Goethe's `Protestant Reformation' as a Textual Demonstration: Comment on Jackson

Abstract

This Comment takes its point of departure from Myles Jackson's historical study of Goethe's attempt to incite a `protestant reformation' in colour theory. According to Jackson, Goethe tried to unseat the remote authority of Newton's science in favour of a science grounded in non-specialized personal knowledge. Goethe's natural-philosophical texts, as we shall demonstrate, involve readers in a firsthand engagement with the actual experimental materials. Consequently, Goethe's physics is presented in the form of a reflexive anthropological inquiry. When Jackson proposes that Goethe respecifies Newton's optical experiments, he treats this as a substantive historic accomplishment. Although his paper nicely reviews how Goethe can be understood to be respecifying Newton's experiments, in this Comment we demonstrate the possibility of such respecification both as a way of reconceptualizing an event in the history of science, and as a distinctive mode of ethnomethodological inquiry. In other words, we invite readers to work with the materials of this text in order to demonstrate the possibility of a reformed experimental field.