Goethe’s Entoptische Farben and the Problem of Polarity

Abstract

When Ludwig Tieck visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Highgate in June, 1817, their conversation certainly concerned matters literary, for Tieck had been busy at the British Museum collecting transcriptions for “his great Work on Shakespear” (Coleridge, 1959, 4, pp. 744–747). As his letters reveal, however, Coleridge was much more excited by their discussion of the mysticism of Boehme and Tauler, the animal magnetism practiced by Wohlfahrt, and the color theory of Goethe, topics that Coleridge found intimately conjoined through the principle of polarity. Digressing at length on Tieck’s account of Schelling and Spinoza, the tetractys of τò θεîον and ’ο θɛóς, Coleridge confesses that “these Tieckiana have seduced me from Mr. Tieck himself (1959, 4, p. 745). Goethe’s Farbenlehre and his supplemental work on entoptics were discussed, as Coleridge makes evident in his letter to Tieck at Oxford (4 July 1817), under the same constellation of mystical and magnetic polarity:

I am anxious to learn the specific Objections of the Mathematicians to Goethe’s Farbenlehre, as far as it is an attack on the assumptions of Newton. To me, I confess, Newton’s positions, first of a Ray of light, as a physical synodical Individuum, secondly, that specific individua are co-existent (by what copula?) in this complex yet divisible Ray; thirdly, that the Prism is a mere mechanic Dissector of this Ray; and lastly, that Light, as the common result, is = confusion; have always, and years before I ever heard of Göthe, appeared monstrous FICTIONS! — and in this conviction I became perfectly indifferent, as to the forms of their geometrical Picturability. The assumption of the Thing, Light, where I can find nothing but visibility under given conditions, was always a stumbling-block to me. Before my visit to Germany in September, 1798, I had adopted (probably from Behmen’s Aurora, which I had conjured over at School) the idea that Sound was = Light under the praepotence of Gravitation, and Color = Gravitation under the praepotence of Light: and I have never seen the reason to change my faith in this respect (1959, 4, pp. 750–751).

Originally presented at the symposium ‘Goethe as a Scientist’ held at the University of California at Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology, 12‘13 April 1982, and initially published in the Journal of Social and Biological Structures 7 (1984) 307–324; 345–356. It appears with the kind permission of the editors of JSBS.