Is Wittgenstein's Goethe Stock's Goethe?

Abstract

In his review of Remarks on Colour' Guy Stock quotes Wittgenstein's remark that 'a physical theory (such as Newton's) cannot solve the problems that motivated Goethe . . .' and goes on to say that it is difficult to pinpoint the problems that motivated Goethe. His attempt to do so is quite wrong and misleading. He says that Goethe 'took the chromatic circle to exhibit colour contrasts produced by the action and reaction of the retina'. Stock believes that Goethe's theory is a physiological theory, and he says that Wittgenstein's objection to this kind of theory is clear. But this doesn't explain Wittgenstein's interest in Goethe at all, for example the appropriation of Goethe's Maxims and Reflections 575 for Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 1.889: 'Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory'. It is true that Goethe has much to say about physiological colour effects in Part I of the 'Didaktischer Teil' of the Farbenlehre, but the essence of what anyone familiar with it would understand by 'Goethe's Theory', including any educated German speaker of Wittgenstein's period, comes in Part II, 'Physical Colours'. Paragraphs I50 and I5I are a summary of the theory; they describe the 'primary phenomenon'. 'Light seen through a medium but very slightly thickened appears to us yellow', etc. How will Stock's interpretation of Goethe's Theory handle Zettel 347, 'On propositions about colours that are like mathematical ones, e.g. Blue is darker than white. On this Goethe's Theory of Colour', a marginal note which illustrates the concinnity of Wittgenstein's 'logic of colour concepts' with the doctrines of the Farbenlehre? In addition (i) Stock has Goethe's account of afterimage colours back to front-the colour circle explains afterimage colours via Goethe's homoeostatic biology, not the other way round: (2) this is anyway not a point of conflict between Goethe and physical theory-Goethe's problems with Newton are of a quite different kind, e.g. the fact that white is not visually compound, that yellow is light, etc.: (3) the theory of harmony was also not the kind of thing Newtonian physics tried to explain-it is not here that the conflict lay. And when Stock, looking for a likely Wittgensteinian target in the Farbenlehre, settles on 834, saying that harmony is something Goethe 'derived from the constitution of our nature', he leaves off the end of Goethe's sentence, 'and the constant relations which are found to obtain between chromatic phenomena'. So Goethe's Theory is not physiological. And having put together a theory which is not Goethe's, the objection to it which Stock attributes to Wittgenstein (the colour circle is not 'divorced from language') is nothing like anything Wittgenstein actually says about Goethe, either in Remarks on