomena of color, and correspondingly unhypothetical but absolutely sure descriptions and low-level generalizations, that would serve as a certain and unshakable foundation for future researchers and their attempts at yet higher levels of generalization. The Beitrdge zur Optik were to be continued until, as Goethe said, they should have traversed the entire circle of color. From this basis science would ascend by a process of rigorous induction. This vision of science, in its theoretical reticence and its strict induction, is Baconian. Goethe was less worried by the possible baneful influences of hypotheses, theories, and imagination at the higher levels, however; they did not need to be suppressed but only restrained until the researcher should have had the chance to gain an overview, precise and comprehensive, of all the phenomena that pertain to the science and that thus needed to be embraced by future work.

If Goethe had stopped at this point he would deserve nothing more than a footnote in histories of the natural sciences as one of the last and most rigorous inductivists. But he did not stop here, he went on to elaborate a philosophical and historical vision of natural science that rivals even the best 20th-century philosophy and history of science (a vision which Friedrich Schiller christened rational empiricism).¹⁴ At some point in the decade of the 1790s Goethe came to recognize that there could be no single, comprehensive, and authoritative way of conceiving and presenting the phenomena of color. There were many factors at work in this development, including his attempts to continue the series of the Beiträge zur Optik (which led to his discovery of the fundamental importance of the so-called physiological colors), his reading of Kant and his conversations with the Kantian Schiller, the deepening of his historical studies, and his growing awareness that the resistance to his work was motivated not simply by blockheadedness or ill-will but by a different way of seeing and explaining the world that had become inveterate in physicists and even in the educated public. In response he began to note with avidity and assiduity the variety of ways of (re)presenting the world, the Vorstellungsarten, for which the history of the natural sciences is the richest source. These Vorstellungsarten, at least in first approximation, appear to be ideal types of consciousness that are historically rare in unalloyed form but that nevertheless are fundamentally at work in science, in experience, in language. The historical part of the Farbenlehre, though it does not offer a formalized schema of the Vorstellungsarten, is suffused with their presence. As we read through it we see the continual emergence, interplay, adaptation, ebb, and reemergence of—to name some of the chief ones—the genetic and the atomistic, the dynamic' and the mechanical, the concrete and the abstract, the mathematical and the physical, the material and the spiritual ways of thinking and conceiving things. One concrete example: Newton's intelligence Goethe describes as atomistic, mechanical, and above all mathematical; he himself inclines more to the genetic, the dynamic, and the concrete. He understood these characteristic traits as influencing all of one's cognitive life, right down to apparently innocuous attempts at describing and organizing simple phenomena.

Ironic as it may be, the man who found himself compelled to polemicize against the Newtonian theory of white light and color because of the undue limitations and distortions it had imposed on scientific seeing was really a scientific pluralist who believed that proof and refutation can have only limited scope and thus can not be the essential activity of science. The truth, to be comprehended, must be approached from all its many sides. A priori there is no single, authoritative way to approach a given phenomenon; and a single human being, plagued by many kinds of one-sidedness, would scarcely be able to produce a science on his own. Thus pluralism is not just one among many desiderata but an absolute prerequisite for a constructive and progressive science, whose goal is less to produce a set of true propositions and indoctrinate scientists into their intention than to amplify the human experience of nature—which includes amplifying the store of technical means—and to enrich our comprehension of it by cultivating our ability to see natural wholes (e.g. the unity of a potentially infinite class of prismatic experiments) and to recognize the complex of their interrelationships to which 'nature' refers. One consequence is that mathematical exactitude is to be sought where it is truly exacting, i.e. faithful to the disciplined scientific seeing that arises from the comprehensive rehearsal of the phenomena; yet it cannot be allowed to supplant actual scientific experience (in the way that Newton's theory supplanted and obscured the phenomena of color so that ultimately his followers either merely repeated his formulations or used his experiments to reconfirm what he had said). The education of scientists, the methods of research, the role of serendipity, the standards of rationality, the civilized conduct of debate: these and a whole spectrum of other activities, entities, and relationships concomitant with and sometimes essential to science can never be adequately quantified or systematized. All these things are the scientist's concern; let us then treat them as such, says Goethe, and not as secondary or peripheral because our measuring stick won't work.

In twentieth-century philosophy of science the theory-ladenness of facts has led to the paradoxes of apparently self-validating theories (the theory shapes the fact, the fact in turn is used to confirm the theory) and the incommensurability of competing theories, with the result that science and its changes take place on ground that is constantly in danger of shifting. If there are no independent facts, and if no two theories are strictly comparable with one another or about the same things, then science and scientific change appear to suffer from a fundamental irrationality that makes them subject to the preferences and prejudices of individuals and institutions, to the winds of philosophical fashion, to the vagaries of political interests, in fact to a whole host of extraneous factors. The conclusion is of course alarming to those who, like Goethe, see natural science as one of the noblest ventures that human beings have undertaken; yet it appears that once we grant the theory-ladenness of facts we lose the last foothold on a slippery slope, where nostalgia for the certainties of positivism and the invocation of a new realism will be of little help. It seems to me that Goethe already faced this twentieth-century perplexity more than 150 years ago without succumbing to irrationalism, apathetic skepticism, or a new variety of dogmatism. The key to his perseverance and whatever success he achieved lies in the phenomenality of his science: nature and nature's phenomena, not theories about the phenomena, are its center and its center of gravity. For Goethe the phenomena are not the totality of science, but they are where it commences and the place to which it must constantly recur—often enough with previously unnoticed phenomena, sometimes with a new way of looking at them, sometimes even with hypotheses that help us to see with new, more alert eyes. Even under the regime of theory-ladenness the phenomena are not infinitely malleable, and the more one aims at comprehensiveness, the more one works to elaborate intrinsic relationships among them, the greater becomes the specific resistance that they offer to arbitrary interpretations. The great danger in the kind of science that cultivates hypotheses and theories as the real core of science is that it encourages one to care about the phenomena only insofar as they seem relevant to the theory (and then to see and describe them in the theory's terms) and to treat what is remotest from sense, what is experienceable only by hypothesis, as though it were indistinguishable from (sometimes even more reliable than) what is nearer to sense. Whatever may be said in defense of these induced beliefs in sciences like particle physics, it is absurd to think that they can lead unproblematically to a genuine science of color.¹⁵

If phenomena are laden with theory, if every attentive look at the world is the beginning of theoretical activity, there still remains the possibility that some phenomena are less theoretical than others, and that there exists in the human being a non-apodictic capacity to note this difference and to start the work of sorting out the consequences. If this possibility is authentic, it can be realized only by acts of comparison, which in turn require something better than a randomly-assembled group of phenomena. A comprehensive survey, or at the very least the intention of comprehensiveness and the ethic it imposes,¹⁶ is the only basis for the adequate comparison of the less with more. And a survey conducted in awareness of implicit theory is less likely to be tendentious than one undertaken in the spirit of unproblematic factuality. Thus even though it is never possible in science to claim with certainty that one has overcome all inappropriate preconceptions, it may well be possible to present the phenomena in a way that, though it reflects certain Vorstellungsarten, nevertheless will be useful even to those who do not share these ways of conceiving things. Despite his knowledge that the Farbenlehre was only a new beginning for chromatic science and was inevitably marked by characteristic Vorstellungsarten, then, Goethe could still argue that the didactic part of the work had general utility. The mere existence of such a compendium of phenomena, systematically arranged and more exhaustive than any that had preceded, would help recall color scientists to the matter of their subject and its proper forms, and might prevent overanxious theorists from disregarding entire groups of phenomena or dismissing them as unimportant or anomalous. It could serve the pedagogical function of orienting beginners in the science, who otherwise would know the phenomena only in the terms of theories. Even the circumstance that it reflected certain Vorstellungsarten and not others could be a virtue: for only when scientists confront other Vorstellungsarten can they well assess the strengths and limitations of their own, and by seeing the truth—even if partial—of other ways they may be able to amplify and enrich their experience and conceptions of things.¹⁷

Goethe frequently pointed out to friends that his scientific work had made him many-sided by compelling him to entertain different points of view, some of which he was able to incorporate into his own; and by practicing sciences he gradually developed "organs" for experiencing and understanding that originally he had not possessed (see, for example, LA I.3, pp. 303 and 305). He had learned even to appreciate the attractions and merits of notions that were not compatible with his own way of seeing. By giving up the insistence that there is one and only one truth, expressible in a set of propositions on which all could agree and towards which all researchers would converge, yet retaining the imperative of comprehensiveness in experience, he bade farewell to the absoluteness of certainty in favor of a rich, many-sided scientific culture, which in turn is embraced by the human culture in which science takes place. For him, the rationality of science was grounded in a human openness to the world that is always going beyond itself as it seeks a way back to its origins.

We must not edify ourselves into thinking that this Goethean rationality is easy; certainly the limited success of his Farbenlehre should make us wonder. Perhaps it was Goethe himself who best recognized the difficulties, as can be seen from the scientific essays of the last decades of his life and even more in works like Wahlverwandtschaften, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, and the second part of Faust. The difficulties are perhaps starkest in the contrast near the end of Faust between the contemplative, all-seeing watchman Lynkeus and the dynamic but blind and dying Faust. To understand nature and the world we must achieve a perspective from which we can perceive everything as it has been and is: the situation of Lynkeus. In the struggle to experience and understand, however, we must act; action is always particular, and dealing with things particularly ordinarily cannot reveal them in their wholeness, in fact it may alter them. The interests, including self-interests, that our actions serve may even blind us to tensions and contradictions we have fostered. This is the dilemma of the mighty Faust, who has transformed the world in his quest to come face to face with nature, simply, as a man alone. He has acted as though truth is fundamentally remote and hidden (albeit manipulable once it is discovered) and tried to force it to appear. In seeking what is furthest, however, he has ravaged the object of his hope and pursuit. Even in blindness, however, he seems to share in the truth; prepared as he is to continue devastating earth and sea for the sake of his constructions, he sees in imagination a world where he might find it possible and desirable to live and abide. Is the conclusion that human erring is inevitable but still oriented towards truth, if only partial truth, and that even in the depths of errancy we in some sense anticipate it? This could be reason for perseverant hope, if not optimism. The hope would be that the passion for revealing a world in naked truth does not destroy what is near and true but inconspicuous because of its constant proximity; and that the light in our inward eye is not the blinding fireball searing everything near and far. To realize this hope we would need to remember that in trying to understand nature we likewise reveal our own nature. Unless we are constantly attentive to both, we shall surely, albeit darkly, live out the consequences of our science, in all its magnificence, in all its partiality.

Notes

¹ Earlier versions of portions of this essay appeared in papers delivered at the 1982 meeting of the Claremont Institute in Denver and the 1983 History of Science Society meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut. I wish to express special thanks to Drs. John Cornell and Neil Ribe, who have been unstinting in their conversations, comments, and encouragement, and to F. J. Zucker for his critique of the penultimate version of this essay.

² For example LA I.8, p. 276 and LA 1.11, pp. 289-294. Goethe's unhappiness with the application of mathematics in the natural sciences may have been directed chiefly against the reduction of these sciences to what he called Rechenkunst and Meßkunst (the arts of reckoning and measuring, viz. elementary arithmetic and geometry). We must recall, too, that Newton's presentations of his theory, apart from the posthumously-published Lectiones opticae, hardly require anything more advanced than arithmetic and elementary plane geometry. Goethe's comments about higher mathematics were typically generous, and he even conceded that symbols "taken from mathematics, because intuitions [Anschauungen] likewise lie at their foundation [i.e. just as with other kinds of symbol], can become in the highest sense identical with the appearances" (LA 1.3, p. 418).

³HA 13, p. 317. Cf. Goethe, Maximen, no. 575: "Das Höchste wäre zu begreifen, daß alles Factische schon Theorie ist."

⁴ Goethe's polemics against Newton's theory display some remarkable parallels to his critique of Romanticism: in both he sees the danger of imagination twisting reality to its own purposes. See Schrimpf

⁵ In Seeing and Knowing. Goethe against Newton on the Theory of Colors, forthcoming, and in the author's doctoral dissertation, "Goethe, Newton, and Color: The Background and Rationale of an Unrealized Scientific Controversy" (University of Chicago, 1981).

⁶ See, for instance, Newton, 1959-1976, Vol. 1, pp. 96-97 and 187-188. Zev Bechler (1974) has shown that Newton's early critics disagreed more with the extravagance of his truth-claims than with the substance of his theory, and points to Newton's apparent incomprehension of their epistemological arguments as beginning the era of the "blind spot" for such matters. Below we shall deal with the issue of the correlation of refrangibility and color; here it should be mentioned that the proof of the pre-existence of diverse rays in the original light is defective. In Seeing and Knowing, part 3, I have argued that the proof depends on a subtle question-begging implicit in Newton's geometrical interpretation. But its invalidity can also be shown by counterexample. Newton believed that his proof would remain valid whatever light turned out to be in its fine structure, in particular whether light turned out to consist of tiny corpuscles or of waves. When the wave-theory of light displaced the particle-theory in the first half of the nineteenth-century physicists saw no reason to disagree. But in the last decades of the century the French physicist Louis-Georges Gouy showed on mathematical and empirical grounds that the wave theory was compatible with the notion that the prism actually manufactures the differentiated rays out of an originally simple pulse rather than sorts out rays already present in the original beam. But this was the leading principle of modification theories of light, which were the chief competitors of Newton's theory in the seventeenth century and which have affinities with Goethe's positive doctrine of color. See Wood (1911), pp. 648-666.

⁷ On the modifications, see Shapiro (1980), pp. 211-235. I believe that most historians of optics would now agree that the mathematical format of the Opticks is more rhetoric than substance. This format, plus the greater number of experiments, often described in minute detail, bolstered the appearance of certainty but did not respond to the epistemological and material criticisms advanced earlier (1672-1677). It is interesting to note that the last of the original critics died the year before the Opticks was published.

⁸ Besides Shapiro (1980), one might also consult such works as Lohne (1968), Sabra (1967), and Laymon (1978). Among recent philosophers and historians of science, only Feyerabend (1970) has realized that this very type of critique had already been carried out by Goethe.

⁹ The interested reader can find out more about the history of modern color science and differences between physical and perceptual approaches from, for example, Wasserman (1978). Though Ronchi (1957) deals chiefly with optics rather than color theory, he is highly instructive about confusions between physics and perception. Ronchi shows in astonishing detail how the relative successes of geometrical and physical optics have led scientists to overlook even gross discrepancies between theory and what is seen in actuality. Ronchi's desire to establish a science of optics (of the seeing eye) independent of the science of radiation parallels Goethe's wish to set up a chromatics independent of optics. We must not forget, however, that our articulation of the sciences, and in particular our mathematico-physical science of radiation, has (and probably always will have) roots going back into the phenomena and thus will not be independent of the more phenomenally-oriented science.

¹⁰ In asserting this I take issue with the standard claim that Newton proved diverse refrangibility without needing any reference to color. In order to see this, one must first realize that the experimentum crucis depends very much on its context, a context that relies heavily on the essential equivalence in the spectrum of refrangibility and coloration. The proof benefits from the ambiguity created by what precedes it. I argue this at length in Seeing and Knowing, part 3.

¹¹ C. V. Raman (1968), pp. 22-28, discusses the appearance of the spectrum under various conditions and theoretical and empirical considerations concerning the human ability to discriminate the colors at wavelengths close to one another. The spectrum, when viewed as a whole, has an almost eerie beauty, attributable in part to its seeming to change almost imperceptibly as one observes it. Exactly what hue one sees at any particular point depends on a wide range of circumstances, e.g. the duration, intensity, direction, and distance of viewing. Other changes are quite determinate. For example, as pointed out by Goethe, when the screen is placed at a great distance from the prism some of the colors begin to disappear, until a tricolored spectrum is obtained. Apparently this phenomenon is intended to raise a question that is difficult to resolve in a purely physical framework: what has happened to all those unchangeable indigo-, blue-, yellow-, and orange-producing rays that were supposed to have been separated? These kinds of changes, and even more the different dispersive power of various refracting materials, make any notion of 'the' spectrum fallacious.

¹² On the number of spectral colors in Newton and later eighteenth-century accounts see Hargreave (1973), esp. pp. 477-495. It is likely that when ca. 1790 Goethe consulted a scientific text to find out about the theory of Newton he read that with a small aperture it was possible to get a "spectrum" consisting of seven separate, differently-colored circles aligned in a row; see Seeing and Knowing, Part 2. If initially he had some misconceptions about the theory, he may not have been at fault.

¹³HA 13, pp. 10-20. A superb analysis of this essay and of the structure of Goethe's method is Gögelein (1972).

¹⁴ A christening highlighted already by Matthaei in LA I.3, pp. 302-314, which reproduces letters exchanged by Goethe and Schiller in early 1798 and represents in nuce the philosophical rationale of the Farbenlehre as well as an important stage in Goethe's understanding of the Vorstellungsarten.

¹⁵ I have glossed over the question of whether modern discussions of the theory-ladenness of facts really penetrates the problem of the theorizing that is implicit in observing phenomena. One issue that is in need of reflection is possible distinctions between fact and phenomenon: e.g. energy conservation can be a fact but probably not a phenomenon, whereas this rainbow I am looking at is a phenomenon but perhaps not a fact (though clearly I can make statements of fact about it). Much of the recent philosophical discussion about the theory-ladenness of facts concerns sciences already constituted at a highly abstract level, where most of the evidence is mediated by complex instrumentation, so that the kind of phenomenality that can be claimed for the evidence is a question. Of course there is the more directly accessible issue whether a pre-Copernican and a post-Copernican see the sun rise or the horizon sink below the sun (the complications of which are too great to be disposed of in a note). However, that it is possible (in thought, at least) to have both look to the East one morning, that they could discuss the event and agree to disagree, indicates the central field to which questions about the differences must be addressed. For a discussion of the changing use of the term 'fact' over the last three centuries, see Sepper, Seeing and Knowing, Part 4.

¹⁶ The undertaking of any science already presupposes an ethics and politics of science, i.e. an understanding of science's place in the being of human beings (in the economy of their faculties) and in their community. All important philosophies of science recognize this, at least implicitly (e.g. the positivistic conception of the historical emergence of reason)—and for Goethe it is an explicit concern, both in his scientific and his literary works. For a discussion see Sepper, Seeing and Knowing, Parts 1 and 5.

¹⁷ The parallels between Goethe's method and twentieth-century phenomenology are interesting and significant but run into difficulties on the matter of apodicticity—though the themes of the life-world and the historicity of science in the late Husserl provide a point of contact again. But if one is looking for parallels with recent philosophy there is also the fundamentally hermeneutic character of Goethe's science, which makes the history of science (or rather the history of knowing) part of science itself, and which through the doctrine of the Vorstellungsarten is thematically concerned with the horizons within which all knowing is appropriated. For Goethe science is intrinsically historical, so that it can never be adequately grasped if it is understood as essentially a result, e.g. by ignoring its ethical and political character (see note 16).

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