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Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History
ROBERT FINLAY
University of Arkansas
| Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his last work, Remarks on Colour, during a visit to Vienna in 1950 and while dying of cancer in Cambridge the following year. The slim book represented a return to a theme of his earliest writings, for he had dealt with the thorny problem of the logical structure of color concepts in Tractatus Philosophico-Mathematicus (1908).1Remarks on Colour sets forth a broad range of what Wittgenstein called "puzzle questions": Why is white not considered a color? What makes bright colors bright? Are "pure" colors mere abstractions, never found in reality? What is the relationship between the world of objects and the world of consciousness? Is there such a thing as a "natural history of color"? Faced with more conundrums than answers, Wittgenstein despaired that the logic of color perceptions could be clarified: "there is merely an inability to bring the concepts into some kind of order. We stand there like the ox in front of the newly-painted stall door."2 |
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Wittgenstein's reflections on color took place upon a fault line dividing the followers of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) from those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Wittgenstein remarked that he found Newtonian questions interesting but not gripping, and although he was sympathetic toward the intentions of Goethe, he regarded his Theory of Colours (1810) as no more than a makeshift outline: "it isn't really a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted with it.... Nor is there any experimentum crucis which could decide for or against the theory."3 In Newton's renowned experimentum crucis of 1666, described in his Optiks (1704), the scientist used glass prisms to demonstrate that sunlight (or white light) comprised a mixture of rays of different colors, not a uniform, pure substance, as previously thought. A stunning revelation, it provoked wonder and controversy well into the nineteenth century.4 Newton recognized that his findings about the composite nature of light ran counter to age-old, commonsense assumptions: "I perswade my selfe that this assertion above the rest appears Paradoxicall, & it is with most difficulty admitted."5 |
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Newton adopted the term "spectrum" (from Latin specere, "to look") to characterize his rainbow image of seven colors. His analysis moved color theory from the realms of philosophy and painting to those of mathematics and optics: he showed that color is not an inherent property of objects, as everyone since Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) had maintained, but instead is an illusion arising from the response of human visual apparatus to emissions of light.6 "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured," Newton declared. "In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour."7 Roses are not red, grass is not green, the sky is not blue. |
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