21. Goethe's way of Thinking in the Theory of Colors

This experience forms the basis of Goethe's theory of colors. He is reproached for not deriving it from even higher conditions that are no longer tangible. Helmholtz remarks – and Kalischer refers to this – that the poet is “daunted by the step into the realm of concepts, which must be taken if we are to ascend to the causes of natural phenomena”. But where should this realm of concepts lie, which Goethe was so afraid of? Far removed from Goethe's objective way of thinking were conceptual schemas, such as the generally assumed atomic world, which Goethe assumed. He operated with concepts no less than other scientific researchers. Are they not concepts that compose the general proposition about the archetypal phenomenon? But it did not occur to him to invent an arbitrary content for these concepts, but he sought the same in intuition and in physical things in the outer experience. Where these contents are simple and indecomposable, as in the case of the archetypal phenomenon, it is the physicist's duty to stop; any further questioning about the “why” is unjustified here, not because the answer lies beyond the limits of our knowledge, but simply because the question is nonsense. Anyone who still asks here could say with every further answer: Why is this so, only that all these questions are thoughtless. Goethe therefore has the right to stop here and not to theorize further about the archetypal phenomenon. The archetypal phenomenon, like the mathematical axiom, is neither capable nor in need of proof. But [just as in mathematics – and Goethe himself uses this simile – everything else follows logically from the found and immediately recognized axioms, so he now develops the whole color theory from the archetypal phenomenon. All further appearances arise simply from a complication of the simplest fact, from the addition of ever more circumstances. With the addition of each new circumstance, he also sees the phenomenon becoming more complex. But [as if] one were adding to the fundamental [text breaks off]