Trübe (Turbidity, Cloudiness, Gloominess)

Abstract

The lexeme Trübe (turbidity, cloudiness, gloominess), which plays a major conceptual role in Goethe’s discourse on colors and their perception, exhibits a diverse range of meaning across a variety of textual practices. As the “zarteste Materie” (most delicate form of matter), or the first membrane of corporeality, turbidity manifests itself in the atmosphere as metamorphosing aggregates of particulates such as fog and haze, which at times can also surround the mind metaphorically in acts of perception. In Goethe’s optical and chromatic studies, Trübe mediates the polarity of light and darkness in the physiological formation of colors on the retina, while also serving as an attribute of the semi-opaque experimental media that are used to study physical and entoptic colors. Color’s physical properties and its experimental stagings, moreover, translate into such conceptual problems as the mediation of subject and object or—as with Goethe’s Urphänomen—the relation of the universal to the particular, as well as the mind to matter. And when introduced into a poetics of the self, Trübe challenges the linearity of experience by facilitating an optically sophisticated means of refracting the subject and its depths. Ultimately, these uses together align Goethe with key shifts in metaphysical thinking during the period around 1800. While Goethean Trübe softened epistemological distinctions, as a philosophical concept it also attributed ontological complexity to nature and rethought the world of appearances, thereby articulating challenges for representation.