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Randolph Dible"
PHI 507"
May 2014"

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Abstract: The role of darkness has been overlooked by philosophical theories of color. Johann
Wolfgang von Goethes Theory of Colors gives a special metaphysical status to darkness, but
his romantic-holistic phenomenology applies its principle to color phenomena perhaps too
closely, and in the end he misses the opportunity to say anything ontological about metaphysical
darkness. On the other hand, in his essay Eye and Mind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty critiques the
prevailing Cartesian achromatic optics in favor of the aesthetic optics of Paul Cezanne, and
goes so far as to introduce what he calls the dimension of color (Merleau-Ponty 141) to
counter the primacy of the Cartesian res extensa, but misses the opportunity to ground it in the
special phenomena of darkness. The place of darkness in Goethes Theory of Colors fulfills
what was lacking in Merleau-Pontys philosophy of the dimension of color (141), and MerleauPonty contributes an ontology to Goethes Theory of Colors. "

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The Oversight of Darkness in Goethe and Merleau-Ponty"

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The role of darkness has been overlooked by philosophical theories of color. Johann

Wolfgang von Goethes Theory of Colors gives a special metaphysical status to darkness, but
his romantic-holistic phenomenology applies its principle to color phenomena perhaps too
closely, and in the end he misses the opportunity to say anything ontological about metaphysical
darkness. Goethe misses just how pervasive his theory of color genesis (Goethe 72) according
to a universal formula of life (15) is. In formulating his empirical studies of phenomena in

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reaction to the Newtonian optics, he neglects the possibility that darkness has in an immanent
connection to being. On the other hand, in his essay Eye and Mind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
critiques the prevailing Cartesian achromatic optics in favor of the aesthetic optics of Paul
Cezanne, and goes so far as to introduce what he calls the dimension of color (Merleau-Ponty
141) to counter the primacy of the Cartesian res extensa, but misses the opportunity to ground it
in the special phenomena of darkness. He opens the dimension of color hidden by the
prevailing achromatic res extensa of Cartesian optics. But by neglecting darkness, MerleauPonty does not show just how it is that color has a special connection to being over and above
its mere contrast to extended form. The place of darkness in Goethes Theory of Colors fulfills
what was lacking in Merleau-Pontys philosophy of the dimension of color (141). As the
ground of color, darknessthe black is one color as many, but also the silence of a surplus
from which flows the surplus of visibility. Goethes holism is only a framework for his empirical
theory of colors, which stays close to the phenomena and strays away from the romantic
metaphysics he hints at. Merleau-Pontys philosophical appropriation of Cezannes holistic
optics (63) develops more in the way of a holistic metaphysical theory of the immanence of a
dimension of color (141), yet stops short of actually providing the secret science of the eye
and mind he hints at. By suggesting that darkness is the immanent and dimensionless ground
of color, Merleau-Pontys dimension of color (141) can be tied to the achromatic res extensa of
Descartes, interpenetrating it, and awakening its dormant light. "

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Part 1 - Goethe"

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In Part I of his Theory of Colors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe develops a romantic

phenomenology of color. In his view, color itself is a degree of darkness (Goethe 31), and its
variability and vibrancy is derived from the play of light and darkness implicit to it. The eye

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especially demands completeness, he writes, and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in
itself (28). The eye, he says in his final remarks on completeness and harmony, spontaneously
comprehends the whole chromatic scale (317) in the manifestation of any color, subjectively
producing its complimentary color. This tendency to universality is the fundamental law of all
harmony of colors (317). In his section on grey surfaces and objects (14), grey, the simplest
kind of middle tint (14), can be understood as a leading example of this holistic understanding
of color. Indeed, centuries later, Josef Albers demonstrates that color is the most relative
medium in art (Albers 1). Hues such as red and green conjure their opposites, but grey has a
material plasticity which gives it chameleon-like properties. This middle tint lies between all
the colors of the color circle in the horizontal-planar dimension, but in the vertical axis it lies
between black and white. Albers says that the first great painter to develop color areas which
produce both distinct and indistinct endingsareas connected and unconnectedareas with
and without boundariesas means of plastic organization, was Paul Cezanne (32). We will
return to Cezanne after a closer look at Goethes formulation of a deep conception of color, as it
arises from light and dark. "
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In Part II Goethe begins with a discussion of space (Goethe 60). His treatment of

transparency and dioptrical colors is quite different from that found in Descartes Dioptrics.
According to Goethes theory, if space were assumed to be empty, it would be absolutely
transparent to our vision. In its extension, space becomes occupied by certain material natures,
and hence loose absolute transparency, though its semi-transparency can approach opacity by
degrees of accumulation. The first degree of these is for Goethe whitethe simplest, brightest,
first, opaque occupation of space (61). In this primordial phenomenon we arrive at the limits of
experimental knowledge (73). The experience of primordial transparency prior to vision of
objects and surfaces is already the first degree of the opposite state (61). Thus transparency
and opaque white are opposite and primordial states of sightedness or light, according to

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Goethes theory. Finally, four imperfectly transparent yet light-transmitting media which come to
occupy space (atmospheric air, gas, fluids, and solid glasses) are analyzed according to these
necessary conditions of vision. He calls these leading examples and primordial and
elementary phenomena (71), because for Goethe, they are the abstract limits of concrete
phenomenal experience. It is between these primordial phenomena that Goethe describes the
genesis of color:"
We see on the one side light, brightness; on the other darkness, obscurity: we
bring the semi-transparent medium between the two, and from these contrasts
and this medium the colors develop themselves, contrasted, in like manner, but
soon, through a reciprocal relation, directly tending again to a point of union. (72)"
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In the preface, Goethe says that nowhere is Nature dead or silent; so speaks she with

herself and to us in a thousand modes and has even a secret agent in inflexible
matter (xxxvii). Although nature speaks to other senses, to known, unknown, and
misunderstood senses, he writes, nature manifests as a whole in a special way to the sense of
sight. Animated by color as the acts of light, Goethe explains that the universe is so
constituted as to observe itself in all its organs of experience, and every living thing is a
contraction of the whole of nature. Goethe states that it is useless to try to come to know the
nature of a thing apart from its empirical effects, particularly when it comes to the nature of light
(xxxvii). Thus, only through colors as acts of light can we come to know the character of light,
and through light and color can we come to understand nature in a special way. This rather
cryptic insinuation about the whole of Nature found in the preface is made somewhat more
clear, or at least appropriate, by references to mysticism in the introduction. Here he invokes
the ancient Ionian adage Like is only known by Like (liii), and the words of an old mystic
writer to a similar effect before he asserts the following:"
dormant light resides in the eye, and that it may be excited by the slightest
cause from within or from without. In darkness we can, by an effort of

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imagination, call up the brightest images; in dreams objects appear to us as in

broad daylight; light and colors spring forth. (liii)"
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Invoking the mysteries of sight is the best Goethe can do to explain the phenomena,

beside providing a romantic-holistic metaphysical framework as an empirical alternative to the

reductive paradigm of Cartesian-Newtonian scientific optics. Even today, despite our most
profound hubrisscientific, ontological, etc. we havent come any closer to positive
knowledge of what we ultimately are, and even more modest phenomena, like fire and sight,
continues to elude our understanding. If anything, we have advanced in releasing some hubris
thanks to a focus on critical thinking in our philosophical practice, but even that much is
questionable. So Goethes color mysticisms greatest virtue, next to its remaining closer to
experience than the more abstract Newtonian theories of his day, might very well be its
openness to the enigmatic foundation of subjectivity and of the eye to the whole of the
universe. Thus Goethe admits that his theory will find agreement with the experience of the
practical man more than with the man of letters (lxi). To the dyer, and the painter in particular,
and the side of aesthetic coloring generally (lxi), Goethe dedicates his investigation. The
artist, particularly the painter, is the vocation to which Goethe addresses his endeavor to define
leading principles about the effects of color on the eye and mind (lxii), as he summarizes the
overall project of his Theory of Colors. It is possible that Merleau-Ponty was inspired by this to
write his essay Eye and Mind, on the painter par excellence, Paul Cezanne. "

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Part 2 - Merleau-Ponty"

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In 1961, Merleau-Ponty began his last full essay, Eye and Mind with the famous words,

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them (Merleau-Ponty 121). Just as
Goethes Theory of Colors was a reaction to the reductive science of Newtons Optics, Merleau-

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Pontys Eye and Mind was a reaction to the reductive science of Descartes Dioptrics. The
critique of reductive scientific thought is centered on a certain blindness-to-life that comes with
the operationalist thought of a reductive science premised on the exclusion of first-person
experience. Science begins with the methodic enucleation of the human observer, a vivisection
of the real, in the name of scientific control and technological mastery. Yet there is a ghost in
the machine. A titanic force lies dormant in the Newtonian-Cartesian universe: qualitative
experience. Further, there is a special relation between aesthetic expression and the ground of
aesthetic phenomena, which in the case of colors, I will argue, is darkness. In what follows we
will read Merleau-Pontys interpretation of Cezanne from a Goethian point of view, and find a
special place for immanent blackness as a color in the nature of seeing."
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Descartes philosophy is premised on the division of subject and object (respectively,

according to his theory, res cogitans and res extensa), and in the case of vision, the seer from
the seen. But Merleau-Ponty is attempting a rehabilitation of our wholeness, by emphasizing
the return to color leading us somewhat closer to the heart of things, (141) to quote Klee,
by breaking the skin of things (to quote Michaeux), or in his own words, breaking through to
the heart of Being (132). Whereas the Cartesian can believe that the only true light is not of
this world but is only the natural light of reason, the painter accepts, with all its difficulties, the
myth of the windows of the soul (146). Vision teaches us that the world is in accordance with
my perspective in order to be independent of me, is for me in order to be without me, to be a
world (146). Parallel lines converge in a perspectival point in order to remain equidistant, just
as external objects different from each other are yet together as one simultaneity (146.).
Likewise, color, the visual quale gives me the presence of what is not me, of what is simply
and fully (147). That is, the problem of qualia becomes the problem of the one and the many.
Qualia presents an ontological difference that does not resolve into nothingness apart from the
being that I am, but rather into an other beyond me (Platoss epekenia tes ousias), and the

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qualitative phenomena of the dimension of color does so in a special way. Qualities resist
assimilation to the same. In contrast to the form of the thing I see, which is in the end a mere
set of locations of dead matter and empty space, color is the being-other of the thing I see that I
am with. As a texture, Merleau-Ponty writes, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of one
sole Space that separates and reunites (147). In other words, colors are concrete universals.
Thus he concludes that the hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility in the strict
sense, which it makes present as a certain absence (147). Thus Merleau-Ponty calls vision
itself a precession of what is upon what one sees and makes seen, of what one sees and
makes seen upon what is (147). From such a formulation it is clear that he would be interested
in Cezannes proposed optics of nature and art, and for whom nature is on the inside (125).
Seeing is not a certain presence to itself, but the means given me for being absent from
myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close
up into myself (146). The opening of vision onto the world of external objects, in the midst of
the objects, is the opening of space that is as much inside as outside of the subject, immanent
and transcendent, intertwined. "
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In his essay The Nobility of Sight, Hans Jonas tells us that sight has traditionally served

as the model of perception in general (Jonas 135), and that furthermore in presenting the
simultaneity of a manifold it is par excellence the sense of the simultaneous or the coordinated,
and thereby of the extensive (136). We can find the same assertion in Whiteheads theory of
extension in Process and Reality. But developing Cezannes optics as an alternative to
Descartes Dioptrics, Merleau-Ponty inverts the Euclidean geometry of space, and starts from
my participation in a Being without restriction, first and foremost a participation in the being of
space beyond every particular point of view a single dimensionality, a polymorphous
Being (Merleau-Ponty 134). Rather than being a matrix of mutually external inter-relations, we
experience space starting from me as the null point or degree zero of spatiality (Ibid, pp. 138).

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We are immersed in it and live inside it. Of what is commonly known as the third dimension,
depth, Merleau-Ponty says, if it were a dimension, it would be the first one a global locality
in which everything is in the same place at the same time, a locality from which height, width,
and depth are abstracted, a voluminosity we express in a word when we say that a thing is
there (140). The inversion of the order of the res extensa expresses the reciprocal precession
(147) of color and form. This intertwining of the dimension of color and the dimension of form
brings Merleau-Pontys phenomenology closer to actual experience and thus closer to the
immanent living that is always close to heart of being. Thus the return to color through the
opening of the dimension of color, if it can connect up with the origin of the res extensa,
reanimates it. "
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In his essay, Cezannes Doubt, Merleau-Ponty writes that Cezanne sought to

understand what inner force holds the world together and causes the proliferation of visible
forms (68). He said that in his painting he was attempting a piece of nature and the artist
must conform to this perfect work of art [nature] (62). He told his friend Emile Bernard that he
wanted to develop an optics, a logical vision in which both nature and art are the same. Art is
a personal apperception, he writes, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the
understanding to organize into a painting (63). Merleau-Ponty explains that in this method of
painting from nature, Cezanne did not feel that he had to choose between feeling the chaos of
sensation (63) on the one hand, and thinking the order of an outline on the other. Indeed
Cezanne claimed that he thinks in painting (139). He resisted the tendency to separate the
static vision in which objects stand apart from their genesis in an empty space, or the birth of
order through spontaneous organization (63), through the process of matter taking on a form.
Cezanne said that in his painting he was attempting a piece of nature, simply by conforming to
nature, this perfect work of art (62). Cezannes carnal optics (63) is intimately tied to the

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materiality of color, as well as the spatiality of the Being in its simultaneous and distributed
experience of nature through the visual world. "
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Space is form and content is color. They are two sides of the same coin, and we only

think them apart through abstraction. As Merleau-Ponty writes, we must seek space and
content together (141). In our visual experience, form and color cannot be abstracted from
each other. From his critique of the operationalism of classical science, which ignores the
fabric of brute meaning (123), Merleau-Ponty calls for a return to color (141). By this he
means that in the face of sciences absolute artificialism, (122) and ideology of the object-ingeneral (122), we need to put color back in space, and we do this through a movement of
return. We return to our experience of objectsmy objectand leave the dangerous ideology
of the object-in-general. Merleau-Ponty seeks to color our thought with the colors of visual
experience, since that is what went missing in the abstract thought of science. "
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Merleau-Pontys return to color (141) in Eye and Mind is a Cezannian move, referring

back to the return to the object (62) he attributes to Cezanne in Cezannes Doubt. In his
move away from the style of the Impressionist painters, such as Monet, who tried to capture the
way objects strike our eyes in perception, without fixed contours, bound together by light and
air (61), Cezanne used black. Black in painting is grounding. It makes things appear solid, as
if subtly illuminated from within (62). It grounds the objects in nature. Although Impressionism
took nature as its model, Impressionism painted mere pictures (62), left floating, suspended in
the air, in the imagination, in relation to the atmosphere. In a letter to his friend Emile Bernard,
Cezanne wrote we have to develop an optics, by which I mean a logical visionthat is, one
with no element of the absurd (63). Cezannes optics is a return to the object through a
grounding of color in black. Through his personal apperception he paints a piece of
nature (62). His logical vision refers to the colors of experience, as they are before abstract
thought gives them an artificial outline and before perspectival arrangement. To Merleau-Ponty,

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this is the color lacking in the clear and distinct forms of the achromatic lumen natural or lux
rationis of Descartes, and of the geometric Cartesian grid of the res extensa. "
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The painter takes his body with him (123). The painting, likewise, is not a flat

geometrical representation of some objective scene, but a piece of nature, that is, a piece of
the whole of nature. The worlds instant (130) that Cezanne attempted to paint was there in
the fullness and depths of nature, in what Merleau-Ponty calls a single dimensionality, a
polymorphous Being which justifies all of them without being fully expressed by any (134). In
contrast, the Cartesian grid of the res extensa demands the geometric representation of static
objects reduced to coordinates in a matrix of dead matter or empty space for the clear and
distinct perception of the ideas (forms). For Descartes, the body is an animal automaton, and
as a consequence today, the subjective experience constitutive of life itself is reduced to the
brain functions of an epiphenomenal nature. But if we can join Merleau-Ponty in the concrete
thinking of depth as the first dimension rather than the third, that is, a single dimensionality, a
polymorphous Being (134) that contains all the others, allowing enough room for color
phenomena, we will find ourselves saturated, enveloped, and immersed in an ocean of values,
not only in a matrix of space, but in the real womb of nature."
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In his departure from Impressionism, Cezanne attempted a return to the object (62).

Impressionist painting is atmospheric, ungrounded. By employing black and dark colors

Cezanne grounded his paintings in themselves, imbuing them with the solidity of a ground. This
return to the object is by no means to be confused with the concern for the object-ingeneral (122) of scientific thinking, but it is rather a concern for the there is which precedes it;
to the site, the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for
our bodies this actual body I call mine [and] associated bodies must be revived along with
my body who haunt me and whom I haunt (122). This vast ghost in the machine of
operationalism is precisely what Descartes was trying to banish in his Dioptrics. Descartes

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optical realism treats only of the light which enters the eye, and says nothing of the imagination
that inner sight of the minds eye, which is also superimposed on the external world, giving it
the imaginary texture of the real (126). The oneiric universe of carnal essences (130), the
light on the other side of darkness, in dreams and behind mirrors, brings to the fore the
dimension of color (141). The carnal essence of color, the soil of the sensible, (122) is the
world in its fullness, and it is also nature as a whole, so revered by Goethe, and painted by
Cezanne."
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For both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the way of overcoming the dangers of scientific

reduction lies in the poiesis of art, in its function of creation. Heidegger uses the examples of
Michelangelo who frees the statue of David from the marble, and Merleau-Ponty says that
Cezanne frees the worlds instant (130) in attempting a piece of nature (62). Cezanne
wanted to understand what inner force holds the world together and causes the proliferation of
visible forms (62). The origin of matter remains as obscure as the phenomena of my own birth,
tucked away from my memory, but the origin of form is present in every act of differentiation,
and so present to thought. Where Merleau-Ponty says that a human being is born the moment
when something that was only virtually visible within the mothers body becomes at once visible
for us and for itself (129), he speaks only of the emergence of the fully-formed neonate, not of
its materiality, whose origin remains a mystery embedded into the code of nature. The painter
who toils with the canvas and palette to cause the proliferation of visible forms and colors
always begins with a vision. He sees in the world the colors that it would take for the world to
become a painting (127). But in the world of the canvas, behind the dark pupillary black of the
painters private vision, the ideality of the colors have to pass not only through the unique
transparency of his metaphorical windows, the lenses of his eyes, but also through the
immanent canvas of his pupil, as pure as it is obscure and as unmarked as it is dark. "

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Color is the materiality of vision, just as form is its ideality. According to Kandinsky,

these two are the principles of artistic creation (Kandinsky 28). Both the outer visual world and
the inner visual world are composed of both form and color. What is common to both worlds in
terms of ideality is the coincidence of the point of perspective and the colorless matrix of which it
is the origin. What is common to both worlds in terms of materiality is the immanent and
formless blackness as the condition of possibility of the colors which fill the forms and spaces of
visual ideality."

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Part 3 - Immanent Darkness"

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The Cartesian picture of reality is only an outline, like the tracings on a canvas before it

is painted. But in fact, for Merleau-Ponty reality is first painted, and the drawings of abstract
thought come later as an artificialism. The dark visual world of the blind man in Descartes
Dioptrics, who sees through the use of his canetouch as a metaphor for sightis better a
description of the Cartesian optics of the res extensa, an optics of geometric form, of
perspective and image, than an optics of visual experience. By his proposed return to
color, (Merleau-Ponty 141) Merleau-Ponty invokes Cezannes optics with no element of the
absurd (63). Cezannes primitivism (63) is a return to nature. By staying within nature, and
painting from there, Cezanne attempted to paint a piece of nature (62). What Cezanne added
to his palette that the Impressionists did not, was black. Siennas, ochres, and black, kept
Cezannes paintings close to the reality of visual experience, close to nature. "
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In employing Cezannes return to the object, and art in general, painting in particular

Merleau-Ponty seeks to return sciences agile and improvisatory thought (123) to the objectin-particular. Through the return to color, the science of optics can return to the body I call
mine, the one which, he points out, the painter takes with him. Merleau-Ponty seeks to let

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science learn from painting, to ground itself upon things themselves and upon itself (123) so
that it will once more become philosophy (123). He seeks also to tap the Nietzschean urgency
of the impassioned painter who lives life to the fullest and seems to paint according to a secret
science, (123) or da Vincis pictorial science, or Rilkes and Rodins silent science (146).
The universe speaks to us through all of its phenomena, as Goethe said so directly. Nature
speaks to us and to herself in a thousand modes, Goethe writes, and to all the senses, but
manifests in a special way to the sense of sight (Goethe xxxviii). Merleau-Ponty comes to
acknowledge that we must learn to hear the voice of silence, to see the writing on the wall.
Cezanne, as the prime example, thinks in painting (Merleau-Ponty 139). We must let space
and light which are there, speak to us (138). A philosophy which seeks to learn directly from
nature is what animates the painter, but as philosophy it is yet to be elaborated (138). This is
the secret science (123) of the eye and mind. "
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What Merleau-Pontys secret science could gain from Goethe is precisely the essential

element of Cezannes optics, the ground of the dimension of color: black. The opaque black
of painting is fundamental to Cezannes return to the object, and thus immersion in the whole
of nature. Black is a color for the art of painting, and to vision, which painting begins with, black
is equivalent to darkness. Whereas black is opaque, darkness can be both opaque and
transparent. The darkness of infinite space can be represented as black, as can the darkness
of the pupil, but for Goethe these are transparent (Goethe 60). In Goethes theory, color itself is
a degree of darkness, lumen opacatum, opaque light (31). Merleau-Pontys dimension of
color can thus be grounded in a concept of color as opaque light, as a degree of darkness.
Thus, seeing the world as the colors needed to paint it, as Cezanne did, means seeing in the
dark, or more literally, seeing in the dark light of color. Moreover, returning to the object-inparticular as it is in the depths of color through a chromatic darkness has the power to ground
the scientific thought of the res extensa and its objects-in-general as they are in their achromatic

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forms in a common groundan immanent darknesslight without sight and space without
dimension. In this way, scientific thought will once more become philosophy, (Merleau-Ponty
123) and learn to see nature as a whole, even communicate with the nature it once sought to
manipulate and give up living in (121). Through a respect for the darkness nearer to the
heart of things (141), at the genesis of color (Goethe 72), the visual quale (Merleau-Ponty
147) can teach science how to see what its been looking for all along, namely, the world, silent
Being that itself comes to show forth its own meaning (147). Darkness is the origin of both the
formal and qualitative dimensions of sight. A negative phenomenology in the style of negative
theology comes into focus. In Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, Merleau-Ponty
says that there is an opaqueness of language (79) that Ponge calls a semantic thickness and
Sartre calls a signifying soil (112) that makes it a spiritual power (80). The spirit of language,
he says, is silence (83). Having combined Goethe and Cezanne, we can now say with MerleauPonty that the spirit of painting as a way of seeing is darknessthat immanent semantic
thickness or signifying soil of the painters perception (91). Rather than being a lack of color
and light, darkness is a surplus. Merleau-Ponty observes that the visual quale (147) presents
the ontological difference of an other beyond me. By respecting the spirit of nature as it
manifests to the senses in all-pervasive darkness and silence, we may re-enter the intimate
relationship with the whole of nature we only left for a brief nightmare (122) of disenchantment. "
"

Merleau-Ponty quotes Hermes Trismegistus: [the] inarticulate cry which seemed to be

the voice of the light, Merleau-Ponty continues, once it is present it awakens powers dormant
in ordinary vision, a secret of preexistence (142). To this hermetic thought, Goethe contributes
his own: a dormant light resides in the eye In darkness we can, by an effort of imagination,
call up the brightest images; in dreams objects appear to us as in broad daylight light and
colors spring forth (Goethe liii). A parallel can certainly be drawn between what has been said
of silence and what can be said of darkness. Like Mallarmes notion of a song behind the text,

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the colors which fill the forms of the world already awaken the aesthetic dimension, but it is
through the secrets of dis-apparent phenomenathat is the very same lack of the samein
their pure objectivity, between aesthetic objects, that their ground, and consequently the allencompassing Abgrund manifests. The opening of vision to the dimension of color becomes an
opening of visual space through the recognition of immanent darkness. Traversing this zone of
the fundamental (Merleau-Ponty 149) is possible with a secret science (123) of color vision,
in which I find one color as many, a personal apperception, an art, of the deepest nature through
vision. "
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What is astonishing in Eye and Mind is the non-manifestation of darkness as a thesis.

In Indirect Langauge and the Voices of Silence Merleau-Ponty does say that the voices of
painting are the voices of silence (117). In Cezannes Doubt he describes the only material
change in Cezannes departure from Impressionism as the addition of black to his palette (62).
One would think that the part of Eye and Mind where he introduces the dimension of
color (141) and Cezannes return to the object (62) as a return to color (141) would be the
perfect place to speak of darkness as he spoke of silence in Indirect Language and the Voices
of Silence, where after all the titular tacit language of the spirit is attributed to painting. It could
have added so much to the re-enchantment of science, the secret science of the eye and mind
to have brought in darkness as a theme and grounding to the dimension of color. We could
conjecture that Merleau-Ponty was deliberately or unconsciously suppressing the idea of
darkness to make his point about the achromatic light of Descartes, but in this he might have
gone too far and thereby missed the value of a notion of immanent and necessary darkness as
the ground of the dimension of color for his theory. By pointing this out and adding the insights
of Goethe on the place of darkness in the genesis of color (Goethe 72), we can fill in the blanks
and better understand the role of darkness in the visual world. In his view, color itself is a
degree of darkness (31) according to a universal formula of life (15) which describes the way

R. Dible

The Oversight of Darkness

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the seer demands brightness when darkness is presented and vice versa, thereby it shows its
vital energy (15), which is color. In this way, through color itself, darkness itself shines forth
and the whole of nature speaks and shows its vital energy."

"
Works Cited"
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. Print. "
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colors. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T Press, 1970. "
"

Print."

Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1966. Print."
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Cezannes Doubt. Eye and Mind. Indirect Language and the Voices
"

of Silence. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Ed. Galen "

"

A. Johnson. Trans. Ed. Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University "

"

Press, 1993. Print.

"
"