‘Here we have a sort of mathematics of colour’

Little is known about Wittgenstein's life and work during the three months he spent in Vienna in late 1949 and early 1950. Beyond scant circumstantial evidence regarding the composition of the remarks published as Part II of Remarks on Colour (MS 172, pp. 1–4) and the remarks published as §§1–65 of On Certainty (MS 172, pp. 5–24), the historical record is exceedingly thin. Wittgenstein could have drafted additional thoughts on colour, but if so, they have disappeared. It can only be said with any degree of confidence that he began writing the remarks on colour in MS 173, reproduced as Part III of Remarks on Colour, on 24 March 1950. (In a coded note at the beginning of MS 173, not reproduced in the published work, he records that he arrived in London the previous day and found the city gloomy and people worn out.) Since III.1–130, the first 130 remarks of Part III (pp. 17–24; MS 173, pp. 1–63), are dated, it is as good as certain that they were composed between 24 March and 12 April either while Wittgenstein was staying at the home of Rush Rhees's wife in London (he was there until 4 April) or residing at Georg von Wright's home in Cambridge (he was there between 4 and 25 April). (Anscombe wrongly states in her ‘Editor's Preface’ that Part III ‘reproduces a MS book written in Oxford’.)

III.1, the first remark Wittgenstein wrote back in England, states that white is invariably ‘the lightest colour in a picture’. (The remark is preceded by a question mark, no doubt indicating that Wittgenstein is hesitating or thinking there is more to be said.) In the Tractatus, as already noted, he says it is ‘unthinkable’ that shades of a colour not be interrelated as brighter and darker (4.123), and he now suggests it is integral to our concept of white that it is lighter than yellow, green, blue, red and other colours. (There is also a hint of Goethe's view of colours in Zur Farbenlehre as resulting from the interaction of light and dark, with white the lightest colour.)