These points comprise what might be called the substantive disagreement with Newton. In Goethe's view, Newton erred in these factual matters because he mistook a secondary phenomenon for a primordial cause:

The worst that can happen to physical science as well as to many other kinds of knowledge is that men should treat a secondary phenomenon as a primordial one, and (since it is impossible to derive the original fact from the secondary state) seek to explain what is in reality the cause by an effect made to usurp its place. (¶175, cf. ¶718)

I describe below the demonstration Goethe used to illustrate this supposed error. Here it is worth noting that the Aristotelian dogma was still defended by some artists and naturalists at the turn of the 19th century. The German Neoclassical painter Anton Raffael Mengs (1728-1779) had been a vigorous advocate, and many of the Neoclassical artists whom Goethe consulted in the 1790's (such as Heinrich Meyer and Angelika Kauffmann) accepted the Aristotelian light/dark framework as well. It was defended by the 18th century French academics that Goethe praised in his historical review, and even by some 19th century British scientists. This is the basis for Goethe's baffling optimism (e.g., ¶173, ¶727) that his book would rally contemporary scientists to find empirical and mathematical support for the Aristotelian dogma. It is also the context that motivated Eastlake to delete content that he viewed as still too partisan.

I should point out that the ancient theory is metaphorically correct: color really is created by the partial "darkening" of "white" light by matter. But the physical mechanism of this darkening was precisely described by Newton as "nothing but a Disposition to reflect [or absorb] this or that sort of Rays more copiously than the rest". Colors result because some of "primary" colors of light are absorbed or darkened more than others; and the purest (most saturated) hues appear when the total light spectrum is pared down to a single wavelength or homogenous color band of the spectrum, producing monochromatic lights that are very much dimmer than the original "white" light.

competing physical explanations of color
(left) the Newtonian theory, based on the selective absorptance of spectral "primaries" (wavelengths); (right) the Aristotelian theory, based on an unexplained mixture of pure white light with pure darkness

 
Although Newton only provided a physical explanation for the stimulus, he was careful to point out that the stimulus is perceived as color only through attributes of mind: "The Rays to speak properly are not coloured. ... [Colours] in the Rays ... are nothing but their Dispositions to propagate this or that motion into the Sensorium; and in the Sensorium they are Sensations of those Motions under the Forms of Colours." Thus, Newton was the first to identify color as a phenomenon having both material and psychological aspects, and to associate color with the specific property of light revealed in its angle of refraction, or refrangibility, when passed through a transparent medium.

In contrast, the Aristotelian theory never produced a clear, physically or perceptually consistent explanation for how color is extracted from homogeneous white light, or whether color exists in materials, in the mind, or both.

But Goethe was not really motivated by a factual dispute: he saw something more ominous at stake. Goethe was convinced that Newton's experimental and geometrical methods were a kind of falsehood machine, a delusional maze, an insane and malign procedure for fabricating intellectual illusions that caused many scientists of the time literally to abandon their senses:

[Higher rules and laws] ... are not to be made intelligible to the understanding by words and hypotheses alone, but at the same time by real phenomena to the senses. We call these primordial phenomena because nothing appreciable to the senses lies beyond them. (¶175)

Even when such a primordial phenomenon is arrived at, the evil is that we still refuse to recognize it as such, that we still aim at something beyond, although it would become us to confess that we are arrived at the limits of experimental knowledge. ... Important elementary facts are a worthier basis for further operations than insulated cases, opinions and hypotheses. (¶727)

Here Goethe is not just saying that Newton got a few facts wrong. He is attacking any abstract theory that replaces "primordial" perceptual experience with "imaginary" or invisible constructs. In the deleted polemic, he compared Newton and his abstractions to a child who looks behind a mirror, expecting to find the reflected objects there. Thus, Goethe avoids any reference to optics or light "rays", as these concepts drag in the abstract scaffolding of mathematics and physics that he called "a scientific coffin".

This moral disagreement with Newton is the source of Goethe's indignant ad hominem polemic. In the section titled "Newton's personality" in the Historical Part, Goethe describes Newton as a man "without passion, without longings", whose organ of perception was mathematics and who therefore experienced geometrical ideas as tangible reality. In effect, Newton's abstract thinking is interpreted by Goethe as a kind of perceptual delusion. His "rigid character" hastily seized on the wrong phenomenon, or illusory perceptions, and then methodically built a theory around them by ignoring inconvenient facts or denying their implications. Goethe picks over Newton's definitions and prism experiments, step by step and sometimes word by word, though (as Goethe admits) he discusses limited excerpts from Book I of the Opticks only.

Through dozens of specific examples, Goethe attempts to show that Newton arbitrarily required only certain experiments to be done in a certain way, because this allowed him to push his erroneous preconceptions into his theory or to mislead readers with an inaccurate description or tendentious interpretation of his experimental results. He claims that "We can compare the Newtonian method to a stage set painted in perspective, which must be seen from only one viewpoint to make the lines convergent and convincing. Newton and his disciples do not want the viewer to step a little to one side and view the scene as a whole" (Unmasking Newton's Theory, ¶74).

All these points amount to a moral indictment of Newton as a misguided liar and charlatan, a lunatic and fanatic, all faults that justified the invective directed against him and made him a figurehead for the broader rationalist "evil" that Goethe intended to expose:

Only someone who knows the power of self deception, and knows that it has a very close relation to dishonesty itself, will be able to explain the method of Newton and his followers. (Unmasking Newton's Theory, ¶45)

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In contrast to Newton's logical and empirical method, which (according to Goethe) selects only certain facts and connects them via deductions and imaginary constructs from a biased point of view, Goethe promoted an intuitive and analogical approach to the world. His is a holistic method that proceeds by first bringing all the perceptual phenomena together, then arranging them in a series of perceptual priority or importance. As Goethe says, "we bring the phenomena together as a whole, and have arranged them so that everyone is obliged to consider them in their true order and in their proper proportions". (Unmasking Newton's Theory, ¶1)

This holistic method supports Goethe's larger claim that the causes for perceptual experience are found through the metaphorical similarities between one perceptual experience or appearance and another:

Unfortunately, Goethe's ambitious project has been rendered incoherent both by the deleted sections and by the English translation title: Farbenlehre simply means "chromatics," with no "theory" implied (just as Sprachlehre means "grammar" and not "theory of speech"). Given Goethe's sensitivity to language, it is not irrelevant to note that the root meaning of lehre is "lesson," "teaching" or "learning from experience". In the same way that a grammar of language simply describes the patterns in how we speak, Goethe wanted to develop a holistic "grammar" of color that describes how color behaves. He was looking for patterns in color experience — not for a theory of colors extracted from physical experiments. This makes his book an important precursor to German phenomenology. All these complexities have disappeared from the truncated English version of the book.

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So let's turn to the "color theory" itself. In this "didactic" part of Farbenlehre, Goethe's specific ambition was to provide a comprehensive explanation of how the color producing light/dark mixtures occur. In this Goethe draws primarily on two sources of evidence:

• (1) the many subjective color effects that appear to arise entirely in the eye — chromatic induction (simultaneous color contrasts, studied systematically by Chevreul a few decades later), complementary shadow colors produced when two different light sources (such as a candle and the sky) cast separate shadows from a single object, and both positive (dazzling) and negative (habituated) afterimages — which had all been studied and reported by late 18th century naturalists in the decades before Goethe wrote his book, and which are also mentioned in the art notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci; and

The colours which we see on objects are not qualities entirely strange to the eye; the organ is not thus merely habituated to the impression; no, it is always predisposed to produce colour of itself, and experiences a sensation of delight if something analogous to its own nature is offered from without. (¶760)

Here one should note that Goethe and Newton seem to agree: color is in the mind, not in the world, and the patterns of darkening necessary to produce color are not objective physical facts (like the size or weight of an object) but also rely on our perceptual disposition to interpret light as color.

For Goethe, the evidence of "physiological" or materially inexplicable color phenomena seemed to demonstrate the "vital sensitivity" of the eye and its active role in perception:

These phenomena are of the greatest importance, since they direct our attention to the laws of vision, and are a necessary preparation for the future observation of colors. They show that the eye especially demands completeness [Totalität], and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself. (¶60)

By analogy and extension, these vital responses were part of the dynamic pattern of attractions and repulsions, the flux of opposites akin to life and death, that animates the entire physical world:

To divide the united, to unite the divided, is the life of nature; this is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal collapsion and expansion, the inspiration and expiration of the world in which we move. (¶739)

Thus, darkness is not merely the absence of light, as described by Newton: it is the polar opposite of light, forming with light the dynamic antagonism that produces all color experience. This "eye animism" is why Goethe criticized Newton's lack of passion or desire, and his mistaking geometry and mathematics for reality. For Goethe the young woman is the reality, and his visual response to her, in the afterimage created by his arousal, was part of the "primordial" desire and longing that animates every aspect of the world.

In these "subjective" examples Goethe is basically adding a poetic gloss to phenomena that were already known to naturalists of the time. When he turns to an explanation of the physical or "objective" causes of color, things get murkier.

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Through a variety of examples, Goethe reduces the exterior causes of color to the "clouding" or "shadowing" of white light by semitransparent media such as water, sheets of parchment or the atmosphere; the "displacement" or "bending" of object images produced in transparent media such as lenses, prisms and water; or the "doubling" of images observed in the penumbra of shadows cast by the sun or by laminated materials (such as the front and back of a mirror or a sheet of colored glass, or in mica and soap bubbles). Goethe uses all these phenomena as analogical evidence for "the doctrine of semitransparent mediums and double images" (¶299, ¶691): color is always associated with some kind of clouding (darkening) or displacement of an image.

He puts special emphasis on the image distortions produced by semitransparent media, atmospheric and physical (¶145–¶175), which represents his "primordial and elementary phenomenon" (¶174), the most obvious visible instance of light and dark mixing to make color. A key example (described by Aristotle and Leonardo) appears in the changing appearance of smoke, which is bluish when seen in front of a dark background and reddish when seen against light (¶160). These contrasting effects seem to demonstrate that the light/dark polarity acts spatially, depending on whether dark intrudes in front of or behind the light.

Next, in what he motivates as a pedagogical move, Goethe illustrates the "primordial" shadowing or distorting of images with the colors produced by a prism. These illustrate what is probably the central analogy of his book: that color, to the extent it has an external, physical origin, results in the blending of edges or boundaries between dark and light; edges are both the essential element of an image and the primordial cause of color appearance:

Considered from a general point of view, colour is determined towards one of two sides. It thus presents a contrast which we call a polarity, and which we may fitly designate by the expressions plus and minus.

plus minus Yellow Blue Stimulation Privation Light Shadow Brightness Darkness Strength Weakness Warmth Coldness Proximity Distance Repulsion Attraction Affinity with acids Affinity with alkalis

Note that Goethe first labels the polarity abstractly, with arithmetical signs, then assigns to it a remarkable range of sensory, emotional and physical correlates that in sum define the artists' warm/cool contrast. This gives the contrast a metaphoric quality that I signal by writing the color labels in capital letters.

In keeping with the smoke effects mentioned above, Goethe assigns a spatial relationship to this polarity: the color variations in the YELLOW (+) pole, from pale yellow into deep red, are created by overlaying increasing amounts of dark on or in front of light; similarly the BLUE (–) colors from violet to pale blue are produced by overlaying increasing amounts of light on or in front of dark (¶145–¶151).

Next, by placing a white band of paper over a black background, as viewed through a prism, Goethe demonstrates that the opposing YELLOW/BLUE edge fringes mix in the center to create green (¶214) — the "union" of the YELLOW/BLUE visual polarity. By placing a black band of paper over a white background, the fringe positions are reversed, overlapping violet and yellow red to produce a "deepening", "intensification" or "augmentation" of the BLUE/YELLOW contrast as "purpur" ("a red that contains no part of yellow or blue", cf. ¶215 and diagrams below). These two mixtures complete the hue circle.

Goethe is not explicit about what his terms union or augmentation mean perceptually or physically, or even whether the cause here is in the eye or in the materials affecting the light, or both. He does frequently refer to purpur as the acme or purest state of color, yet he explicitly does not elevate the purpur/green contrast to a polarity equivalent to YELLOW/BLUE: union and augmentation are simply alternate forms of color fusion. This is puzzling, given that most of the subjective color changes observed in afterimages or in chromatic induction (simultaneous contrast, successive contrast and colored shadows) produce contrasts between red and green, not between yellow and blue.

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As noted in the deleted "Historical Part" of Theory of Colours, these pretty, yellow and blue prism fringes had been described by the Jesuit Cartesian Louis Bertrand Castel in 1740, and were of course familiar since the 17th century as chromatic aberration in the science of optics and the manufacture of optical instruments.

Newton's "light spectrum" out of Goethe's
"primordial" fringes

 
Castel had used these fringes polemically (and in a tone of "violence" very similar to Goethe's) to show that Newton had been distracted by a mere "ghostly magic". Goethe's innovation was to add the complementary "dark" spectrum — which appears in the fringes at the shadow edges of a bar or pencil placed across the beam of light before it is refracted by a prism — to demonstrate the origin of the "dyer's primaries" yellow, blue and purpur that describe dye and pigment mixtures.  

In either version, Goethe (like Castel) pointed out that the edge fringes appear in the refracted beam just after it emerges from the prism and much before the complete spectrum is visible (photo, above). And while the YELLOW/BLUE fringes appear along any contrasted edge viewed through a prism, the spectral colors only appear when the edges form a band that is visually narrow.

As a parlor trick and as a schematic (diagram, below), this simple demonstration was one of the most persistent arguments used against the Newtonian theory of multiple "primary" colors by all 18th and 19th century defenders of the ancient light/dark theory. It was persuasive to many intelligent people for over a century after Newton published the Opticks, and it was the primary evidence Goethe offers in the Farbenlehre to prove that Newton had focused on a secondary phenomenon (the complete spectrum) and not the primordial cause (the edge fringes).

"light" and "dark" spectral mixtures from
Goethe's "primordial" fringes
adapted from Plate IV, Figures 1 and 2 and ¶214-¶216 of Zur Farbenlehre (1810)

 
First, on the issue of intellectual ethics, there is an unexplained inconsistency (marked by a ?, above) in the mixture of violet and yellow, which produces a yellow mixture in the "dark" spectrum but violet in the "light" spectrum. Since YELLOW is produced by dark over light, and BLUE by light over dark, this color ambiguously results from dark over light over light over dark! Goethe explicitly left these areas colored gray when the diagrams were first printed as Plate 5 and Plate 6 of his Beiträge zur Optick ("Essays on Optics") in 1792, so he was at first aware of this inconsistency — then later suppressed it.  

The fact that "violet" light is refracted at a sharper angle than "red" light means that each wavelength is projected out of the prism at a slightly different angle. Because the solar light rays are parallel, and the prism faces are flat, the exiting light wavelengths of the same hue form a beam of parallel monochromatic light rays, each monochromatic beam as wide as the original "white" light beam.

This means that the beams of different wavelengths must overlap near the prism. To simulate this, imagine the colored lights aligned so that they all shine on the exit face of the prism, at an angle identical to the angle of refraction for the wavelength of each hue. This arrangement duplicates, with beams of light shining onto the prism, the mixtures created by beams of refracted light as they exit the prism.

Goethe's "primordial" fringes from the additive
mixture of colored lights

 
As the diagram shows, the "red" and "violet" wavelengths exit first from any overlap with the other monochromatic beams. This is why Goethe's YELLOW/BLUE fringes (in their darkest "red" and "violet" hues) appear first.

Additive mixtures always brighten as more light is added, but also become more desaturated (paler or whiter) as the mixed hues are more dissimilar. Closer to the prism, more and more colored beams overlap, producing paler, brighter additive light mixtures: this creates the central beam of "white" light.

Pure "green" light is near the prism completely whitened by the combination of "red" and "violet" light, and farther from the prims mixes with "blue" to make "cyan", and with "orange" to make "yellow". The "green" light is either effaced in a "white" mixture or adds to the "blue" and "yellow" fringes, dividing the spectrum with a "white" central beam and widening the separate "violet+blue" and "yellow+red" fringes.

In his Plate IV, Goethe portrays these mixtures in their "objective" form, as the physical distance of the image from the prism in relation to the width of the light beam. He repeats the demonstration in a "subjective" form, as the visual width (angular size) of black/white bands viewed through the prism. These demonstrations are summarized in the images below (and the original photos are posted here.) The "primordial" fringes are produced by a white or black bands viewed against a contrasting background, and at a visual size below 1° they merge to form the light spectrum (green center) or dark spectrum (magenta center) at a visual width of about 30 minutes of an arc.

The crux here is the very different outcomes from the very similar researches and speculations of these two men. Runge rejected the Aristotelian theory, made splendid use of complementary colors and optical color mixing in his own paintings, and used his color sphere to define pleasing or discordant complementary color combinations — exactly as Michel-Eugène Chevreul would do with his color hemisphere almost 30 years later. In contrast, as Eastlake writes in his preface, "in the portion expressly devoted to the aesthetic application of the doctrine, the author [Goethe] seems to have made but an inadequate use of his own principles".

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Even when charitably summarized, Goethe's theory of color is incomplete, inconsistent and incomprehensible. But in many respects, Goethe is guilty of the very faults he attributed to Newton. He interprets only certain observations in a certain way, confuses cause and effect, and omits or misinterprets conflicting evidence in pursuit of his tendentious and erroneous preconceptions. As Goethe himself proudly declares, "my draft color theory is inherently polemical" (Unmasking Newton's Theory, ¶1).

What explains Goethe's willful and antagonistic obsession with color? His English biographer Nicholas Boyle explains that throughout the 1790's Goethe was struggling through what we would today call a midlife crisis — grief over lost youth in Italy, the limitations of domesticity, boredom in his daily bureaucratic responsibilities, anguish at the violence of the French Revolution and Napoleonic tyranny, and revulsion toward the spiritually empty world view that Rationalist science seemed to create. Boyle explains that Goethe's subjective approach allowed him to project his personal conflicts into his study of color and his horror of abstract science onto Newton; his Farbenlehre was to be a liberating and life enhancing new "poetry of the spirit". This emotional turmoil infused his emphasis on color "antagonisms" and color symbolism (another area where Runge and Neoclassical artists led the way), ideas which heavily influenced 19th century German philosophers such as Georg Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer. Yet the early 19th century scientists who reviewed Goethe's book almost unanimously dismissed it as the result of his peculiar methods — the English naturalist Thomas Young called it "a striking example of the perversion of the human faculties," and a Continental reviewer summarized it as "a tissue of ingenious and obstinate error".

It has been fashionable, ever since Eastlake published his amputated translation, to wave away Goethe's light/dark theory, naive prism demonstrations and gibberish physical color explanations in order to better appreciate his "sensitive" color observations. The subjective color contrasts which Goethe borrowed from the 18th century scientific literature remain well established facts of color vision, and these also are brought to Goethe's defense. True, goes this argument, Newton's physical account of color was integrated with the perceptual trichromatic theory of color vision as a highly successful explanation of retinal color sensations and of all the physical ways that color is produced by an external light or material stimulus. But many subjective color effects can only be explained in terms of the color psychology imposed on the retinal sensations, and cannot be predicted from the light stimulus alone, and this position is somehow attributed to Goethe — even though it was first enunciated by Newton! Goethe is even said to be vindicated in the two color contrasts — yellow/blue and red/green — that inform Evald Hering's theory of unique hues and that are fundamental to most modern models of color perception.

I strongly reject this view, because it is based on a biased interpretation of a mutilated edition of the book Goethe wrote, and because it credits Goethe for color observations painstakingly developed by his predecessors or successors. I can think of no other case, on any topic in any literature, where posthumous reputation is premised on blatant censorship and misattribution.

But there is a more important issue. When Goethe's book is read as a whole, the intellectual "debate" between Newtonian science and Goethean color maunderings uncannily foreshadows the "culture war" between evolution and Creationism (aka "Intelligent Design"). The same tactics used today by Creationists against Darwinian biology (ignoring or misconstruing evidence, selective citation, reasoning from false premises, denegrating "mere theory", fabricating explanations to suit preconceptions, "what if" counterarguments, and hostile ad hominem rhetoric), the same accusation that science promotes a materialist ideology, were used by the Cartesians and by Goethe against Newtonian physics.

This antirationalist rejection of the scientific project, which always comes down to the "feeling" that there is "more to life" than science can explain, is an extraordinarily enduring divide in modern intellectual history. In fact, it has widened into the "two cultures" described by Sir Charles Snow in 1959. Goethe observed that it takes a great man to exemplify a great error. An informed, uncensored study of Goethe and his place in the scientific debate of his times might help us better understand the origins of this fascinating cultural dislocation.

In sum, this book about color by a man who was neither an artist nor a scientist offers neither practical artistic guidance nor a valid scientific approach to color. It offers instead a fascinating case study of error and falsehood. Oblivious to the grossly censored and misinterpreted transmission of Goethe's true gospel, many authors today still treat him as the quotable old testament of "color theory" in what has become a ritual display of color erudition. As I've taken pains to show, ritual is never erudition enough.

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The complete German text of Zur Farbenlehre (useful to evaluate Eastlake's translation), along with many of Goethe's earlier writings on color, are available at the Farben-Welten web site.

The remarkably negative Continental reaction to Newton's empirical rather than "theoretical" approach to science, due primarily to his refutation of the physical theories of both Aristotle and René Descartes, is nicely summarized in The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture by Mordechai Feingold (New York Public Library: 2004).

For a sympathetic if fuzzy minded reading of Goethe's project contra Newton, see Goethe Contra Newton by Dennis Sepper (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Kevin Brown's Zur Farbenlehre is a careful and thoughtful exploration of the many (and sometimes ironic) similarities and contrasts between Newton's and Goethe's approaches to color.