Pp Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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(Yo-han volfgang von gotay)
By Elizabeth Nugent
Biography:
● 1800s German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, etc.

● Regarded as one of the most influential German writers, his works including poetry,
plays, literature, and aesthetic criticism

● Influential in Romanticism - emphasis on individuality, subjectivity, and the primacy

of the individual
Theory of Colors:
● Author of Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre)
-Treatise of the nature, function, and psychology of colors

● Dismissed by most contemporary scientists:

“is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics. But victory, and hence influence on the
research of the following century, has been Newton’s.”
- Werner Heisenberg
Interesting Claims:
Most Radical Point:
●“Light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general
expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the
production of color… Color itself is a degree of darkness.”
- Refuted Newton’s claim that darkness is the absence of light;
instead that all color is a degree of darkness

●Goethe proposed a symmetric color circle, unlike Newton’s color circle

which unequally segmented the colors

●One of the first to recognize the importance of magenta, cyan, and

yellow (instead of red, blue, and yellow as the primary colors)- which
are the primary colors of pigment
Psychology of Colors:
● While a scientific failure, Goethe’s work was a success in terms of an interesting
psychology of colors
- He attached specific, subjective emotion and feeling to each of the colors

Ex: Blue

“This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful…Its appearance,
then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.”
“ Theory of
Colors”… - A Poem -
Bibliography -

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262570213/theory-of-colours/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/19th-century-insight-into-the-p
sychology-of-color-and-emotion/261261/

http://scihi.org/goethe-theory-colours/

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1506750