42. A Hundred Years Back On the Theory of Colors

Except for the second part of "Faust", no other work by Goethe has been judged as disparagingly as his Theory of Colors. His poetic creations are increasingly becoming the basis of our entire education and his powerful conception of nature, with its wonderful consequences in the realm of the organic, is increasingly enjoying the recognition of those who have enough depth of vision to realize that it is precisely this that forms the spiritual bond for the myriad of facts known today in the natural sciences. Only the color theory is regarded as the failed attempt of a man whose entire school of thought was alien to the way of thinking that is decisive in physics. This harsh rejection is countered by the all-important fact that the Theory of Colors is the most mature fruit of Goethe's research, and that it was precisely in it that his conception of nature had to prove itself. This alone is sufficient to examine the files on this subject once again. Perhaps the question has not been the right one so far. Let us endeavor to correct it in at least one respect: as far as Goethe's relationship to mathematics is concerned. The very fact that he was not a mathematician stands in the way of an unbiased assessment of his Theory of Colors. But anyone who considers in detail what Goethe said about mathematics will see how the poet endeavored to find the boundary between where mathematics is appropriate in the natural sciences and where it is not. At the same time, he wanted to limit the realm of his research. In view of this, the following main questions arise with regard to this point: 1. did Goethe define this boundary correctly? 2. did he take due account of it? and 3. could he have given his theory of color a different form if he had known mathematics better, without at the same time being unfaithful to his whole conception of nature? These questions must form the basis for any future assessment of Goethe's Theory of Colors. At the very least, it seems to us that we should not continue to break the baton over Goethe's Theory of Colors without settling these questions first.