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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 10 Mar 2020

Taken: 02 Jan 2020

1 favorite     3 comments    100 visits

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Excerpt •
Goethe •
Life as a Work of Art •
Author •
Rudigar Safaranski •

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Goethe's colours and light

Goethe's colours and light
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50572
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Light, Goethe says, cannot contain something darker than itself. Instead, color arises when light collides and mixes with darkness, or when light penetrates a darker medium. Closest to to light, the color yellow is created; it is shadowed light. Closest to darkness, the color blue is created; it is illuminated darkness. The combination of the two primary colors blue and yellow produces green. And so one begins with an inverted color triangle, with blue and yellow at the top and green at the bottom point. The array is rounded out to a color wheel only when the two primary colors blue and yellow are transformed -- enhanced, Goethe calls it --n by further admixtures of darkness. Blue thus becomes purple and yellow becomes orange. Enhancements of purple and orange yield red. Thus one has the polarity of the primary colors yellow and blue, then their enhancement leading to red and their mixture leading to green. The circle colors is closed via polarity and enhancement -- blue on the left, yellow on the right, red on top, green on the bottom -- and the transitions in between: greenish yellow, brown, bright red, etc. always at play are shading of brightening, superimpoistions and admixtures of the primary colors. In all cases, the basic principle is unchanged: light is an ur-phenomenon that cannot be dissected or traced back to something else. ~ page 419

. . . . Because in principle, we cannot know anything about a thing’s essence, but only its effect, which in the final analysis means its effect on us. The location of these effects is the totality of our sensory and intellectual impressions, and not merely in isolated individuals, but in the exchange and correlation of multiple perspectives and experiences. In the individual is an organism apprehending the nature he encounters, mankind at large is also -- at least potentially -- a superorganism for the comprehension of both human and nonhuman nature. Goethe once wrote in a letter to Schiller that nature cleverly conceals itself by not allowing men to work together at perception. If it were possible humanity would really unite as a perceiving subject. Then all veils would fall, and nature would be for us the open book it is not at present.

Even if we cannot survey and understand the entire text, perhaps we can at least read from it. To read from the book of nature, however, means registering its effects on us, refining our appreciation, sharpening our judgments, relating effects to one another, and so on. These effects on us constitute our reality as a whole. One cannot transcend their perimeter. In the foreword to the ‘Theory of Color’ Goethe emphasizes this: ‘For in truth, it is a vain undertaking to express the essence of a thing. We are aware of effects, and a complete account of those effects would in any case encompass the essence of that thing. - Page 420
5 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
GOETHE ~ Life as a Work of Art
5 years ago.
 aNNa schramm
aNNa schramm club
I like the color !!!
4 years ago.

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