From Sepper, D. L. (1988). Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the project for a new science of color.
P. 39 - Goethe and method -
....”studied nature in the field rather than abstractly....acquired the habit of taking careful notes of his observation....study the phenomena of nature in painstaking detail....mid-1780s..in pursuit of a principle that would account for the order and unity of plant species....
P. 40 — “In searching for the principles of the unity in nature by way of particulars....” In tradition of experimental science from the 18th century... For natural philosophers of that century physics was not a specialized discipline studying motion, matter, and forces “but rather the knowledge of all nature, including the realm of the animate as well as the inanimate.” In German- speaking lands, physics was often called “Naturlehre” (doctrine of nature) and “nature philosophy” in English-speaking countries. It involves “everything about bodies that has ever been experienced or thought (Gehler, 1787-96). In Aristotelian fashion, this approach to science tended “to coalesce around the various genera of natural things: light, magnetism, plants, animals, and so on.”
P. 41 – Bacon quote on vexations....
P. 43. Goethe “understood his own work as part of the tradition of inductive science. The unities he sought in nature were to be arrived at through a careful study of the particulars in a certain class, with the aim of bringing out the full range of relevant observations and phenomena.” Careful measurement and mathematical formulation were not to be cultivated for their own sake. Experimentation should enable phenomena to show themselves...without hypotheses.
P. 45. Goethe’s method....theories have tendency to atomize phenomena...we should follow a method that explores laws, relationships, similarities and homologies in the course of development - a genetic, even a dynamic method (insofar as it identifies forces at work)....look for the intrinsic interrelatedness of things natural...natural things must be studied in a larger context and this context is always capable of further enlargement, in the direction of the totality of phenomenal nature. Let things speak for themselves..find the appropriate Anschauung or onlooking (does this mean perspective?)
P. 47. Try to simplify the phenomenon to more easily recognize its characteristics that are hidden or confused in a more complicated situation.
P. 58. Goethe concentrates on phenomena as events that occur under variable circumstances. Rather than formulate explicit propositions to be confirmed or rejected, Goethe preferred to elaborate the phenomena by determining correlations of the experiments and events that occur.
P. 59. Italy provided more favourable conditions for observing phenomena related to colour.
Analogy between science and art. “Both strive to rescue phenomena from the obscurity of accident by raising them to significant eminence and clarity..no single portrayal of phenomena embraces the whole truth...while some relationships might be enhance and clarified...others withdraw from view. The art connoisseur might focus on luminosity of a painting’s colours and forget the role of light and shadow....scientist who holds to ray theory neglects the different degrees of brightness and darkness in colour.
P. 60. Look for intrinsic harmonic and disharmonic relationships among the various colours.
P. 61. “pure experiences ought to lie at the foundation of all natural science....a theory is estimable when it comprehends all experiences within itself and aids in its practical application..”
P. 62. An intrinsically phenomenal science will appeal strongly to aesthetic sensibility.
P. 64. The scandal of optics lay in its inattention to the concrete application of its tenets to the whole range of color phenomena.
P. 65. For Goethe, “The greatest threat to science was the sterile passivity induced by degenerate scientific scholasticism, the mere handing down of a written tradition without substantial criticism.”
P. 67. For Goethe, the first duty of a scientist is to explore the associations and connections of one phenomenon to another, without the intervention of a theory or hypothesis rather than try from the outset to give proof of a theory.
P. 68. There is a gulf between the certainty of a phenomenon and of a theory. The former are part of experience, whereas the latter comes from a particular way of conceiving that experience.
“Human beings tame more pleasure in their representation than in the thing...Human beings take pleasure in a thing only insofar as they conceive it, it must suit their turn of mind.”
P. 69. “In living nature nothing happens that does not stand in a relationship to the whole...” How are the findings of the isolated facts in an experiment related to the whole phenomenon?
P. 70. Each view through a prism provides a single fact. By means of constant comparison, contrast, simplification, and recomplication, Goethe is able to represent apparently simple facts as different moments of a single dynamic phenomenon...moments that correspond to varying conditions of the basic experiment. With these facts we can do a resynthesis to reconstruct the original event and experience of the phenomenon and view it again with comprehension.
P. 71. Comprehension takes the form of a seeing embedded in the fullness of phenomena. Goethe’s proximate goal of this method is to achieve naturgemasse Darstellung, a presentation in accordance with nature.....which must correspond to the fundamental elements of the phenomenon in question, such as the continuities, associations, contrasts and wholes that give it structure. His physical science of color is morphological as his other sciences....by studying the manifold forms that the phenomenon (which is in itself a significant entity like color, a plant, an animal) assumes in its emergence, development and disappearance. He studied the phenomenon in its phenomenality to provide simple and complete overview of the phenomenon by following the course of the experienced phenomenal event and its articulations.
P. 72. He follows a the logic or a phenomenal, experiential science of nature
Method:
1. Begin with a question about a natural phenomenon...something that appears as a part of a whole
2. Discover through systematic experimentation, the conditions for this appearance
3. Vary and recomplicate the elemental conditions so that the research leads back toward the original standpoint from which the observer will see it with a sharper and better trained eye and with a better grasp of the whole and its parts. The phenomena will then be surveyed and embraced in their entirety as a unified and comprehensive scientific phenomenon.
P. 73. Then you can recognize the unified experience or event in all the individual instances.
P. 76. Mathematical theory is based on purely numerical data the numbers of which are derived by means of concrete operations and instruments that ultimately refer to some phenomenon, to some visible or at least detectable event...they must always pertain to real events.
P. 77. Mathematical theories almost inevitably overlook the intrinsic character or quality of the phenomena. Ray of light theory translates the phenomena into constructs which make it a product of the ray... colour is merely a product of the ray, an epiphenomenon, and an indicator of the presence of the construct, the kind of ray, rather than a true object of investigation.
P. 78. The initial work – collection, examination, and organization of the phenomena – must be done with the greatest of care, industry, rigor so that when wit and imagination are set loose they do not distort the phenomena at will. Where Newton sees evidence for rays, Goethe sees colours or rather the event of occurrence of colour....what is apparent including all the conditions of the event.
** “The event of the phenomenon constitutes the real subject of inquiry...”
P. 79. “As much as possible the theory must wait upon the phenomena...”
P. 82. Goethe would contend that a theory ought to help one observe the phenomena rather than replace them with constructs and symbols that induce one to look at the phenomena abstractly.
P. 86. Goethe’s project was meant to develop his insight that color in prismatic experiments depends on the adjacency of brighter and darker fields.
P. 87. He wanted a multidisciplinary approach to color..physics, botany, anatomy and any other disciplines that might product relevant phenomena, information and interpretations....
P. 90. After incorporating cases of color blindness he concluded that any comprehensive science of colour must include the fact that all colour is seen and the activity of seeing and the lawful contributions of the eye.
He noted homologies between laws governing physiological colors and those related to physical and chemical colors which he tried to embody in his circle of color where he tried to summarize his work on complementarity between chromatic hues such as the eye’s tendency to see the complement of the color that it is presented with as in the case of colored shadows. This suggests that the eye strives for totality by way of polar opposites..what one sees in part of the fields affects what one sees in the rest....what one sees at one moment conditions what one sees at the next.
P. 91. Goethe’s three main categories were: (1) contribution of the eye, (2) the medium through which the image-bearing light passes, and (3) the contribution of the illuminated and perceived object....physiological, physical, and chemical aspects of colour.
Vorstellungsarten....the ways of conceiving things...to bring many objects into relationship that they did not have with each other, strictly speaking.
P. 92. Every directed looking Ansehen leads to consideration...Betrachten...which can lead to reflection...Sinnen...every reflection to connection...Verknupfen....and thus with every attentive look Blick....at the world we are already theorizing....
P. 93. Goethe saw Newton as atomistic, mechanical, and mathematical. Goethe thought of himself as inclined to the genetic (versus atomistic), dynamic (versus mechanical) and concrete (versus abstract).
Greeks versus Romans: Greek language is dynamic with abundance of verb forms and verbal nouns and adjectives. Latin reifies and abstracts so that its overall effect is static and monumental
P. 94. Goethe, though an empiricist, takes issue with the empiricist’s ideological presupposition that the scientist can and does proceed by a kind of mechanical comparison of bits of data and constructs abstractions by a kind of piecing them together. Schiller referred to Goethe’s approach to science as “rational empiricism”.
Science cannot tolerate the authoritarianism of sects and schools because a sect holds tenaciously to what is only a part, which is presented nevertheless as if it were a whole.
P. 95. As long as a scientist remained entirely wrapped up in a single dominant Vorstellungsart he would be unable to criticize his work adequately or that there might be something lacking from his understanding of nature.
P. 97. Goethe conceived of color science as a communal effort. You need a many sided effort to understand a phenomenon. Truth is elusive, subtle and wide-ranging more so than any Vorstellungart can comprehend unassisted. They should acknowledge that science is a historical activity.
We need to cultivate a demanding virtue....to undertake theorizing we have to have “knowledge of oneself, with freedom, and, to use a daring word, with irony...” toward oneself and one’s achievements..so as not be remain imprisoned in their particular conception of things and thereby do them grave injustice.
P. 122. Experimentum crucis
P. 123. Descartes’ “rotating globules”
P. 127. The ray, an explanatory device inferred from exacting description of the phenomenon becomes a neutral descriptive term that becomes normative for both practice and theory. Don’t substitute geometry for the phenomena as though infinitesimal rays are unproblematically real. Newton failed to acknowledge a hierarchy of relationships between theory and phenomena and that the former depends on the latter.
P. 143. Newton argued against the 17th century options who thought that irregularities in glass of a prism bring about the appearance of color and that colors were accidental and not governed by law.
P. 145. Goethe wanted to engage in a combined logical, phenomenal, methodological, epistemological, historical, and rhetorical explication of Newton’s writings.
p. 146. Goethe’s critique of the rays concept. Newton conceived of rays sometimes as grains of powder or sand...this is a mixture concept but constituents should lose their separate identity.
Newton tried to establish an isomorphism between incommensurables....the undifferentiated continuum of degrees of refrangability and the visibly articulated and changeable colours of the spectrum. The spectral thereby gained ontological priority. Light rays should be treated as a convenient fiction. Goethe called his own work “chromatics”..colour research...doctrine or science.
P. 153. Goethean conception of color a skeiron, as a kind of shadow. This goes back to Aristotle and conceives of color as a mixture, blend or other interaction of light and darkness.
P. 158. “The blue of the sky reveals to us the fundamental law of chromatics. Do not search for anything behind the phenomena: They themselves are the teaching.” Goethe
P. 163. “curator” of experiments for the Royal Society
P. 164. The concept of the “crucial experiment” was developed by Hooke..to disprove a hypothesis of Descartes and prove confirm Newton. Focus on single phenomenon.
P. 165. The theory becomes a matter of fact because it is a direct expression of the experiment.
***change in the use of the term “fact” in the 18th century. Original sense in Latin, English and the Romance languages. The word “fact” was something done, a deed, and derivatively, anything that occurred. The fact had a doer, a time and a place. The actor or the event was visible, in evidence. The more modern acceptation has add a subjective component....something known by actual observation or authentic testimony (thus opposed to mere inference) – a datum of experience. Dogma of facts was a prerequisite for the rise of positivism. Comte’s “positive” reveals an utter dependence on facts...”coordination of observed facts” (p. 166).
P. 166. Newton conflated fact as thing, act, or event with the fact as proposition so that the proposition was reified as something simply given. Fisher (1819) emphasized science as a careful compilation of facts. Fact as indestructible building block. Confusion of proposition, experience and reality in the term “fact”.
P. 167. Theorizing is inherent in all intelligent seeing.******
P. 168. Goethe’s science attempted to keep in view both the knower and the known. Objective sciences of his day had a naive conception of the relationship between subject and object.
Professionalization and redefinition of science at the end of the 18th century.
P. 169. French physics brought specialized research, standardized methods, quantitative rigor and a new definition of the scientific disciplines. Naturlehere was giving way to Physik in the modern sense.
Schelling and speculative excesses and transcendentalizing. Factual science proponents had difficulty imagining the historicity of science.
Enlightening historiography saw the rise of science as the gradual overcoming of obscurantism, superstitions, and vague ideas. Factual truth is present truth.
P. 170. Goethe dealt with the historical appearance and disappearance of Vorstllungsarten with their pervasiveness and modes of influence...dominate the imagination of an age and set the standard for all other sciences.
He felt that intelligent amateurs can make small but important contributions to observational sciences...they might notice things that escape the attention of experts...they have not been indoctrinated into the ways of the discipline...inject new ways of conceiving things...
P. 171. List of reasons for the failure of Goethe’s approach to science.
1. Decision to polemicize
2. Dogma of factuality
3. Lessening of historical consciousness among natural philosophers
4. Fear of speculation among the anti-Naturphilosophen
5, Rise of wave theory of light and
6. Professionalization of science
Caneva’s discussion of “concretizing science”which was like Goethe.
Anschauung...in the study of electromagnetism
1. Qualitative experiment
2. Inductivism
3. Rejection of hypotheses
4. Explain phenomena in terms of relations with other phenomena
University tradition of transmitting established knowledge rather than producing new knowledge
P. 173. Goethe had no natural audience for his case.
P. 175. Goethe felt that polarities in the phenomena of color demanded a vocabulary of polarities.
Phenomena of turbid media are called Uhphenomenal
P. 176. Goethe asserted the existence of an essentially unresolvable tension between theory and phenomenon.
P. 177. To be genuinely scientific a science must develop a coherent understanding and a clear conception of what part of nature they are attempting to investigate and how they ought to go about it.
P. 181. “A science founded in a pluralistic spirit requires two virtues above all, patience and irony. With irony one may not be overwedded to the supposed perfection of the truths one holds. With patience one may not rashly reject as impossible alternatives one violently disagrees with.
P. 182. Only Leopold von Henning offered lectures on his work. His defenders were readers of science rather than practitioners...they were chiefly artists, literati, and philosophers.
P. 184. Apercu - provisional glimpses of comprehensive truths (e.g., a boundary is necessary for the appearance of colors in cases of refraction.
P. 185. The apercu is an anticipatory experience. It is seeing through a set of given phenomena to a higher or more elemental level of truth. It is intrinsically transcendental in the sense of going beyond the previously given. Then it is necessary to concretize this experience in a formula.
The apercu represents an individualization of the standpoint from which the phenomenal field is viewed. This can be associated with a scientific pluralism based on Vorstellungsarten...implying that the consensus among scientists is problematic. The standpoint is implicit in every apprehension and conception of the subject and is reflected in how we separate and collect the different experiments and phenomena into significant groupings.
P. 187. “In the world of Goethean science, the chief criterion of truth is comprehensiveness and the chief locus of truth is the conformity of scientific discourse and practice to the experience, both scientific and everyday, of nature”.
P. 188. ...”if there is a most fundamental reality of all, it is phenomenality – that is, the appearing (being) or one thing to (for) another.
P. 190. “Experience, as the cumulative apperception of the world and ourselves, is the locus of truth. Because it is guided by apercus, experience and its truth have an inevitably transcendental character because they are lived, they are subject to the test of further experience. Moreover, experience is affect by what we hear from others and what we experience with them.... Every expression of the complex of experience is problematic; the expression is not identical to our own experience...it does not conform exactly to the experience of others, and it also unavoidably diverges from the object it aims to comprehend. This constellation of experience and expression is the ethos of science, and as ethos is the proper place for science’s ethics.