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EMBODIED COGNITION: GOETHE'S FARBENLEHRE AS PHENOMENOLOGY
Author(s) -
Boyle Nicholas
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/glal.12170
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , phenomenology (philosophy) , phenomenon , painting , psychology , philosophy , art , aesthetics , epistemology , art history
In his Entwurf einer Farbenlehre , completed in 1806, Goethe aims to integrate the objective and subjective aspects of human knowledge. It is a phenomenology in the same sense as Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). The work begins with propositions not about light (as in Newton's Opticks ) but about the body, specifically the eye, and colours generated within the eye, such as after‐images of bright objects. In the section on ʻPhysiological Coloursʼ the eye is shown to respond to any strong stimulus with a complementary and opposite reaction. There is therefore a systematic relation between colours – blue opposed to yellow, red to green – which can be represented as a circle. Colours are not qualities of objects, but experiences of an observer in time. In his second section, on ʻPhysical Colours’, Goethe aims to show that Newton's prismatic experiments, which treat colour as an object, are secondary variations of such subjective experiences. That subjective element cannot be eliminated from colour, which is therefore a ‘primary phenomenon’, an ‘Urphänomen’, not susceptible of further explanation. The appendix on ʻSinnlich‐sittliche Wirkung der Farbeʼ recombines the subjective and objective in the subtlest colour phenomenon of all – the art of painting.