Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T19:07:08.718Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Goethe and the ethos of science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2009

Get access

Summary

If ultimately I rest content with the Urphenomenon, it is, after all, but a kind of resignation; yet it makes a great difference whether I resign myself at the boundaries of humanity, or within a hypothetical narrowness of my small-minded individuality.

– Goethe (MR, no. 577)

Urphenomenality and the basis of science

The Opticks spurred the growth of eighteenth-century experimental science by teaching investigators to see theoretically, mathematicophysically. Both the Opticks and the Principia provided decisive paradigms for exploring in detail the substructures of everyday appearances. The Opticks in particular showed how from within the bewildering, apparently arbitrary domain of colors one could gain virtually self-evident mathematicophysical knowledge about the nature of light and colors by fusing the way of experiment with mathematical demonstration. Thenceforth, wherever the physicist saw light, he also saw geometrically conceived color rays. The eye became little more than a passive detector, even an undependable one, for it could be deceived when it was fatigued or when the rays were mixed with one another.

Almost every early nineteenth-century critic of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre had been initiated into this kind of seeing and took for granted the factuality of Newton's interpretation (indeed, Goethe complained that not just physicists but also almost every intelligent layman had been indoctrinated as well; see LA I, 3: 116).

Type
Chapter
Information
Goethe contra Newton
Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color
, pp. 174 - 195
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×